1.
Broadcasting House
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Broadcasting House is the headquarters of the BBC, in Portland Place and Langham Place, London. The first radio broadcast was made on 15 March 1932, the main building is in Art Deco style, with a facing of Portland stone over a steel frame. As part of a consolidation of the BBCs property portfolio in London. This involved the demolition of post-war extensions on the side of the building. The wing was named the John Peel Wing in 2012, after the disc jockey, BBC London, BBC Arabic Television and BBC Persian Television are housed in the new wing, which also contains the reception area for BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 1Xtra. The main building was refurbished, and a built to the rear. The radio stations BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 4 Extra and the BBC World Service transferred to refurbished studios within the building. The extension links the old building with the John Peel Wing, the move of news operations from BBC Television Centre completed in March 2013. Construction of Broadcasting House began in 1928, programmes transferred gradually to the building. On 15 March 1932 the first musical programme was given by the bandleader Henry Hall, Hall also wrote and performed, with his Dance Band, Radio Times, the name of the BBCs schedule publication. The first news bulletin was read by Stuart Hibberd on 18 March, the last transmission from Savoy Hill was on 14 May, and Broadcasting House officially opened on 15 May 1932. George Val Myer designed the building in collaboration with the BBCs civil engineer, the interiors were the work of Raymond McGrath, an Australian-Irish architect. The building is built in two parts, dispensing with the oft-found central light-well of contemporary buildings this size, the central core containing the recording studios was a windowless structure built of brick. The surrounding outer portion, designed for offices and ancillary spaces, is framed and faced using Portland stone. While the outer portion had plenty of windows, the core required special sound-dampened ventilation systems. There were two areas where right of ancient lights would cause height restrictions, Underground structures, including a hundred-year-old sewer, also presented problems during construction. The building is above the Bakerloo line of the London Underground, the Victoria line was tunnelled beneath in the 1960s, noise from passing trains is audible within the radio theatre, but generally imperceptible in recordings. The ground floor was fitted with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the street, the rapid expansion of the BBC meant this never occurred
2.
London
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London /ˈlʌndən/ is the capital and most populous city of England and the United Kingdom. Standing on the River Thames in the south east of the island of Great Britain and it was founded by the Romans, who named it Londinium. Londons ancient core, the City of London, largely retains its 1. 12-square-mile medieval boundaries. London is a global city in the arts, commerce, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, professional services, research and development, tourism. It is crowned as the worlds largest financial centre and has the fifth- or sixth-largest metropolitan area GDP in the world, London is a world cultural capital. It is the worlds most-visited city as measured by international arrivals and has the worlds largest city airport system measured by passenger traffic, London is the worlds leading investment destination, hosting more international retailers and ultra high-net-worth individuals than any other city. Londons universities form the largest concentration of education institutes in Europe. In 2012, London became the first city to have hosted the modern Summer Olympic Games three times, London has a diverse range of people and cultures, and more than 300 languages are spoken in the region. Its estimated mid-2015 municipal population was 8,673,713, the largest of any city in the European Union, Londons urban area is the second most populous in the EU, after Paris, with 9,787,426 inhabitants at the 2011 census. The citys metropolitan area is the most populous in the EU with 13,879,757 inhabitants, the city-region therefore has a similar land area and population to that of the New York metropolitan area. London was the worlds most populous city from around 1831 to 1925, Other famous landmarks include Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, Piccadilly Circus, St Pauls Cathedral, Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square, and The Shard. The London Underground is the oldest underground railway network in the world, the etymology of London is uncertain. It is an ancient name, found in sources from the 2nd century and it is recorded c.121 as Londinium, which points to Romano-British origin, and hand-written Roman tablets recovered in the city originating from AD 65/70-80 include the word Londinio. The earliest attempted explanation, now disregarded, is attributed to Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regum Britanniae and this had it that the name originated from a supposed King Lud, who had allegedly taken over the city and named it Kaerlud. From 1898, it was accepted that the name was of Celtic origin and meant place belonging to a man called *Londinos. The ultimate difficulty lies in reconciling the Latin form Londinium with the modern Welsh Llundain, which should demand a form *lōndinion, from earlier *loundiniom. The possibility cannot be ruled out that the Welsh name was borrowed back in from English at a later date, and thus cannot be used as a basis from which to reconstruct the original name. Until 1889, the name London officially applied only to the City of London, two recent discoveries indicate probable very early settlements near the Thames in the London area
3.
BBC
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The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. It is headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, the BBC is the worlds oldest national broadcasting organisation and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees. It employs over 20,950 staff in total,16,672 of whom are in public sector broadcasting, the total number of staff is 35,402 when part-time, flexible, and fixed contract staff are included. The BBC is established under a Royal Charter and operates under its Agreement with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. The fee is set by the British Government, agreed by Parliament, and used to fund the BBCs radio, TV, britains first live public broadcast from the Marconi factory in Chelmsford took place in June 1920. It was sponsored by the Daily Mails Lord Northcliffe and featured the famous Australian Soprano Dame Nellie Melba, the Melba broadcast caught the peoples imagination and marked a turning point in the British publics attitude to radio. However, this public enthusiasm was not shared in official circles where such broadcasts were held to interfere with important military and civil communications. By late 1920, pressure from these quarters and uneasiness among the staff of the licensing authority, the General Post Office, was sufficient to lead to a ban on further Chelmsford broadcasts. But by 1922, the GPO had received nearly 100 broadcast licence requests, John Reith, a Scottish Calvinist, was appointed its General Manager in December 1922 a few weeks after the company made its first official broadcast. The company was to be financed by a royalty on the sale of BBC wireless receiving sets from approved manufacturers, to this day, the BBC aims to follow the Reithian directive to inform, educate and entertain. The financial arrangements soon proved inadequate, set sales were disappointing as amateurs made their own receivers and listeners bought rival unlicensed sets. By mid-1923, discussions between the GPO and the BBC had become deadlocked and the Postmaster-General commissioned a review of broadcasting by the Sykes Committee and this was to be followed by a simple 10 shillings licence fee with no royalty once the wireless manufactures protection expired. The BBCs broadcasting monopoly was made explicit for the duration of its current broadcast licence, the BBC was also banned from presenting news bulletins before 19.00, and required to source all news from external wire services. Mid-1925 found the future of broadcasting under further consideration, this time by the Crawford committee, by now the BBC under Reiths leadership had forged a consensus favouring a continuation of the unified broadcasting service, but more money was still required to finance rapid expansion. Wireless manufacturers were anxious to exit the loss making consortium with Reith keen that the BBC be seen as a service rather than a commercial enterprise. The recommendations of the Crawford Committee were published in March the following year and were still under consideration by the GPO when the 1926 general strike broke out in May. The strike temporarily interrupted newspaper production and with restrictions on news bulletins waived the BBC suddenly became the source of news for the duration of the crisis. The crisis placed the BBC in a delicate position, the Government was divided on how to handle the BBC but ended up trusting Reith, whose opposition to the strike mirrored the PMs own
4.
BBC Home Service
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The BBC Home Service was a British national radio station that broadcast from 1939 until 1967, when it became the current BBC Radio 4. Between the 1920s and the outbreak of the Second World War, as well as a basic service programmed from London, the Regional Programme included programming originating in six regions. On 1 September 1939, the BBC merged the two programmes into one service from London. The reasons given included the need to prevent enemy aircraft from using differentiated output from the Regional Programmes transmitters as navigational beacons. To this end, the regional transmitters were synchronised in chains on two frequencies,668 and 767 kHz, with an additional chain of low-powered transmitters on 1474 kHz appearing later. The new service was named the Home Service, which was also the designation at the BBC for domestic radio broadcasting. On 29 July 1945, the BBC resumed its previous structure, though true regional radio stations would not return till the 1970s. The Home Service had seven regions, London and South East England was served by the basic Home Service, which was not considered a region by the BBC and acted as the sustaining service for the other regions. The Northern Ireland service was separated from the North region on 7 January 1963, the Service provided five national news programmes a day from London, and drama, talks and informational programmes. Non-topical talk programmes and heavier drama output were transferred to the BBC Third Programme when it began broadcasting on 29 September 1946, during the day, the Service included programmes of classical music. They disappeared when the Music Programme began regular 0700–1830 broadcasting daily on 22 March 1965, the Service broadcast educational programmes for schools during the day, backed with booklets and support material. On 30 September 1967, the BBC split the Light Programme into a pop music service, the Light Programme became BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 2. The BBC Third Programme became BBC Radio 3, with the Music Programme losing its separate identity, the Home Service was renamed BBC Radio 4. With the introduction of BBC Local Radio, starting with BBC Radio Leicester on 8 November 1967, the BBC produced a report, Broadcasting in the Seventies, on 10 July 1969, proposing the reorganisation of programmes on the national networks and the end of regional broadcasting. During the 1970s Radio 4 FM in the East of England carried a breakfast magazine programme, Roundabout East Anglia, the service closed in advance of the opening of BBC Radio Norfolk in 1980. Radio 4 FM continued to carry four daily five-minute regional news bulletins on Mondays to Saturdays until the early 1980s, the wide coverage of the Holme Moss transmitter meant that listeners in much of Northern England received combined North and North-West news. BBC Radio Timeline of the BBC Stations of the BBC BBC English Regions Radio drama BBC Year Book 1947, London, BBC Year Book 1948, London, British Broadcasting Corporation,1948. BBC Handbook 1967, London, British Broadcasting Corporation,1967, BBC Handbook 1972, London, British Broadcasting Corporation,1972
5.
BBC Radio 3
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BBC Radio 3 is a British radio network operated by the BBC. Its output centres on classical music and opera, but jazz, world music, drama, culture, the station is the world’s most significant commissioner of new music, and through its New Generation Artists scheme promotes young musicians of all nationalities. The station is notable for its broadcast of the BBC Proms concerts, live and in full, each summer in addition to performances by the BBC Orchestras, there are regular productions of both classic plays and newly commissioned drama. Radio 3 won the Sony Radio Academy UK Station of the Year Gold Award for 2009 and was nominated again in 2011, Radio 3 is the successor station to the BBC Third Programme which began broadcasting on 29 September 1946. The name Radio 3 was adopted on 30 September 1967 when the BBC launched its first pop station, Radio 1 and rebranded its national radio channels as Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3. On 10 July 1969 the BBC published its plans for radio, at the time of the review, Radio 3 faced several problems. However Day-time serious music would be the casualty of these proposals, a further rumour was expressed that Radio 3 could be closed altogether as a strong statistical case existed against the station according to The Guardian. However, the Director-General, Charles Curran, publicly denied this as quite contradictory to the aim of the BBC, which is to provide a comprehensive radio service. As a result of Broadcasting in the Seventies, factual content, including documentaries and current affairs, were moved to BBC Radio 4 and the separate titled strands were abolished. The document stated that Radio 3 was to have an output of standard classical music but with some element in the evening of cultural speech programmes – poetry. Equally, questions were being asked by the poet Peter Porter about whether other spoken content, for example poetry, the Broadcasting in the Seventies report also proposed a large cutback in the number and size of the BBCs orchestras. The campaign objected to the dismantling of the Third Programme by cutting down its spoken word content from fourteen hours a week to six, mention of the campaign even reached debate in the House of Commons. From the launch until 1987, the controllers of Radio 3 showed preferences towards speech and arts programming as opposed to focus on classical music and the Proms. The first controller, Newby, made little contribution to the station, focusing on the transition from the Third programme to Radio 3, the second controller, Stephen Hearst who assumed the role in 1972, was different. As Hearst had previously been head of television arts features his appointment was seen with scepticism among the staff who viewed him as a populariser. However, during this time the long running arts discussion programme Critics’ Forum was launched as well as themed evenings, in 1978, Ian McIntyre took over as controller of Radio 3 but quickly faced uncomfortable relationships between departments. An example of this is the replacement of Homeward Bound in 1980 with an extended, senior management was also getting dissatisfied with listening figures leading to the Director-General Alasdair Milne to suggest that presentation style was too stodgy and old-fashioned. In 1987 the positions of Controller of Music and Controller of Radio 3 were merged, Drummond, like Hearst, believed that the music programmes presentation was too stiff and formal and he therefore encouraged announcers to be more natural and enthusiastic
6.
Academy
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Academy is a type of secondary or tertiary education institutions. The word comes from the Academy in ancient Greece, which derives from the Athenian hero, outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning. The sacred space, dedicated to the goddess of wisdom, Athena, had formerly been an olive grove, in these gardens, the philosopher Plato conversed with followers. Plato developed his sessions into a method of teaching philosophy and in 387 BC, by extension academia has come to mean the cultural accumulation of knowledge, its development and transmission across generations and its practitioners and transmitters. In the 17th century, British, Italian and French scholars used the term to describe types of institutions of higher learning, in ancient Greece, after the establishment of the original Academy, Platos colleagues and pupils developed spin-offs of his method. Arcesilaus, a Greek student of Plato established the Middle Academy, carneades, another student, established the New Academy. In 335 BC, Aristotle refined the method with his own theories, the library of Alexandria in Egypt was frequented by intellectuals from Africa, Europe and Asia studying various aspects of philosophy, language and mathematics. The University of Timbuktu was a university in Timbuktu, present-day Mali. During its zenith, the university had an attendance of around 25,000 students within a city of around 100,000 people. In China a higher education institution Shang Xiang was founded by Shun in the Youyu era before the 21st century BC, in the 8th century another kind of institution of learning emerged, named Shuyuan, which were generally privately owned. There were thousands of Shuyuan recorded in ancient times, the degrees from them varied from one to another and those advanced Shuyuan such as Bailudong Shuyuan and Yuelu Shuyuan can be classified as higher institutions of learning. Taxila or Takshashila, in ancient India, modern-day Pakistan, was an early Buddhist centre of learning and it is considered as one of the ancient universities of the world. According to scattered references which were only fixed a millennium later it may have dated back to at least the 5th century BC, some scholars date Takshashilas existence back to the 6th century BC. The school consisted of several monasteries without large dormitories or lecture halls where the instruction was most likely still provided on an individualistic basis. Takshashila is described in detail in later Jātaka tales, written in Sri Lanka around the 5th century AD. It became a centre of learning at least several centuries BC. Takshashila is perhaps best known because of its association with Chanakya, the famous treatise Arthashastra by Chanakya, is said to have been composed in Takshashila itself. Chanakya, the Maurya Emperor Chandragupta and the Ayurvedic healer Charaka studied at Taxila, generally, a student entered Takshashila at the age of sixteen
7.
John Reith, 1st Baron Reith
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His concept of broadcasting as a way of educating the masses marked for a long time the BBC and similar organisations around the world. Born at Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, Reith was the youngest, by ten years, of the seven children of the Reverend Dr George Reith and he was to carry strict Presbyterian religious convictions forward into his adult life. Reith was educated at The Glasgow Academy then at Greshams School, Holt and his father refused to support any further education and apprenticed him as an engineer at the North British Locomotive Company. Reith was also a soldier in the 1st Lancashire Rifle Volunteers. In 1914, Reith left Glasgow for London, though he readily found work at the Royal Albert Dock, his commission in the 5th Scottish Rifles sent him serving in World War I. He was struck in the cheek by a bullet in October 1915, at time he was a Lieutenant. He spent the two years in the United States, supervising armament contracts, and became attracted to the country. He was promoted to Captain in 1917, before being transferred to the Royal Marine Engineers in 1918 as a Major and he returned to the Royal Engineers as a Captain in 1919. Reith resigned his Territorial Army commission in 1921, the end of the war found Reith returning to Glasgow as general manager of an engineering firm. In 1922, he returned to London, where he started working as secretary to the London Conservative group of MPs in the United Kingdom general election,1922 and that elections results were the first to be broadcast on the radio. Reith had no broadcasting experience when he replied to an advertisement in The Morning Post for a manager for an as-yet unformed British Broadcasting Company in 1922. He later admitted that he felt he possessed the necessary to manage any company. In 1926, Reith famously came into conflict with the Government during the 1926 United Kingdom general strike, the BBC bulletins reported, without comment, all sides in the dispute, including the TUCs and of union leaders. He even turned down a direct request from the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald who wanted to deliver a talk, MacDonald complained that the BBC was biased and was misleading the public while other Labour Party figures were just as critical. Philip Snowden, the former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, was one of those who wrote to the Radio Times to complain, Reiths reply also appeared in the Radio Times, admitting the BBC had not had complete liberty to do as it wanted. He recognised that at a time of emergency the government was never going to give the complete independence. The Labour leadership was not the only high-profile body denied a chance to comment on the strike. Davidson telephoned Reith about his idea on 7 May, saying he had spoken to the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, who had said he would not stop the broadcast, but would prefer it not to happen
8.
Secretary of State for Education
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Her Majestys Principal Secretary of State for Education is the chief minister of the Department for Education in the United Kingdom government. The position was re-established on 12 May 2010, a committee of the Privy Council was appointed in 1839 to supervise the distribution of certain government grants in the education field. The members of the committee were the Lord President of the Council, the Secretaries of State, the First Lord of the Treasury, from 1857 a vice-president was appointed who took responsibility for policy. On 1 April 1900, the Board of Education Act 1899 abolished the committee and instituted a new board, the Education Act 1944 replaced the Board of Education with a new Ministry of Education. The Department of Education and Science was created in 1964 with the merger of the offices of Minister of Education, in 1992 the responsibility for science was transferred to Cabinet Offices Office of Public Service, and the department was renamed Department of Education. As of 14 July 2016, the position is held by Justine Greening as her predesseccesor, in 2009, the latter department was merged into the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Colour key, Labour Labour Co-operative The Department for Education and the post of Secretary of State for Education were recreated in 2010. Responsibility for higher and adult education remained with the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, colour key, Conservative Department for Education Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
9.
Clement Attlee
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Attlee was the first person to hold the office of Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, serving under Winston Churchill in the wartime coalition government. He went on to lead the Labour Party to an election victory in summer 1945. One of only a handful of Labour frontbenchers to retain his seat in the defeat of 1931. In 1935 he became the Leader of the Party, at first advocating pacificism and appeasement, he later reversed his position and by 1938 became a strong critic of Neville Chamberlains attempts to appease Adolf Hitler. He took Labour into the Churchill war ministry in 1940, initially serving as Lord Privy Seal, he was appointed Deputy Prime Minister in 1942. With victory in Europe in May 1945, the government was dissolved. Attlee led Labour to win a majority in the ensuing 1945 general election two months later. Within this context, his government undertook the nationalisation of public utilities and major industries, Attlee himself had little interest in economic matters but this settlement was broadly accepted by all parties for three decades. Foreign policy was the domain of Ernest Bevin, but Attlee took special interest in India. He supervised the process by which India was partitioned into India and he also arranged the independence of Burma, and Ceylon. His government ended the British Mandates of Palestine and Jordan, from 1947 he and Bevin pushed the United States to take a more vigorous role in the emerging Cold War against Soviet Communism. When the budgetary crisis forced Britain out of Greece in 1947 he called on Washington to counter the Communists with the Truman Doctrine and he avidly supported the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe with American money. In 1949, he promoted the NATO military alliance against the Soviet bloc and he sent British troops to fight in the Malayan Emergency in 1948 and sent the RAF to participate in the Berlin Airlift. He commissioned an independent nuclear deterrent for the UK and he used 13,000 troops and passed special legislation to promptly end the London dock strike in 1949. After leading Labour to a victory in the 1950 general election. Attlee was narrowly defeated by the Conservatives under Churchill in the 1951 general election and he continued as Labour leader but had lost his effectiveness by then. He retired after losing the 1955 general election and was elevated to the House of Lords, in public, Attlee was modest and unassuming, he was ineffective at public relations and lacked charisma. His strengths emerged behind the scenes, especially in committees where his depth of knowledge, quiet demeanour, objectivity and he saw himself as spokesman on behalf of his entire party and successfully kept its multiple factions in harness
10.
Ellen Wilkinson
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Ellen Cicely Wilkinson PC was a British Labour Party politician who served as Minister of Education from July 1945 until her death. Although unsuccessful at that time, the march provided an image for the 1930s. Wilkinson was born into a poor though ambitious Manchester family, after graduating from the University of Manchester she worked for a womens suffrage organisation and later as a trade union officer. She was elected Labour MP for Middlesbrough East in 1924, in the 1929–31 Labour government she served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the junior Health Minister. Following her defeat at Middlesbrough in 1931, Wilkinson became a prolific journalist and she was a strong advocate for the Republican faction in the Spanish Civil War, and made several visits to the battle zones. During the Second World War Wilkinson served in Churchills wartime coalition as a junior minister and she supported Morrisons attempts to replace Clement Attlee as the Labour Partys leader, nevertheless, when he formed his postwar government Attlee appointed Wilkinson as Minister of Education. By this time her health was poor, the legacy of years of overwork, much of her energy was applied to organising the raising of the school leaving age from 14 to 15. In the exceptionally cold English winter of 1946–47, she succumbed to a bronchial disease, Ellen Wilkinson was born on 8 October 1891, at 41 Coral Street in the Manchester district of Chorlton-on-Medlock. She was the child and second daughter of Richard Wilkinson, a cotton worker who became an insurance agent. Entirely self-educated, he ensured that his children received the best schooling available, encouraged them to read widely, at the age of six Ellen began attending what she described as a filthy elementary school with the five classes in one room. A series of illnesses kept her at home for two years, but she used the time learning to read. On her return to school she made progress, and at the age of 11 won a scholarship to Ardwick Higher Elementary Grade School. Outspoken and often rebellious, after two years she transferred to Stretford Road Secondary School for Girls, an experience she later remembered as horrid and she made up for the schools shortcomings by reading, with her fathers encouragement, the works of Haeckel, Thomas Huxley and Darwin. Teaching was one of the few careers then open to educated working-class girls, for half the week she attended the Manchester Day Training College, and during the other half taught at Oswald Road Elementary School. Her classroom approach—she sought to interest her pupils, rather than learning by rote—led to frequent clashes with her superiors. At the college, where she was encouraged to more widely and to engage with the issues of the day. By this time she was impatient with religion, socialism provided a timely, thirty years later Wilkinson told her colleague George Middleton that Glasier had brought me into the Socialist movement. It always makes me humble to think of her indomitable courage, after meeting the suffragist Hannah Mitchell, Wilkinson took up the cause of womens suffrage, the major womens rights issue of the day
11.
T. S. Eliot
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Thomas Stearns Eliot OM was a British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and one of the twentieth centurys major poets. He moved from his native United States to England in 1914 at the age of 25, settling, working and he eventually became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39, renouncing his American citizenship. Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and it was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets. He was also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry. The Eliots were a Boston family with roots in Old and New England, Thomas Eliots paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved to St. Louis, Missouri to establish a Unitarian Christian church there. Eliot was the last of six surviving children, his parents were both 44 years old when he was born, Eliot was born at 2635 Locust St. property owned by his grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot. His four sisters were between 11 and 19 years older, his brother was eight years older, known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns. Eliots childhood infatuation with literature can be ascribed to several factors, firstly, he had to overcome physical limitations as a child. Struggling from a congenital double inguinal hernia, he could not participate in physical activities. As he was isolated, his love for literature developed. Once he learned to read, the boy immediately became obsessed with books and was absorbed in tales depicting savages. In his memoir of Eliot, his friend Robert Sencourt comments that the young Eliot would often curl up in the window-seat behind an enormous book, setting the drug of dreams against the pain of living. Secondly, Eliot credited his hometown with fuelling his literary vision, I feel that there is something in having passed ones childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been here, rather than in Boston, or New York. From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, where his studies included Latin, Ancient Greek, French and he began to write poetry when he was fourteen under the influence of Edward Fitzgeralds Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a translation of the poetry of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing and he destroyed them and his first published poem, A Fable For Feasters, was written as a school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905. Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript and he also published three short stories in 1905, Birds of Prey, A Tale of a Whale and The Man Who Was King. The last mentioned story significantly reflects his exploration of Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 Worlds Fair of St. Louis, such a link with primitive people importantly antedates his anthropological studies at Harvard
12.
Albert Camus
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Albert Camus was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay The Rebel that his life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, Camus did not consider himself to be an existentialist despite usually being classified as a follower of it, even in his lifetime. In a 1945 interview, Camus rejected any ideological associations, No, Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked. Camus was born in French Algeria to a Pied-Noir family and studied at the University of Algiers, in 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons to denounce two ideologies found in both the USSR and the USA. Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in Dréan in French Algeria and his mother was of Spanish descent and could only hear out of her left ear. His father, Lucien, an agricultural worker of Alsatian descent, was wounded in the Battle of the Marne in 1914 during World War I. Lucien died from his wounds in an army hospital on 11 October. Camus and his mother, a house cleaner, lived without many basic material possessions during his childhood in the Belcourt section of Algiers. In 1923, Camus was accepted into the Lycée Bugeaud and eventually was admitted to the University of Algiers, after he contracted tuberculosis in 1930, he had to end his football activities, he had been a goalkeeper for a prominent Algerian university team. In addition, he was able to study part-time. To earn money, he took odd jobs, as a tutor, car parts clerk. Camus joined the French Communist Party in early 1935, seeing it as a way to fight inequalities between Europeans and natives in Algeria. He did not suggest he was a Marxist or that he had read Das Kapital, in 1936, the independence-minded Algerian Communist Party was founded. Camus joined the activities of the Algerian Peoples Party, which got him into trouble with his Communist party comrades, Camus then became associated with the French anarchist movement. The anarchist André Prudhommeaux first introduced him at a meeting in 1948 of the Cercle des Étudiants Anarchistes as a sympathiser familiar with anarchist thought, Camus wrote for anarchist publications such as Le Libertaire, La révolution Prolétarienne, and Solidaridad Obrera, the organ of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. Camus stood with the anarchists when they expressed support for the uprising of 1953 in East Germany and he again allied with the anarchists in 1956, first in support of the workers uprising in Poznań, Poland, and then later in the year with the Hungarian Revolution
13.
Laurence Olivier
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Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM, was an English actor who, along with his contemporaries Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, dominated the British stage of the mid-20th century. He also worked in films throughout his career, playing more than fifty cinema roles, late in his career, he had considerable success in television roles. His family had no connections, but Oliviers father, a clergyman. After attending a school in London, Olivier learned his craft in a succession of acting jobs during the late 1920s. In 1930 he had his first important West End success in Noël Cowards Private Lives, in 1935 he played in a celebrated production of Romeo and Juliet alongside Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft, and by the end of the decade he was an established star. In the 1940s, together with Richardson and John Burrell, Olivier was the co-director of the Old Vic, there his most celebrated roles included Shakespeares Richard III and Sophocless Oedipus. From 1963 to 1973 he was the director of Britains National Theatre. His own parts there included the role in Othello and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Among Oliviers films are Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, and a trilogy of Shakespeare films as actor-director, Henry V, Hamlet and his later films included Sleuth, Marathon Man, and The Boys from Brazil. His television appearances included an adaptation of The Moon and Sixpence, Long Days Journey into Night, Love Among the Ruins, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brideshead Revisited, Oliviers honours included a knighthood, a life peerage and the Order of Merit. For his on-screen work he received four Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, five Emmy Awards and three Golden Globe Awards. The National Theatres largest auditorium is named in his honour, and he is commemorated in the Laurence Olivier Awards, given annually by the Society of London Theatre. He was married three times, to the actresses Jill Esmond from 1930 to 1940, Vivien Leigh from 1940 to 1960, Olivier was born in Dorking, Surrey, the youngest of the three children of the Revd Gerard Kerr Olivier and his wife Agnes Louise, née Crookenden. Their elder children were Sybille and Gerard Dacres Dickie and his great-great-grandfather was of French Huguenot descent, and Olivier came from a long line of Protestant clergymen. Gerard Olivier had begun a career as a schoolmaster, but in his thirties he discovered a strong religious vocation and was ordained as a priest of the Church of England and he practised extremely high church, ritualist Anglicanism and liked to be addressed as Father Olivier. This made him unacceptable to most Anglican congregations, and the church posts he was offered were temporary. This meant a nomadic existence, and for Laurences first few years, in 1912, when Olivier was five, his father secured a permanent appointment as assistant priest at St Saviours, Pimlico. He held the post for six years, and a family life was at last possible
14.
Bertrand Russell
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Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist and Nobel laureate. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist and he was born in Monmouthshire into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in the United Kingdom. In the early 20th century, Russell led the British revolt against idealism and he is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, colleague G. E. Moore, and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is widely held to be one of the 20th centurys premier logicians, with A. N. Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica, an attempt to create a logical basis for mathematics. His philosophical essay On Denoting has been considered a paradigm of philosophy, Russell mostly was a prominent anti-war activist, he championed anti-imperialism. Occasionally, he advocated preventive nuclear war, before the opportunity provided by the monopoly is gone. He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I, in 1950 Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought. Bertrand Russell was born on 18 May 1872 at Ravenscroft, Trellech, Monmouthshire and his parents, Viscount and Viscountess Amberley, were radical for their times. Lord Amberley consented to his wifes affair with their childrens tutor, both were early advocates of birth control at a time when this was considered scandalous. Lord Amberley was an atheist and his atheism was evident when he asked the philosopher John Stuart Mill to act as Russells secular godfather, Mill died the year after Russells birth, but his writings had a great effect on Russells life. His paternal grandfather, the Earl Russell, had asked twice by Queen Victoria to form a government. The Russells had been prominent in England for several centuries before this, coming to power, Lady Amberley was the daughter of Lord and Lady Stanley of Alderley. Russell often feared the ridicule of his grandmother, one of the campaigners for education of women. Russell had two siblings, brother Frank, and sister Rachel, in June 1874 Russells mother died of diphtheria, followed shortly by Rachels death. In January 1876, his father died of bronchitis following a period of depression. Frank and Bertrand were placed in the care of their staunchly Victorian paternal grandparents and his grandfather, former Prime Minister Earl Russell, died in 1878, and was remembered by Russell as a kindly old man in a wheelchair. His grandmother, the Countess Russell, was the dominant family figure for the rest of Russells childhood, the countess was from a Scottish Presbyterian family, and successfully petitioned the Court of Chancery to set aside a provision in Amberleys will requiring the children to be raised as agnostics. Her favourite Bible verse, Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil, the atmosphere at Pembroke Lodge was one of frequent prayer, emotional repression, and formality, Frank reacted to this with open rebellion, but the young Bertrand learned to hide his feelings
15.
Isaiah Berlin
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Sir Isaiah Berlin OM CBE FBA was a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas. He was an essayist, conversationalist, raconteur, and lecturer, born in Riga, Latvia in 1909, he moved to Petrograd, Russia at the age of six, where he witnessed the revolutions of 1917. In 1921 his family came to England, and he was educated at St Pauls School, London and Corpus Christi College, in 1932, at the age of 23, Berlin was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. He translated works by Ivan Turgenev from Russian into English and, during the war, from 1957 to 1967 he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964, in 1966, he played a crucial role in founding Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its first President. Berlin was appointed a CBE in 1946, knighted in 1957 and he was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his writings on individual freedom, an annual Isaiah Berlin Lecture is held at the Hampstead Synagogue, at Wolfson College, Oxford, at the British Academy, and in Riga. Berlins work on theory and on value pluralism has had a lasting influence. Berlin was the surviving child of a prosperous Jewish family, the son of Mendel Berlin, a timber trader and direct descendant of Shneur Zalman. He spent his first six years in Riga, and later lived in Andreapol and Petrograd, in London, the family first stayed in Surbiton, then within the year they bought a house in Holland Park, and six years later in Hampstead. Berlins English was virtually nonexistent at first, but he became fluent within a year, Berlin was educated at St Pauls School, then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he studied Greats. In his final examinations, he took a First, winning The John Locke Prize for his performance in the philosophy papers and he subsequently took another degree at Oxford in PPE, winning another First after less than a year on the course. He was appointed a tutor in philosophy at New College, Oxford, and soon afterwards was elected to a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. While still a student, he befriended Ayer, Stuart Hampshire, Richard Wollheim, Maurice Bowra, Stephen Spender, J. L. Austin, in 1940, he presented a philosophical paper on other minds to a meeting attended by Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge University. Wittgenstein rejected the argument of his paper in discussion but praised Berlin for his honesty and integrity. Prior to this service, however, Berlin was barred from participation in the British war effort as a result of his being born in Latvia, for his services, he was appointed a CBE in the 1946 New Year Honours. Berlin was fluent in Russian and English, spoke French, German and Italian, meetings with Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad in November 1945 and January 1946 had a powerful effect on both of them, and serious repercussions for Akhmatova. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and he was instrumental in the founding, in 1966, of a new graduate college at Oxford University, Wolfson College
16.
Fred Hoyle
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He spent most of his working life at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge and served as its director for six years. He was a writer of fiction, and co-authored twelve books with his son. Hoyle was born near Bingley in Gilstead, West Riding of Yorkshire and his father, Ben Hoyle, worked in the wool trade in Bradford. His mother, Mabel Pickard, had studied music at the Royal College of Music in London, Hoyle was educated at Bingley Grammar School and read mathematics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In late 1940, Hoyle left Cambridge to go to Portsmouth to work for the Admiralty on radar research and he was also put in charge of countermeasures against the radar guided guns found on the Graf Spee. Britains radar project employed more personnel than the Manhattan project, and was probably the inspiration for the large British project in The Black Cloud, two key colleagues in this war work were Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, and the three had many and deep discussions on cosmology. The radar work paid for a couple of trips to North America and he had an intuition at the time I will make a name for myself if this works out. Eventually his prescient and ground breaking paper came out and he also formed a group at Cambridge exploring Stellar nucleosynthesis in ordinary stars and was bothered by the paucity of stellar carbon production in existing models. He noticed that one of the existing processes would be made a billion times more if the carbon-12 nucleus had a resonance at 7.7 MeV. After the war, in 1945, Hoyle returned to Cambridge University, Hoyles Cambridge years, 1945–1973, saw him rise to the top of world astrophysics theory, on the basis of a startling originality of ideas covering a very wide range of topics. In 1958, Hoyle was appointed to the illustrious Plumian Professor of Astronomy, in 1971 he was invited to deliver the MacMillan Memorial Lecture to the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland. He chose the subject Astronomical Instruments and their Construction, after his leaving Cambridge, Hoyle wrote many popular science and science fiction books, as well as presenting lectures around the world. Part of the motivation for this was simply to provide a means of support, Hoyle was still a member of the joint policy committee, during the planning stage for the 150-inch Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales. He became chairman of the Anglo-Australian Telescope board in 1973, and presided at its inauguration in 1974 by Charles, on 24 November 1997, while hiking across moorlands in west Yorkshire, near his childhood home in Gilstead, Hoyle fell down into a steep ravine called Shipley Glen. Roughly twelve hours later, Hoyle was found by a search dog and he was hospitalized for two months with pneumonia, kidney problems as a result of hypothermia, and a smashed shoulder, while he ever afterwards suffered from memory and mental agility problems. In 2001, he suffered a series of strokes and died in Bournemouth on 20 August, Fred Hoyle authored the first two research papers ever published on the synthesis of the chemical elements heavier than helium by nuclear reactions in stars. This idea would later be called the e Process, Hoyles second foundational nucleosynthesis publication showed that the elements between carbon and iron cannot be synthesized by such equilibrium processes. Hoyle attributed those elements to specific nuclear fusion reactions between abundant constituents in concentric shells of evolved massive, pre-supernova stars and this startlingly modern picture is the accepted paradigm today for the supernova nucleosynthesis of these primary elements
17.
Benjamin Britten
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Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten OM CH was an English composer, conductor and pianist. He was a figure of 20th-century British classical music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes, the War Requiem, Born in Suffolk, the son of a dentist, Britten showed talent from an early age. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London and privately with the composer Frank Bridge, Britten first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy was Born in 1934. With the premiere of Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to international fame, over the next 28 years, he wrote 14 more operas, establishing himself as one of the leading 20th-century composers in the genre. In addition to large-scale operas for Sadlers Wells and Covent Garden, he wrote operas for small forces. Among the best known of these is The Turn of the Screw, recurring themes in his operas include the struggle of an outsider against a hostile society and the corruption of innocence. Brittens other works range from orchestral to choral, solo vocal, chamber and he took a great interest in writing music for children and amateur performers, including the opera Noyes Fludde, a Missa Brevis, and the song collection Friday Afternoons. He often composed with particular performers in mind, Britten was a celebrated pianist and conductor, performing many of his own works in concert and on record. He also performed and recorded works by others, such as Bachs Brandenburg concertos, Mozart symphonies, in his last year, he was the first composer to be given a life peerage. Britten was born in the port of Lowestoft in Suffolk, on the east coast of England on 22 November 1913. He was the youngest of four children of Robert Victor Britten and his wife Edith Rhoda, Robert Brittens youthful ambition to become a farmer had been thwarted by lack of capital, and he had instead trained as a dentist, a profession he practised successfully but without pleasure. While studying at Charing Cross Hospital in London he met Edith Hockey and they were married in September 1901 at St Johns, Smith Square, London. The consensus among biographers of Britten is that his father was a loving but somewhat stern, Britten, according to his sister Beth, got on well with him and shared his wry sense of humour, dedication to work and capacity for taking pains. Edith Britten was an amateur musician and secretary of the Lowestoft Musical Society. In the English provinces of the early 20th century, distinctions of class were taken very seriously. Music was the means by which Edith Britten strove to maintain the familys social standing, inviting the pillars of the local community to musical soirées at the house. When Britten was three months old he contracted pneumonia and nearly died, the illness left him with a damaged heart, and doctors warned his parents that he would probably never be able to lead a normal life
18.
Samuel Beckett
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Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. He is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century, Becketts work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd. Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and he was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984. The Becketts were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland, the family home, Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court built in 1903 by Samuels father, William. Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday,13 April 1906, to William Frank Beckett, a quantity surveyor and descendant of the Huguenots, and Maria Jones Roe, a nurse, Beckett had one older brother, Frank Edward Beckett. At the age of five, Beckett attended a local playschool, where he started to learn music, in 1919, Beckett went to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. A natural athlete, Beckett excelled at cricket as a left-handed batsman, later, he was to play for Dublin University and played two first-class games against Northamptonshire. As a result, he became the only Nobel literature laureate to have played first class cricket, Beckett studied French, Italian, and English at Trinity College, Dublin from 1923 to 1927. He was elected a Scholar in Modern Languages in 1926, Beckett graduated with a BA and, after teaching briefly at Campbell College in Belfast, took up the post of lecteur danglais at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from November 1928 to 1930. While there, he was introduced to renowned Irish author James Joyce by Thomas MacGreevy and this meeting had a profound effect on the young man. Beckett assisted Joyce in various ways, one of which was research towards the book that became Finnegans Wake, in 1929, Beckett published his first work, a critical essay entitled Dante. Becketts close relationship with Joyce and his family cooled, however, Becketts first short story, Assumption, was published in Jolass periodical transition. In 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer, in November 1930, he presented a paper in French to the Modern Languages Society of Trinity on the Toulouse poet Jean du Chas, founder of a movement called le Concentrisme. It was a parody, for Beckett had in fact invented the poet and his movement that claimed to be at odds with all that is clear. Beckett later insisted that he had not intended to fool his audience, when Beckett resigned from Trinity at the end of 1931, his brief academic career was at an end. He spent some time in London, where in 1931 he published Proust, two years later, following his fathers death, he began two years treatment with Tavistock Clinic psychoanalyst Dr. Wilfred Bion. Aspects of it became evident in Becketts later works, such as Watt, in 1932, he wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but after many rejections from publishers decided to abandon it
19.
Harold Pinter
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Harold Pinter CH CBE was a Nobel Prize-winning English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, and Betrayal and his screenplay adaptations of others works include The Servant, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenants Woman, The Trial, and Sleuth. He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, Pinter was born and raised in Hackney, east London, and educated at Hackney Downs School. He was a sprinter and a cricket player, acting in school plays. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but did not complete the course and he was fined for refusing National service as a conscientious objector. Subsequently, he continued training at the Central School of Speech and Drama, in 1956 he married actress Vivien Merchant and had a son, Daniel, born in 1958. He left Merchant in 1975 and married author Lady Antonia Fraser in 1980, Pinters career as a playwright began with a production of The Room in 1957. His second play, The Birthday Party, closed after eight performances and his early works were described by critics as comedy of menace. Later plays such as No Mans Land and Betrayal became known as memory plays and he appeared as an actor in productions of his own work on radio and film. He also undertook a number of roles in works by other writers and he directed nearly 50 productions for stage, theatre and screen. Pinter received over 50 awards, prizes, and other honours, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005 and he died from liver cancer on 24 December 2008. In 1940 and 1941, after the Blitz, Pinter was evacuated from their house in London to Cornwall, Pinter discovered his social potential as a student at Hackney Downs School, a London grammar school, between 1944 and 1948. Partly through the school and partly through the life of Hackney Boys Club. He formed an almost sacerdotal belief in the power of male friendship, the friends he made in those days—most particularly Henry Woolf, Michael Goldstein and Morris Wernick—have always been a vital part of the emotional texture of his life. A major influence on Pinter was his inspirational English teacher Joseph Brearley, according to Billington, under Brearleys instruction, Pinter shone at English, wrote for the school magazine and discovered a gift for acting. In 1947 and 1948, he played Romeo and Macbeth in productions directed by Brearley, at the age of 12, Pinter began writing poetry, and in spring 1947, his poetry was first published in the Hackney Downs School Magazine. In 1950, his poetry was first published outside of the magazine in Poetry London
20.
Joe Orton
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John Kingsley Joe Orton was an English playwright and author. His public career was short but prolific, lasting from 1964 until his three years later. During this brief period he shocked, outraged, and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies, the adjective Ortonesque is sometimes used to refer to work characterised by a similarly dark yet farcical cynicism. Orton was born at Causeway Lane Maternity Hospital, Leicester, to William A. Orton, William worked for Leicester County Borough Council as a gardener and Elsie worked in the local footwear industry until tuberculosis cost her a lung. When Joe was two old, they moved from 261 Avenue Road Extension in Clarendon Park, Leicester. He soon had a brother, Douglas, and two younger sisters, Marilyn and Leonie. Orton attended Marriot Road Primary School, but failed the exam after extended bouts of asthma. He then began working as a clerk on £3 a week. Orton became interested in performing in the theatre around 1949 and joined a number of different dramatic societies and he applied for a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in November 1950. He was accepted, and left the East Midlands for London and his entrance into RADA was delayed until May 1951 by appendicitis. Orton met Kenneth Halliwell at RADA in 1951 and moved into a West Hampstead flat with him, Halliwell was seven years older than Orton and of independent means, having a substantial inheritance. They quickly formed a relationship and became lovers. After graduating, both Orton and Halliwell went into repertory work, Orton spent four months in Ipswich as an assistant stage manager, Halliwell in Llandudno. Both returned to London and began to write together and they collaborated on a number of unpublished novels with no success at gaining publication. The rejection of their hope, The Last Days of Sodom. Orton wrote his last novel, The Vision of Gombold Proval and he would later draw on these manuscripts for ideas, many show glimpses of his stage-play style. Confident of their specialness, Orton and Halliwell refused to work for long periods and they subsisted on Halliwells money and were forced to follow an ascetic life to restrict their outgoings to £5 a week. From 1957 to 1959, they worked in six-month stretches at Cadburys to raise money for a new flat, they moved into a small, a lack of serious work led them to amuse themselves with pranks and hoaxes
21.
Dylan Thomas
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He became widely popular in his lifetime and remained so after his premature death at the age of 39 in New York City. By then he had acquired a reputation, which he had encouraged, as a roistering, drunken, Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1914. An undistinguished pupil, he left school at 16 and became a journalist for a short time. Many of his works appeared in print while he was still a teenager, however, while living in London, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara, whom he married in 1937. Their relationship was defined by alcoholism and was mutually destructive, in the early part of their marriage, Thomas and his family lived hand-to-mouth, they settled in the Welsh fishing village of Laugharne. Thomas came to be appreciated as a poet during his lifetime. He began augmenting his income with reading tours and radio broadcasts and his radio recordings for the BBC during the late 1940s brought him to the publics attention, and he was frequently used by the BBC as a populist voice of the literary scene. Thomas first travelled to the United States in the 1950s and his readings there brought him a level of fame, while his erratic behaviour and drinking worsened. His time in America cemented his legend, however, and he went on to record to vinyl such works as A Childs Christmas in Wales. During his fourth trip to New York in 1953, Thomas became gravely ill and fell into a coma and he died on 9 November 1953. His body was returned to Wales where he was interred at the churchyard in Laugharne on 25 November 1953. Though Thomas wrote exclusively in the English language, he has acknowledged as one of the most important Welsh poets of the 20th century. He is noted for his original, rhythmic and ingenious use of words and his position as one of the great modern poets has been much discussed, and he remains popular with the public. Dylan Thomas was born on 27 October 1914 in Swansea, the son of Florence Hannah, a seamstress, and David John Thomas, a teacher. His father had an honours degree in English from University College, Aberystwyth. Thomas had one sibling, Nancy Marles, who was eight years his senior, the children spoke only English, though their parents were bilingual in English and Welsh, and David Thomas gave Welsh lessons at home. Thomass father chose the name Dylan, which could be translated as son of the sea, after Dylan ail Don and his middle name, Marlais, was given in honour of his great-uncle, William Thomas, a Unitarian minister and poet whose bardic name was Gwilym Marles. Dylan, pronounced ˈ in Welsh, caused his mother to worry he might be teased as the dull one, when he broadcast on Welsh BBC, early in his career, he was introduced using this pronunciation
22.
Under Milk Wood
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Under Milk Wood is a 1954 radio drama by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, commissioned by the BBC and later adapted for the stage. A film version, Under Milk Wood directed by Andrew Sinclair, was released in 1972, an omniscient narrator invites the audience to listen to the dreams and innermost thoughts of the inhabitants of the fictional small Welsh fishing village Llareggub. Later, the town awakens and, aware now of how their feelings affect whatever they do, we watch them go about their daily business. When Thomas was staying at New Quay, Cardiganshire, in West Wales, one winter, he went out one morning into the still sleeping town. He wrote the account of this as a story named Quite Early One Morning. He continued to work on the idea for the eight years of his life. In 1931 a 17-year-old Dylan created a piece for the Swansea Grammar School magazine which included a conversation of Milk Wood stylings with Mussolini, Wife, in it are lines which are nearly identical to those that would later be found in Milk Wood. A year later in 1932, Dylan talked at length with his mentor and friend Bert Trick, The socialist grocer of Brynmill, at Bert Tricks bungalow in Caswell, Gower in 1933 Dylan read an embryonic Under Milk Wood. In an interview with Colin Edwards, Bert Trick recalls, He read it to Nell and me in our bungalow at Caswell around the old Dover stove, I am Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard and I want another snooze. Dust the china, feed the canary, sweep the floor, And before you let the sun in. Thomas wrote to his wife, Caitlin, towards the end of a long letter, the same year, he read a part of the script in public for the first time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at The Poetry Centre. Soon afterwards, with others, he sound-recorded a performance at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, New York. Thomas is reported to have commented that Under Milk Wood was developed in response to the bombing of Hiroshima. The fictional name Llareggub bears some resemblance to many actual Welsh place names, which begin with Llan-. In early published editions of the play, it was rendered as Llaregyb or similar. A double-g is not used in written Welsh, if the name were to be pronounced in Welsh as spoken in South Wales, it would be. The geographical inspiration for the town has generated intense debate, Laugharne was the village where Thomas lived intermittently from the 1930s. Both towns use the Under Milk Wood association to attract tourists, hence the rivalry, more recent research has indicated that most of the first half of the play was written in South Leigh, Oxfordshire, whilst the second half was mostly written in America in May 1953
23.
Philip O'Connor
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Philip OConnor was an English writer and surrealist poet, who also painted. He was one of the Wheatsheaf writers of 1930s Fitzrovia and he married six times and fathered at least eight children. Two years later, his mother returned to him and was met with violent protests. This heartbreaking scene later became the subject of a BBC radio play and Wimereux, its white beaches. Memories of twilight in Wimereux return home in a glass of wine, poetry was a perfect outlet for OConnor. His contempt for the editors who published his work in magazines such as New Verse and Life. OConnor, who began his literary career turning out surrealistic poetry, also took to buttonholing literary lions, not always to their delight. He once sent a note up to Aldous Huxleys hotel suite demanding five pounds and on another occasion jumped out from behind a door and shouted Boo. at T. S. Eliot. His time on the road was followed by a stay in the Maudsley psychiatric hospital. He then bounced, or fell, back into Fitzrovia and into a marriage with the daughter of a Scottish lawyer, OConnor and his frail bride returned to the hill where he had lived with his guardian and purchased another hut there. The marriage ended five years and OConnor embarked upon a number of other relationships, fathering an unknown number of children. The publication of the complex, adroit and highly pertinent Memoirs of a Public Baby lent OConnor considerable prestige in literary circles, the book is dedicated to Anna Wing, the actress and his third partner with whom he had a son, Jon. Its success though launched OConnor into a career as a radio interviewer. One literary figure who did not shrink from such antics was Stephen Spender, indeed, the daily book reviewer for the New York Times, Orville Prescott, was unable to decide which he loathed more, the sickening book or the sick man who had produced it. OConnor, who emerged from his childhood with a disdain for the British middle class, fared better in the Timess Sunday Book Review. Two autobiographical sequels, The Lower View, about bicycle visits to writers and artists, but Vagrancy, a study of those on the bottom of British society, enjoyed a vogue on university reading lists. During the early 1960s OConnor conducted a series of interviews for the BBC Third Programme. He talked on air with drug addicts, alcoholics and other misfits, including Quentin Crisp, the flamboyant eccentric credited OConnor with inventing him
24.
Quentin Crisp
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Quentin Crisp was an English writer and raconteur. From a conventional suburban background, Crisp enjoyed wearing make-up and painting his nails and he then spent thirty years as a professional model for life-classes in art colleges. The interviews he gave about his unusual life attracted increasing public curiosity and he was sought after for his highly individual views on social manners. His one-man stage show was a hit both in Britain and America and he also appeared in films and on TV. Crisp defied convention by criticising both gay liberation and Diana, Princess of Wales, Denis Charles Pratt was born in Sutton, South London, on Christmas Day 1908, the fourth child of solicitor Spencer Charles Pratt and former governess Frances Marion Pratt. His elder siblings were Katherine, Gerald and Lewis, after leaving school in 1926 Crisp studied journalism at Kings College London but failed to graduate in 1928 going on to take art classes at the Regent Street Polytechnic. For six months he worked as a sex worker, looking for love, he said in a 1999 interview. In 1940 he moved into a flat at 129 Beaufort Street, Chelsea. In the intervening years he never attempted any housework, writing famously in his memoir The Naked Civil Servant, Crisp left his job as an engineers tracer in 1942 to become a model in life classes in London and the Home Counties. He continued posing for artists for the next 30 years, Crisp had published three short books by the time he came to write The Naked Civil Servant at the urging of his agent, Donald Carroll. The book was published in 1968 to generally good reviews, in 1975 the television version of The Naked Civil Servant was broadcast on British and US television and made both actor John Hurt and Crisp himself into stars. This success launched Crisp in a new direction, that of performer and he devised a one-man show and began touring the country with it. When his autobiography was reprinted in 1975 after the success of the version of The Naked Civil Servant. Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell claimed to have met Crisp in 1974, Tatchell claimed that Crisp asked him, What do you want liberation from. What is there to be proud of, I dont believe in rights for homosexuals. By now Crisp was a theatre-filling raconteur and his one-man show sold out the Duke of Yorks Theatre in London in 1978. Crisp then took the show to New York and his first stay in the Hotel Chelsea coincided with a fire, a robbery, and the death of Nancy Spungen. Crisp decided to move to New York permanently and set about making arrangements, in 1981, he arrived with few possessions and found a small apartment on East 3rd Street in Manhattans East Village
25.
Ludovic Kennedy
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Kennedy was born in 1919 at Edinburgh, the son of a career Royal Navy officer, Edward Coverley Kennedy, and his wife, Rosalind Grant, daughter of Sir Ludovic Grant, 11th Baronet. His mother Rosalind was a cousin of the Conservative politician Robert Boothby and he had two younger sisters, Morar and Katherine. Morar married the playwright Royce Ryton in 1954, Katherine married Major Ion Calvocoressi in 1947. He was schooled at Eton College, and studied for a year at Christ Church, Oxford, until the outbreak of war. Kennedys father, by then a 60-year-old retired captain, returned to the navy and was given command of HMS Rawalpindi, the Rawalpindi was able to signal the German ships location back to base. Despite being hopelessly outgunned, Captain Edward Coverley Kennedy of the Rawalpindi decided to fight and his son Ludovic was twenty years old. Ludovic Kennedy followed his father into the navy, he served as an officer on destroyers, Kennedy later wrote about this in Pursuit, his chronicle of the chase and sinking of the Bismarck. Having studied for one year at Christ Church, Oxford, before the war, at Oxford he helped found the Writers Club and then sought a means of support while he completed a book on Nelsons captains. After leaving Oxford he began a career as an investigative journalist, a campaigning, investigative reporter, Kennedy wrote for a number of publications, including Newsweek. From 1953, he edited and introduced the First Reading radio series on the BBC Third Programme, presenting young writers such as Kingsley Amis, later he became a television journalist and a newsreader on ITVs Independent Television News alongside Robin Day and Chris Chataway. He presented the BBCs flagship current affairs programme Panorama for several years, Kennedy was interested in miscarriages of justice, and he wrote and broadcast on numerous cases. A major interest of Kennedys was naval warfare, other subjects included the U-Boat war, the story of HMS Belfast, and the raids on Dieppe and St. Nazaire. The Life and Death of the Scharnhorst brought him contact with survivors of the battlecruiser that had sunk his fathers ship HMS Rawalpindi. The series climaxed with the acclaimed Target Tirpitz, a history of the attempts to sink the feared German battleship. Two of these led to subsequent books. In 1980 he presented an episode of the BBC television series Great Railway Journeys of the World, from 1980 to 1988 he presented the television review programme Did You See. He interviewed Peter Cooks character Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling in A Life in Pieces in 1990 and he appeared as himself in several episodes on the political comedy series Yes Minister. Kennedy was the subject of an episode of That Reminds Me, private Eye magazine sometimes referred to him as Ludicrous Kennedy
26.
Philip Larkin
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Philip Arthur Larkin CH CBE FRSL was an English poet, novelist and librarian. His many honours include the Queens Gold Medal for Poetry and he was offered, but declined, the position of Poet Laureate in 1984, following the death of Sir John Betjeman. After graduating from Oxford in 1943 with a first in English language and literature and it was during the thirty years he worked with distinction as university librarian at the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull that he produced the greater part of his published work. Eric Homberger called him the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket—Larkin himself said that deprivation for him was what daffodils were for Wordsworth, influenced by W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, and Thomas Hardy, his poems are highly structured, Larkins public persona was that of the no-nonsense, solitary Englishman who disliked fame and had no patience for the trappings of the public literary life. On 2 December 2016, the 31st anniversary of his death, a floor stone memorial for Larkin was unveiled at Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey. Philip Larkin was born on 9 August 1922 at 2, Poultney Road, Radford, Coventry, the son and younger child of Sydney Larkin, who came from Lichfield. His sister Catherine, known as Kitty, was 10 years older than he was and he introduced his son to the works of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and above all D. H. Lawrence. His mother was a nervous and passive woman, a kind of defective mechanism. Her ideal is to collapse and to be taken care of, although home life was relatively cold, Larkin enjoyed support from his parents. For example, his passion for jazz was supported by the purchase of a drum kit. From the junior school he progressed to King Henry VIII Senior School and he fared quite poorly when he sat his School Certificate exam at the age of 16. Despite his results, he was allowed to stay on at school, two later he earned distinctions in English and History, and passed the entrance exams for St Johns College, Oxford. Larkin began at Oxford University in October 1940, a year after the outbreak of Second World War, the old upper class traditions of university life had, at least for the time being, faded, and most of the male students were studying for highly truncated degrees. Due to his eyesight, Larkin failed his military medical examination and was able to study for the usual three years. Through his tutorial partner, Norman Iles, he met Kingsley Amis, who encouraged his taste for ridicule and irreverence, Amis, Larkin and other university friends formed a group they dubbed The Seven, meeting to discuss each others poetry, listen to jazz, and drink enthusiastically. During this time he had his first real social interaction with the opposite sex, in 1943 he sat his finals, and, having dedicated much of his time to his own writing, was greatly surprised at being awarded a first-class honours degree. In 1943 Larkin was appointed librarian of the library in Wellington. It was while working there that in early 1944 he met his first girlfriend, Ruth Bowman, in 1945, Ruth went to continue her studies at Kings College London, during one of his visits their friendship developed into a sexual relationship
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Kingsley Amis
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Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, according to his biographer, Zachary Leader, Amis was the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century. He is the father of British novelist Martin Amis, in 2008, The Times ranked Kingsley Amis thirteenth on their list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Kingsley Amis was born in Clapham, south London, the son of William Robert Amis and he was raised in Norbury – in his later estimation not really a place, its an expression on a map really I should say I came from Norbury station. He was educated at the City of London School on a scholarship, after his first year, and in April 1941 was admitted to St. Johns College, Oxford, also on a scholarship, where he read English. It was there that he met Philip Larkin, with whom he formed the most important friendship of his life, while at Oxford, in June 1941, Amis joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. After only a year, in July 1942, he was called up for national service, after serving in the Royal Corps of Signals in the Second World War, Amis returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree. Although he worked hard and earned in 1947 a first in English, in 1946 he met Hilary Bardwell, they married in 1948 after she became pregnant with their first child, Philip. Amis initially arranged for her to have an abortion, but changed his mind. He became a lecturer in English at the University of Wales, Two other children followed, Martin in August 1949 and Sally in January 1954. Days after Sallys birth, Amiss first novel Lucky Jim was published to acclaim, critics saw it as having caught the flavour of Britain in the 1950s. The novel won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction and Amis was associated with the writers labelled the Angry Young Men. Lucky Jim was one of the first British campus novels, setting a precedent for later generations of such as Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Tom Sharpe. As a poet, Amis was associated with The Movement, on returning to Britain, he fell into a rut, and he began looking for another post, after thirteen years at Swansea, Amis became a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He regretted the move within a year, finding Cambridge an academic and social disappointment and resigned in 1963, intent on moving to Majorca, in 1963, Hilary discovered Amiss love affair with novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Hilary and Amis separated in August, and he went to live with Howard and he divorced Hilary in 1965 and married Howard the same year. In 1968 he moved with Howard to Lemmons, a house in Barnet and she and Amis divorced in 1983. In his last years, Amis shared a house with his first wife Hilary and her husband, Alastair Boyd
28.
David Jones (artist-poet)
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Walter David Jones CH, CBE was both a painter and one of the first-generation British modernist poets. As a painter he worked chiefly in watercolour, painting portraits and animal, landscape, legendary and he was also a wood-engraver and designer of inscriptions. As a writer he was considered by T. S. Eliot to be of major importance, help in forming his work came from his Christian beliefs and Welsh heritage. Jones was born on 1 November 1895 in Arabin Road, Brockley, Kent, now a suburb of South East London, and later lived in nearby Howson Road. James Jones had moved to London to work as an overseer for the Christian Herald Press, and it was here that he had met his wife, Alice. They had three children, Harold, Alice, and David, Jones exhibited artistic promise at an early age, even entering his drawings into exhibitions of childrens artwork. He wrote that from the age of six he knew that he would devote his life to art, in 1909, at fourteen, he persuaded his parents to allow him to abandon traditional education for art school and entered the Camberwell Art School. Hartrick, who had worked with Van Gogh and Gauguin, Reginald Savage and Herbert Cole, at Camberwell it was mandatory to study English Literature, and in addition to his art studies Jones also developed his knowledge of literature. With the outbreak of the First World War, Jones enlisted with the Royal Welch Fusiliers and he served longer at the front than any other British war writer. His experiences in the trenches were to prove important in his painting and poetry. The consequences of long period in the trenches on Joness health were slow to emerge. The school was close to Westminster Cathedral, which Jones often visited to participate in Mass, in 1921 he became a Roman Catholic and in 1922 he joined Eric Gills Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic at Ditchling, Sussex, but not as a guild member. There Desmond Chute taught him to engrave in wood, in 1923 he first worked as an illustrator, for The Game published by Gill and H. Pepler. In 1927 Jones returned to live full-time with his parents at Brockley and he was painting prolifically during this period, and exhibited seascapes and drawings of Wales at the St Georges gallery. He also joined the Society of Wood Engravers, the following year he visited Salies-de-Béarn, in France with the Gills. In 1929 he exhibited at the Goupil gallery, including landscapes of France. This prevented him from painting for several years, and delayed publication of In Parenthesis, Joness works were shown at Chicago in 1933, the Venice Biennale in 1934 and the Worlds Fair, New York, in 1939. In 1937 Faber published, In Parenthesis, the poem based on his first seven months in the trenches
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P. H. Newby
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Percy Howard Newby CBE was an English novelist and broadcasting administrator. He was the first winner of the Booker Prize, his novel Something to Answer For having received the award in 1969. Newby, known as Howard Newby, was born in Crowborough, Sussex on 25 June 1918 and was educated at Hanley Castle Grammar School in Worcestershire, in October 1939 he was sent to France to serve in World War II as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps. His unit was one of the last to be evacuated, afterwards he was sent to the Middle East and served in the Egyptian desert. Newby was released from service in December 1942, and then taught English Literature at King Fouad University in Cairo until 1946. One of his students was the Egyptian editor Mursi Saad El-Din, while at Radio 3, Newby is credited with increasing the amount of Classical music on the station without the need for controversial changes to schedules. His first novel, A Journey into the Interior, was published in 1946 and he then returned to England to write. In the same year he was given an Atlantic Award in literature, in 1947, John Lehmann published Newbys boys adventure story The Spirit of Jem with 41 line drawings and a colour dust wrap by Keith Vaughan. He was awarded a CBE for his work as Managing Director of BBC Radio, author, friend and colleague Anthony Thwaite in his obituary states, P. H. Newby was one of the best English novelists of the second half of the century. H
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Radio drama
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Radio drama is a dramatized, purely acoustic performance, broadcast on radio. Radio drama achieved widespread popularity within a decade of its development in the 1920s. By the 1940s, it was an international popular entertainment. With the advent of television in the 1950s, however, radio drama lost some of its popularity, however, recordings of OTR survive today in the audio archives of collectors and museums, as well as several online sites such as Internet Archive. As of 2011, radio drama has a presence on terrestrial radio in the United States. Much of American radio drama is restricted to rebroadcasts or podcasts of programs from previous decades, however, other nations still have thriving traditions of radio drama. In the United Kingdom, for example, the BBC produces and broadcasts hundreds of new plays each year on Radio 3, Radio 4. Like the USA, Australia ABC has abandoned broadcasting drama but New Zealand RNZ continues to promote, podcasting has also offered the means of creating new radio dramas, in addition to the distribution of vintage programs. Thanks to advances in recording and Internet distribution, radio drama was experiencing a revival in 2010. The terms audio drama or audio theatre are used synonymously with radio drama, however. Audio drama can also be found on CDs, cassette tapes, Radio drama traces its roots back to the 1880s, In 1881 French engineer Clement Ader had filed a patent for ‘improvements of Telephone Equipment in Theatres’. English-language radio drama seems to have started in the United States, a Rural Line on Education, a brief sketch specifically written for radio, aired on Pittsburghs KDKA in 1921, according to historian Bill Jaker. Newspaper accounts of the era report on a number of other experiments by Americas commercial radio stations. In February 1922, entire Broadway musical comedies with the original aired from WJZs Newark studios. Actors Grace George and Herbert Hayes performed a play from a San Francisco station in the summer of 1922. Aware of this series, the director of Cincinnatis WLW began regularly broadcasting one-acts in November, the success of these projects led to imitators at other stations. By the spring of 1923, original pieces written specially for radio were airing on stations in Cincinnati, Philadelphia. That same year, WLW and WGY sponsored scripting contests, inviting listeners to create original plays to be performed by those stations dramatic troupes
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International Standard Book Number
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The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
