1.
William Wordsworth
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William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworths magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, before which it was known as the poem to Coleridge. Wordsworth was Britains Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death from pleurisy on 23 April 1850 and his sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptised together. Wordsworths father was a representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his connections. He was frequently away from home on business, so the young William and his siblings had little involvement with him and remained distant from him until his death in 1783. However, he did encourage William in his reading, and in particular set him to commit to memory large portions of verse, including works by Milton, Shakespeare, William was also allowed to use his fathers library. William also spent time at his mothers house in Penrith, Cumberland, where he was exposed to the moors, but did not get along with his grandparents or his uncle. His hostile interactions with them distressed him to the point of contemplating suicide, Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else. It was at the school in Penrith that he met the Hutchinsons, including Mary, after the death of his mother, in 1778, Wordsworths father sent him to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire and sent Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire. She and William did not meet again for nine years. Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine and that same year he began attending St Johns College, Cambridge. He received his BA degree in 1791 and he returned to Hawkshead for the first two summers of his time at Cambridge, and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape. In 1790 he went on a tour of Europe, during which he toured the Alps extensively, and visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland. In November 1791, Wordsworth visited Revolutionary France and became enchanted with the Republican movement and he fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon, who in 1792 gave birth to their daughter Caroline. Financial problems and Britains tense relations with France forced him to return to England alone the following year. The circumstances of his return and his subsequent behaviour raised doubts as to his wish to marry Annette. With the Peace of Amiens again allowing travel to France, in 1802 Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy visited Annette, the purpose of the visit was to prepare Annette for the fact of his forthcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson
2.
William S. Burroughs
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William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer. Burroughs was a figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author whose influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories, five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians and he was also briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He was born into a family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence, but did not begin publicizing his writing until his thirties and he left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. With Brion Gysin, he popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy. In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, J. G. Burroughs had one child, William S. Burroughs, Jr. with his second wife Joan Vollmer. William Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering an attack in 1997. Burroughs was born in 1914, the younger of two born to Mortimer Perry Burroughs and Laura Hammon Lee. His was a prominent family of English ancestry in St. Louis and his grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which evolved into the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughss mother was the daughter of a minister whose family claimed to be related to Robert E. Lee and his maternal uncle, Ivy Lee, was an advertising pioneer later employed as a publicist for the Rockefellers. His father ran an antique and gift shop, Cobblestone Gardens, first in St. Louis, then in Palm Beach, as a boy, Burroughs lived on Pershing Ave. in St. Louiss Central West End. He attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis where his first published essay and he then attended the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, which was stressful for him. The school was a school for the wealthy, where the spindly sons of the rich could be transformed into manly specimens. Burroughs kept journals documenting an erotic attachment to another boy, according to his own account, he destroyed these later, ashamed of their content. He became a well-known homosexual writer after the publication of Naked Lunch in 1959, some say that he was expelled from Los Alamos after taking chloral hydrate in Santa Fe with a fellow student. Yet, according to his own account, he left voluntarily, Burroughs finished high school at Taylor School in Clayton, Missouri, and in 1932, left home to pursue an arts degree at Harvard University, where he was affiliated with Adams House
3.
John Keats
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John Keats was an English Romantic poet. He had a significant influence on a range of poets. Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keatss work was the most significant literary experience of his life, the poetry of Keats is characterised by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. This is typical of poets, as they aimed to accentuate extreme emotion through the emphasis of natural imagery. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular, John Keats was born in Moorgate, London, on 31 October 1795 to Thomas Keats and his wife, born Frances Jennings. There is no evidence of his exact birthplace. Although Keats and his family seem to have marked his birthday on 29 October and he was the eldest of four surviving children, his younger siblings were George, Thomas, and Frances Mary Fanny who eventually married Spanish author Valentín Llanos Gutiérrez. Another son was lost in infancy and his father first worked as a hostler at the stables attached to the Swan and Hoop Inn, an establishment he later managed, and where the growing family lived for some years. Keats believed that he was born at the inn, a birthplace of humble origins, the Globe pub now occupies the site, a few yards from the modern-day Moorgate station. He was baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, and sent to a dame school as a child. His parents were unable to afford Eton or Harrow, so in the summer of 1803, he was sent to board at John Clarkes school in Enfield, the small school had a liberal outlook and a progressive curriculum more modern than the larger, more prestigious schools. In the family atmosphere at Clarkes, Keats developed an interest in classics and history, the headmasters son, Charles Cowden Clarke, also became an important mentor and friend, introducing Keats to Renaissance literature, including Tasso, Spenser, and Chapmans translations. The young Keats was described by his friend Edward Holmes as a character, always in extremes, given to indolence. However, at 13 he began focusing his energy on reading and study, in April 1804, when Keats was eight, his father died. The cause of death was a fracture, suffered when he fell from his horse while returning from a visit to Keats. Frances remarried two months later, but left her new husband soon afterwards, and the four went to live with their grandmother, Alice Jennings. In March 1810 when Keats was 14, his mother died of tuberculosis and she appointed two guardians, Richard Abbey and John Sandell, to take care of them. That autumn, Keats left Clarkes school to apprentice with Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary who was a neighbour, Keats lodged in the attic above the surgery at 7 Church Street until 1813
4.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets, and is regarded by some as among the finest lyric, as well as most influential, poets in the English language. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not see fame during his lifetime, but recognition for his poetry grew steadily following his death. Shelley was a key member of a circle of visionary poets and writers that included Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, and his own second wife, Mary Shelley. Shelley is perhaps best known for such poems as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud. Shelleys close circle of friends included some of the most important progressive thinkers of the day, including his father-in-law, the philosopher William Godwin and Leigh Hunt. Though Shelleys poetry and prose output remained steady throughout his life, most publishers, Shelley became a lodestone to the subsequent three or four generations of poets, including important Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets such as Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He was admired by Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, yeats, Upton Sinclair and Isadora Duncan. Henry David Thoreaus civil disobedience was apparently influenced by Shelleys non-violence in protest, Shelleys popularity and influence has continued to grow in contemporary poetry circles. Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Place, Broadbridge Heath, near Horsham, West Sussex, England. He was the eldest legitimate son of Sir Timothy Shelley, a Whig Member of Parliament for Horsham from 1790–92 and he had four younger sisters and one much younger brother. He received his education at home, tutored by the Reverend Evan Edwards of nearby Warnham. His cousin and lifelong friend Thomas Medwin, who lived nearby and it was a happy and contented childhood spent largely in country pursuits such as fishing and hunting. In 1802, he entered the Syon House Academy of Brentford, in 1804, Shelley entered Eton College, where he fared poorly, and was subjected to an almost daily mob torment at around noon by older boys, who aptly called these incidents Shelley-baits. Surrounded, the young Shelley would have his books torn from his hands and his clothes pulled at and this daily misery could be attributed to Shelleys refusal to take part in fagging and his indifference towards games and other youthful activities. Because of these peculiarities he acquired the nickname Mad Shelley, Shelley possessed a keen interest in science at Eton, which he would often apply to cause a surprising amount of mischief for a boy considered to be so sensible. Shelley would often use an electric machine to charge the door handle of his room. His friends were particularly amused when his tutor, Mr Bethell, in attempting to enter his room, was alarmed at the noise of the electric shocks. His mischievous side was again demonstrated by his last bit of naughtiness at school, despite these jocular incidents, a contemporary of Shelley, W. H. Merie, recalled that Shelley made no friends at Eton, although he did seek a kindred spirit without success
5.
John Clare
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John Clare was an English poet, the son of a farm labourer, who became known for his celebrations of the English countryside and sorrows at its disruption. His poetry underwent major re-evaluation in the late 20th century, he is now seen as one of the major 19th-century poets. His biographer Jonathan Bate states that Clare was the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced, no one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self. Clare was born in Helpston, six miles to the north of the city of Peterborough, in his lifetime, the village was in the Soke of Peterborough in Northamptonshire and his memorial calls him The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet. Helpston now lies in the Peterborough unitary authority of Cambridgeshire and he became an agricultural labourer while still a child, however, he attended school in Glinton church until he was 12. In his early years, Clare became a potboy in the Blue Bell public house and fell in love with Mary Joyce, but her father. Subsequently, he was a gardener at Burghley House and he enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with Gypsies, and worked in Pickworth as a lime burner in 1817. In the following year he was obliged to accept parish relief, malnutrition stemming from childhood may be the main culprit behind his 5-foot stature and may have contributed to his poor physical health in later life. Clare had bought a copy of James Thomsons The Seasons and began to write poems, in an attempt to hold off his parents eviction from their home, Clare offered his poems to a local bookseller named Edward Drury. Drury sent Clares poetry to his cousin John Taylor of the firm of Taylor & Hessey. Taylor published Clares Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820 and this book was highly praised, and in the next year his Village Minstrel and other Poems was published. Soon, however, his income insufficient, and in 1823 he was nearly penniless. The Shepherds Calendar met with success, which was not increased by his hawking it himself. As he worked again in the fields his health temporarily improved, earl FitzWilliam presented him with a new cottage and a piece of ground, but Clare could not settle in his new home. Clare was constantly torn between the two worlds of literary London and his often illiterate neighbours, between the need to write poetry and the need for money to feed and clothe his children. His health began to suffer, and he had bouts of severe depression, in 1832, his friends and his London patrons clubbed together to move the family to a larger cottage with a smallholding in the village of Northborough, not far from Helpston. However, he felt only more alienated and his last work, the Rural Muse, was noticed favourably by Christopher North and other reviewers, but this was not enough to support his wife and seven children. Clares mental health began to worsen, as his alcohol consumption steadily increased along with his dissatisfaction with his own identity, Clares behaviour became more erratic
6.
Thomas De Quincey
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Thomas Penson De Quincey was an English essayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Many scholars suggest that in publishing this work De Quincey inaugurated the tradition of literature in the West. De Quincey was born at 86 Cross Street, Manchester, Lancashire and his father was a successful merchant with an interest in literature who died when he was quite young. Soon after his birth the family went to The Farm and then later to Greenheys, in 1796, three years after the death of his father, Thomas Quincey, his mother – the erstwhile Elizabeth Penson – took the name De Quincey. In the same year, De Quinceys mother moved to Bath, Somerset, De Quincey was a weak and sickly child. His youth was spent in solitude, and when his brother, William, came home. De Quinceys mother was a woman of character and intelligence. It is purported that at time, in 1799, De Quincey first read Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth. In 1800, De Quincey, aged fifteen, was ready for the University of Oxford and that boy, his master at Bath had said, could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one. He was sent to Manchester Grammar School, in order that after three years stay he might obtain a scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, but he took flight after nineteen months. His first plan had been to reach William Wordsworth, whose Lyrical Ballads had consoled him in fits of depression and had awakened in him a reverence for the poet. From July to November 1802, De Quincey lived as a wayfarer and he soon lost his guinea by ceasing to keep his family informed of his whereabouts, and had difficulty making ends meet. Still, apparently fearing pursuit, he borrowed money and travelled to London. Having failed, he lived close to starvation rather than return to his family, discovered by chance by his friends, De Quincey was brought home and finally allowed to go to Worcester College, Oxford, on a reduced income. Here, we are told, he came to be looked upon as a strange being who associated with no one, in 1804, while at Oxford, he began the occasional use of opium. He completed his studies, but failed to take the oral examination leading to a degree and he became an acquaintance of Coleridge and Wordsworth, having already sought out Charles Lamb in London. His acquaintance with Wordsworth led to his settling in 1809 at Grasmere and he lived for ten years in Dove Cottage, which Wordsworth had occupied and which is now a popular tourist attraction, and for another five years at Fox Ghyll near Rydal. De Quincey was married in 1816, and soon after, having no money left and his wife Margaret bore him eight children before her death in 1837
7.
William Hazlitt
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William Hazlitt was an English writer, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher. He is now considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and he is also acknowledged as the finest art critic of his age. Despite his high standing among historians of literature and art, his work is little read. The family of Hazlitts father were Irish Protestants who moved from the county of Antrim to Tipperary in the early 18th century, also named William Hazlitt, Hazlitts father attended the University of Glasgow, receiving a masters degree in 1760. Not entirely satisfied with his Presbyterian faith, he became a Unitarian minister in England, in 1764 he became pastor at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, where in 1766 he married Grace Loftus, daughter of a recently deceased ironmonger. Of their many children, only three survived infancy, the first of these, John, was born in 1767 at Marshfield in Gloucestershire, where the Reverend William Hazlitt had accepted a new pastorate after his marriage. In 1770, the elder Hazlitt accepted yet another position and moved with his family to Maidstone, Kent, William, the youngest of the surviving Hazlitt children, was born in Mitre Lane, Maidstone, in 1778. In 1780, when he was two, his family began a lifestyle that was to last several years. His efforts to obtain a post did not meet with success, in 1786–87 the family returned to England and settled in Wem, in Shropshire. Hazlitt would remember little of his years in America, save the taste of barberries, Hazlitt was educated at home and at a local school. In 1793 his father sent him to a Unitarian seminary on what was then the outskirts of London, the schooling he received there, though relatively brief, approximately two years, made a deep and abiding impression on Hazlitt. The curriculum at Hackney was very broad, including a grounding in the Greek and Latin classics, mathematics, history, government, science, priestley, whom Hazlitt had read and who was also one of his teachers, was an impassioned commentator on political issues of the day. This, along with the turmoil in the wake of the French Revolution, sparked in Hazlitt and his classmates lively debates on these issues, changes were taking place within the young Hazlitt as well. While, out of respect for his father, Hazlitt never openly broke with his religion, he suffered a loss of faith, although Hazlitt rejected the Unitarian theology, his time at Hackney left him with much more than religious scepticism. He had read widely and formed habits of independent thought and respect for the truth that would remain with him for life. The belief of many Unitarian thinkers in the natural disinterestedness of the mind had also laid a foundation for the young Hazlitts own philosophical explorations along those lines. I cannot sit quietly down under the claims of barefaced power, in September 1794, he had met William Godwin, the reformist thinker whose recently published Political Justice had taken English intellectual circles by storm. Hazlitt was never to feel entirely in sympathy with Godwins philosophy, from this point onwards, Hazlitts goal was to become a philosopher
8.
William Ernest Henley
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He is remembered most often for his 1875 poem Invictus, a piece which recurs in popular awareness. William Ernest Henley was born in Gloucester, England on August 23,1849, to mother, Mary Morgan, a descendent of poet and critic Joseph Warton, and father, William, a bookseller and stationer. William Ernest was the oldest of six children, five sons and a daughter, his father died in 1868, Henley was a pupil at the The Crypt School, Gloucester between 1861 and 1867. A commission had recently attempted to revive the school by securing as headmaster the brilliant, though Browns tenure was relatively brief, he was a revelation to Henley because the poet was a man of genius — the first Id ever seen. From the age of 12, Henley suffered from tuberculosis of the bone that resulted in the amputation of his leg below the knee in 1868–69. According to Robert Louis Stevensons letters, the idea for the character of Long John Silver was inspired by Stevensons real-life friend Henley, Stevensons stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, described Henley as. In a letter to Henley after the publication of Treasure Island, Stevenson wrote, I will now make a confession, It was the sight of your maimed strength, the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you. Frequent illness often kept him from school, although the misfortunes of his fathers business may also have contributed, in 1867, Henley passed the Oxford Local Schools Examination. As an editor of a series of magazines and journals, Henley. As Andrzej Diniejko notes, Henley and the Henley Regatta promoted realism and opposed Decadence through their own works and he published in the journals he edited. Henley published many tens of poems in several volumes and editions, soon after passing the examination, Henley moved to London and attempted to establish himself as a journalist. His work over the eight years was interrupted by long stays in the hospital. Henley spent three years in hospital, during which he wrote and published the poems collected as In Hospital, although Listers treatment had not effected a complete cure, Henley enjoyed a relatively active life for nearly thirty years after his discharge. After his recovery, Henley began by earning his living as a journalist, in addition to his inviting its articles and editing all content, Henley anonymously contributed tens of poems to the journal, some of which have been termed brilliant. In 1889 Henley became editor of the Scots Observer, an Edinburgh journal of the arts, after its headquarters were transferred to London in 1891, it became the National Observer and remained under Henleys editorship until 1893. The paper had almost as many writers as readers, said Henley, and its fame was confined mainly to the literary class, Henley had an editors gift for identifying new talent, and the men of the Scots Observer, said Henley affectionately, usually justified his support. Charles Whibley was Henleys friend and helped him edit the Ana Siken, the journals outlook was conservative and often sympathetic to the growing imperialism of its time. Among other services to literature it published Rudyard Kiplings Barrack-Room Ballads, Henley married Hannah Johnson Boyle on 22 January 1878
9.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer. His most famous works are Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a literary celebrity during his lifetime, Stevenson now ranks as the 26th most translated author in the world. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton, who said of him that he seemed to pick the word up on the point of his pen. Stevenson was born at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Scotland, on 13 November 1850, to Thomas Stevenson, a lighthouse engineer. He was christened Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, at about age 18, Stevenson was to change the spelling of Lewis to Louis, and in 1873, he dropped Balfour. Lighthouse design was the profession, Thomass father was the famous Robert Stevenson. Indeed, even Thomass maternal grandfather, Thomas Smith, had been in the same profession, however, Roberts mothers family were not of the same profession. Margarets natal family, the Balfours, were gentry, tracing their lineage back to a certain Alexander Balfour who had held the lands of Inchyra in Fife in the fifteenth century. Margarets father, Lewis Balfour, was a minister of the Church of Scotland at nearby Colinton, and her siblings included the physician George William Balfour, Stevenson spent the greater part of his boyhood holidays in his maternal grandfathers house. Now I often wonder, wrote Stevenson, what I inherited from this old minister, I must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them. Lewis Balfour and his daughter both had weak chests, so they often needed to stay in warmer climates for their health, Stevenson inherited a tendency to coughs and fevers, exacerbated when the family moved to a damp, chilly house at 1 Inverleith Terrace in 1851. The family moved again to the sunnier 17 Heriot Row when Stevenson was six years old, illness would be a recurrent feature of his adult life and left him extraordinarily thin. Contemporary views were that he had tuberculosis, but more recent views are that it was bronchiectasis or even sarcoidosis, Stevensons parents were both devout and serious Presbyterians, but the household was not strict in its adherence to Calvinist principles. His nurse, Alison Cunningham, was fervently religious. Her Calvinism and folk beliefs were a source of nightmares for the child. But she also cared for him tenderly in illness, reading to him from Bunyan, Stevenson recalled this time of sickness in The Land of Counterpane in A Childs Garden of Verses, dedicating the book to his nurse. In any case, his frequent illnesses often kept him away from his first school and he was a late reader, first learning at age seven or eight, but even before this he dictated stories to his mother and nurse. He compulsively wrote stories throughout his childhood and his father was proud of this interest, he had also written stories in his spare time until his own father found them and told him to give up such nonsense and mind your business
10.
Daily Mail
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The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust and published in London. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982, Scottish and Irish editions of the daily paper were launched in 1947 and 2006 respectively. A survey in 2014 found the age of its reader was 58. It had a daily circulation of 1,510,824 copies in November 2016. Its website has more than 100 million unique visitors per month, the Daily Mail has been accused of racism, and printing sensationalist and inaccurate scare stories of science and medical research. The Mail was originally a broadsheet but switched to a format on 3 May 1971. On this date it absorbed the Daily Sketch, which had been published as a tabloid by the same company. The publisher of the Mail, the Daily Mail and General Trust, is currently a FTSE250 company, the paper has a circulation of around two million, which is the fourth largest circulation of any English-language daily newspaper in the world. Circulation figures according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations in March 2014 show gross daily sales of 1,708,006 for the Daily Mail. According to a December 2004 survey, 53% of Daily Mail readers voted for the Conservative Party, compared to 21% for Labour, the main concern of Viscount Rothermere, the current chairman and main shareholder, is that the circulation be maintained. The Mail has been edited by Paul Dacre since 1992, the Daily Mail, devised by Alfred Harmsworth and his brother Harold, was first published on 4 May 1896. It cost a halfpenny at a time when other London dailies cost one penny, and was more populist in tone and more concise in its coverage than its rivals. The planned issue was 100,000 copies but the print run on the first day was 397,215, Lord Salisbury, 19th-century Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, dismissed the Daily Mail as a newspaper produced by office boys for office boys. By 1902, at the end of the Boer Wars, the circulation was over a million, from the beginning, the Mail also set out to entertain its readers with human interest stories, serials, features and competitions. In 1900 the Daily Mail began printing simultaneously in both Manchester and London, the first national newspaper to do so, the same production method was adopted in 1909 by the Daily Sketch, in 1927 by the Daily Express and eventually by virtually all the other national newspapers. Printing of the Scottish Daily Mail was switched from Edinburgh to the Deansgate plant in Manchester in 1968 and, for a while, in 1987, printing at Deansgate ended and the northern editions were thereafter printed at other Associated Newspapers plants. In 1906 the paper offered £1,000 for the first flight across the English Channel, punch magazine thought the idea preposterous and offered £10,000 for the first flight to Mars, but by 1910 both the Mails prizes had been won. Before the outbreak of World War I, the paper was accused of warmongering when it reported that Germany was planning to crush the British Empire
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.
Stephen Fry
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Stephen John Fry is an English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist. While at university, he involved with the Cambridge Footlights. As half of the double act Fry and Laurie, he co-wrote and co-starred in A Bit of Fry & Laurie and also took the role of Jeeves in Jeeves. He was also the long-time host of the BBC television quiz show QI and he has also filmed commercials, including an advertisement where he explains the essence of British culture to foreigners arriving at Londons Heathrow Airport. Fry was born in Hampstead, London, on 24 August 1957, the son of Marianne Eve Fry and Alan John Fry, a British physicist and inventor. The Fry family originates in Dorset, at Shillingstone and Blandford, in the early 1800s, Samuel Fry settled in Surrey, Frys mother is Jewish, but he was not brought up in a religious family. His maternal grandparents, Martin and Rosa Neumann, were Hungarian Jews, rosas parents, who originally lived in Vienna, Austria, were sent to a concentration camp in Riga, Latvia, where they were murdered. His mothers aunt and cousins were sent to Auschwitz and Stutthof, Frys father is English, and his paternal grandmother had roots in Kent and Cheshire. Fry grew up in the village of Booton near Reepham, Norfolk, having moved from Chesham, Buckinghamshire and he has an elder brother, Roger, and a younger sister, Joanna. He was expelled from Uppingham when he was 15 and subsequently from the Paston School, at 17, after leaving Norfolk College of Arts and Technology, Fry absconded with a credit card stolen from a family friend. He had taken a coat when leaving a pub, planning to spend the night sleeping rough and he was arrested in Swindon, and, as a result, spent three months in Pucklechurch Prison on remand. While Fry was in Pucklechurch, his mother had cut out the crossword from every copy of The Times since he had been away, Fry later stated that these crosswords were the only thing that got him through the ordeal. Following his release, he resumed his education at City College Norwich and he scored well enough to gain a scholarship to Queens College, Cambridge. At Cambridge, Fry joined the Cambridge Footlights, appeared on University Challenge, Fry also met his future comedy collaborator Hugh Laurie at Cambridge and starred alongside him in the Footlights Club. Frys career in television began with the 1982 broadcasting of The Cellar Tapes, a second series, retitled Alfresco, was broadcast in 1983, and a third in 1984, it established Fry and Lauries reputation as a comedy double act. In 1983, the BBC offered Fry, Laurie and Thompson their own show, which became The Crystal Cube, undeterred, Fry and Laurie appeared in an episode of The Young Ones in 1984, and Fry also appeared in Ben Eltons 1985 Happy Families series. In 1986 and 1987 Fry and Laurie performed sketches on the LWT/Channel 4 show Saturday Live, forgiving Fry and Laurie for The Crystal Cube, the BBC commissioned, in 1986, a sketch show that was to become A Bit of Fry & Laurie. The programme ran for 26 episodes spanning four series between 1986 and 1995, and was very successful, in a 1988 television special, Blackadders Christmas Carol, he played the roles of Lord Melchett and Lord Frondo
