David Garnett
David Garnett was a British writer and publisher. As a child, he had a cloak made of rabbit skin and thus received the nickname "Bunny", by which he was known to friends and intimates all his life. Garnett was born in Brighton, East Sussex, the only child of writer and publisher Edward Garnett and his wife Constance Clara Black, a translator of Russian. Through his father, he was descended from a writer and a philologist who both worked at what is now the British Library within the British Museum. Bloomsbury and the life of letters were embedded in David; as a conscientious objector in the First World War, Garnett worked on fruit farms in Suffolk and Sussex with his lover Duncan Grant. A prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group, Garnett received literary recognition when his novel Lady into Fox, an allegorical fantasy, was awarded the 1922 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, he ran a bookshop near the British Museum with Francis Birrell during the 1920s. He founded the Nonesuch Press.
He wrote the novel Aspects of Love, on which the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical of the same name was based. His first wife was the illustrator Rachel "Ray" Marshall, sister of the translator and diarist Frances Partridge, he and Ray, whose woodcuts appear in some of Garnett's books, had two sons, the older of, Richard Garnett, the writer. Ray died young of breast cancer. Garnett was bisexual, as were several members of the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group, he had affairs with Francis Birrell and Duncan Grant. On 25 December 1918 he was present at the birth of Grant's daughter by Vanessa Bell, accepted by Vanessa's husband Clive Bell. Shortly afterwards he wrote to a friend: "I think of marrying it; when she is 20, I shall be 46 – will it be scandalous?" On 8 May 1942, when Angelica was in her early twenties, they did marry, to the horror of her parents. She did not find out until much that her husband had been a lover of her father; the Garnetts lived at Hilton Hall, near St Ives in Huntingdonshire, where David Garnett kept a herd of Jersey cows.
They had four daughters: in order, Amaryllis and the twins Nerissa and Frances. Amaryllis Virginia Garnett was an actress who had a small part in Harold Pinter's film adaptation of The Go-Between, she drowned in the Thames, aged 29. Henrietta Garnett married Lytton Burgo Partridge, her father's nephew by his first wife Ray, but was left a widow with a newborn infant when she was 18. Nerissa Garnett was an artist and photographer. Fanny Garnett moved to France. After his separation from Angelica, Garnett moved to France and lived in the grounds at the Château de Charry, Montcuq, in a house leased to him by the owners, Jo and Angela d'Urville. Garnett continued to write and lived there until his death in 1981. Liz Hodgkinson, "Poisoned Legacy of the Bloomsbury Group", Daily Mail, May 2012. Works by David Garnett at Project Gutenberg Works by or about David Garnett at Internet Archive Works by David Garnett at LibriVox
El Señor Presidente
El Señor Presidente is a 1946 novel written in Spanish by Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan writer and diplomat Miguel Ángel Asturias. A landmark text in Latin American literature, El Señor Presidente explores the nature of political dictatorship and its effects on society. Asturias makes early use of a literary technique now known as magic realism. One of the most notable works of the dictator novel genre, El Señor Presidente developed from an earlier Asturias short story, written to protest social injustice in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in the author's home town. Although El Señor Presidente does not explicitly identify its setting as early twentieth-century Guatemala, the novel's title character was inspired by the 1898–1920 presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera. Asturias began writing the novel in the 1920s and finished it in 1933, but the strict censorship policies of Guatemalan dictatorial governments delayed its publication for thirteen years; the character of the President appears in the story but Asturias creates a number of other characters to show the terrible effects of living under a dictatorship.
His use of dream imagery, onomatopoeia and repetition of particular phrases, combined with a discontinuous structure, which consists of abrupt changes of style and viewpoint, springs from surrealist and ultraist influences. The style of El Señor Presidente influenced a generation of Latin American authors; the themes of Asturias's novel, such as the inability to tell reality apart from dreams, the power of the written word in the hands of authorities, the alienation produced by tyranny, center around the experience of living under a dictatorship. On its eventual publication in Mexico in 1946, El Señor Presidente met with critical acclaim. In 1967, Asturias received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his entire body of work; this international acknowledgment was celebrated throughout Latin America, where it was seen as a recognition of the region's literature as a whole. Since El Señor Presidente has been adapted for the screen and theater. In a 1970 interview, the German critic Gunter W. Lorenz asked Miguel Ángel Asturias why he began to write and the novelist replied: Yes, at 10:25 pm on the 25th of December in 1917, an earthquake destroyed my city.
I saw. I had been placed in a hole, in a cave or someplace else, it was that I wrote my first poem, a song of farewell to Guatemala. I was angered by the circumstances during which the rubble was cleared away and by the social injustice that became so bloodily apparent; this experience, at the age of 18, led Asturias to write "Los mendigos políticos", an unpublished short story that would develop into his first novel, El Señor Presidente. Asturias began writing El Señor Presidente in 1922, he moved to Paris in 1923. While living in France, he continued to work on the book and associated with members of the Surrealist movement as well as fellow future Latin American writers such as Arturo Uslar Pietri and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier; the novel was completed in 1933, shortly before Asturias returned to Guatemala. Though El Señor Presidente was written in France and is set in an unnamed Latin American country, governed by an unnamed President in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, there is still plenty of support linking the novel to the Manuel Estrada Cabrera era in Guatemala.
For example, as critic Jack Himelblau explains, "Asturias wrote his novel with his compatriots in mind, undoubtedly, had lived through the tyranny of Estrada Cabrera from 1898 to 1920." Estrada Cabrera was notorious for his brutal repression of dissent in Guatemala, Asturias had been involved in protests against his rule in 1920. Asturias integrated and reworked incidents from Estrada Cabrera's dictatorship into the novel, such as the torture of a political adversary, tricked "into believing that his innocent wife had been unfaithful to him". Estrada Cabrera was forced out of office as a result of popular disturbances and the intervention of U. S. and other foreign diplomats. Rather than go into exile, the ex-president opted to defend himself against criminal charges. In the ensuing trial, Asturias served as a legal secretary and so, as Gregory Rabassa's biographical sketch points out, he had the opportunity to base his own fictional leader—the President—on his observations of the disgraced Guatemalan dictator.
As Asturias himself put it: I saw him every day in the prison. And I found. To the extent that while he was a prisoner people would say: "No, that can't be Estrada Cabrera; the real Estrada Cabrera escaped. This is some poor old man that they've locked up in here." El Señor Presidente was not published until years. Asturias claims that Jorge Ubico y Castañeda, the dictator of Guatemala from 1931 to 1944, "prohibited its publication because his predecessor, Estrada Cabrera, was my Señor Presidente which meant that the book posed a danger to him as well". Additionally, because Ubico was Guatemala's dictator while the novel was being finished, critics have linked him with the characterization of the President in El Señor Presidente; as Himelblau notes, elements of the book "could have been interpreted as reflecting General Ubico's dictatorship". The novel first saw the light of day in Mexico, in 1946, at a time when Juan José Arévalo was serving as Guatemala's first democratically elected president.
Despite the manifest influence of Asturias's experiences
World War II
World War II known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries; the major participants threw their entire economic and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China, it included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, the only use of nuclear weapons in war. Japan, which aimed to dominate Asia and the Pacific, was at war with China by 1937, though neither side had declared war on the other. World War II is said to have begun on 1 September 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France and the United Kingdom.
From late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Finland and the Baltic states. Following the onset of campaigns in North Africa and East Africa, the fall of France in mid 1940, the war continued between the European Axis powers and the British Empire. War in the Balkans, the aerial Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the long Battle of the Atlantic followed. On 22 June 1941, the European Axis powers launched an invasion of the Soviet Union, opening the largest land theatre of war in history; this Eastern Front trapped most crucially the German Wehrmacht, into a war of attrition. In December 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the United States as well as European colonies in the Pacific. Following an immediate U. S. declaration of war against Japan, supported by one from Great Britain, the European Axis powers declared war on the U.
S. in solidarity with their Japanese ally. Rapid Japanese conquests over much of the Western Pacific ensued, perceived by many in Asia as liberation from Western dominance and resulting in the support of several armies from defeated territories; the Axis advance in the Pacific halted in 1942. Key setbacks in 1943, which included a series of German defeats on the Eastern Front, the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy, Allied victories in the Pacific, cost the Axis its initiative and forced it into strategic retreat on all fronts. In 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained its territorial losses and turned toward Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in Central China, South China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy and captured key Western Pacific islands; the war in Europe concluded with an invasion of Germany by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, culminating in the capture of Berlin by Soviet troops, the suicide of Adolf Hitler and the German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945.
Following the Potsdam Declaration by the Allies on 26 July 1945 and the refusal of Japan to surrender under its terms, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August respectively. With an invasion of the Japanese archipelago imminent, the possibility of additional atomic bombings, the Soviet entry into the war against Japan and its invasion of Manchuria, Japan announced its intention to surrender on 15 August 1945, cementing total victory in Asia for the Allies. Tribunals were set up by fiat by the Allies and war crimes trials were conducted in the wake of the war both against the Germans and the Japanese. World War II changed the political social structure of the globe; the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The Soviet Union and United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the nearly half-century long Cold War. In the wake of European devastation, the influence of its great powers waned, triggering the decolonisation of Africa and Asia.
Most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic expansion. Political integration in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities and create a common identity; the start of the war in Europe is held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred and the two wars merged in 1941; this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935; the British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the fo
Paul Levy (journalist)
Paul Levy is a US/British author and journalist. He lives with his wife, Penelope Marcus, children in Oxfordshire and London, UK. With Ann Barr, he coined the word "foodie", he has won many British and American food writing and journalism prizes, including two commendations in the national British Press Awards, in 1985 and 1987. Levy attended Lafayette High School, Lexington, KY. Levy was Wine editor for The Observer in the 1980s, he was subsequently arts correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, where he reported to Raymond Sokolov, Wall Street Journal Europe. He blogs on culture at ArtsJournal.com/plainenglish, contributes food-related pieces to Travel + Leisure, obituaries to the Independent. He is co-literary executor with Michael Holroyd of Lytton Strachey's estate, trustee of the Strachey Trust, Jane Grigson Trust, co-chair with Claudia Roden of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. Lytton Strachey: The Really Interesting Question, 1972 Moore: G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles, 1979 The Shorter Strachey, 1980 The Official Foodie Handbook, 1984 Out to Lunch, 1986 Finger-Lickin' Good: A Kentucky childhood, 1990 The Feast of Christmas, 1992.
Writer and presenter of 5-part Channel Four network/ABC /CBC TV series with same title The Penguin Book of Food and Drink, 1996 Eminent Victorians, The Definitive Edition, 2002 The Letters of Lytton Strachey, 2005 PaulLevy.com Paul Levy interview with Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire Oxfordsymposium.org JaneGrigsonTrust.org
Bedford Square
Bedford Square is a garden square in the Bloomsbury district of the Borough of Camden in London, England. Built between 1775 and 1783 as an upper middle class residential area, the square has had many distinguished residents, including Lord Eldon, one of Britain's longest serving and most celebrated Lord Chancellors, who lived in the largest house in the square for many years; the square takes its name from the main title of the Russell family, the Dukes of Bedford, who owned much of the land in what is now Bloomsbury. The architect Thomas Leverton is known to have designed some of the houses, although he may not have been responsible for all of them. Bedford Square is one of the best preserved set pieces of Georgian architecture in London, but most of the houses have now been converted into offices. Numbers 1-10, 11, 12 -- 27, 28 -- 38 and 40 -- 54 are grade; the central garden remains private, but is opened to the public as part of the Open Garden Squares Weekend. The square is Grade II* listed on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.
Bedford College, the first place for female higher education in Britain, was located in Bedford Square. No. 1: Sir Lyonel Lyde Bt. first occupier of the building for ten years until his death in 1791 No. 4: Paul Weidlinger – structural engineer No. 6: Lord Eldon — Lord Chancellor No. 8: Frederick Warne & Norman Warne — publishers, of Frederick Warne & Co. who published the Beatrix Potter books No. 10: Samuel Lyde Charles Gilpin — MP No. 11: John Scarlett Davis - artist.
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