Edmund Evans
Edmund Evans was a prominent English wood-engraver and colour printer during the Victorian era. Evans specialized in full-colour printing, which, in part because of his work, became popular in the mid-19th century, he employed and collaborated with illustrators such as Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway and Richard Doyle to produce what are now considered to be classic children's books. Although little is known about his life, he wrote a short autobiography before his death in 1905 in which he described his life as a printer in Victorian London. After finishing an apprenticeship, Evans went into business for himself. By the early 1850s, he had established a reputation as a printer of covers for a type of cheap novels known as yellow-backs. In the early 1860s, he began to print children's toy books and picture books in association with the printing house Routledge and Warne, his intention was to produce books for children that were inexpensive. For three decades he produced multiple volumes each year, first illustrated by Crane, by Caldecott and Greenaway.
Evans used a woodblock printing technique known as chromoxylography, used for inexpensive serialised books and children's books requiring few colours, so as to maximize profits. However, chromoxylography allowed a variety of tones to be produced by mixing colours; the process was required intricate engraving to achieve the best results. Evans possessed a meticulous eye for detail and used a hand-press and as many as a dozen colour blocks for a single image, he went on to become the preeminent wood engraver and colour printer in Britain during the second half of the 19th century. Evans was born in London, on 23 February 1826, to Henry and Mary Evans, he attended school in Jamaica Row, where he wished he had learned Latin. As a 13-year-old he began work as a "reading boy" at the printing house of Samuel Bentley in London in 1839. However, he was reassigned as a general errand boy; the hours were long—from seven in the morning until nine or ten at night—but the printmaking process itself, the books produced by the establishment, fascinated Evans.
Bentley soon realized the boy was talented after seeing his early attempts at scratching illustrations on slate, arranged for Evans to begin an apprenticeship with wood-engraver Ebenezer Landells. Evans started with Landells in 1840, his duties included delivering proofs of drawings to be approved by artists such as Edward Dalziel, or authors such as Charles Dickens. A year Landells launched Punch magazine, as early as 1842 had Evans illustrate covers for the new publication. Evans became friends with Myles Birket Foster, John Greenaway and George Dalziel. Foster and Evans became lifelong friends; when Landells received a commission from the Illustrated London News to provide illustrations of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, he sent Evans and Foster to Balmoral to make sketches, which Evans engraved. Toward the end of his apprenticeship, the demands of the Illustrated London News caused Evans to work late into the night and return early in the morning; when his apprenticeship ended in 1847, Evans 21, refused an offer of employment from Landells, deciding instead to go into business for himself as a wood-engraver and colour printer.
In 1848 Evans engraved a title-page illustration, among other commissions, for the Illustrated London News. However, the Illustrated London News stopped employing him on the basis that his wood engraving was too fine for newspaper work, his final print for the Illustrated London News showed the four seasons, was illustrated by Foster. In fact Foster received his first commission from the publisher Ingram and Company to reproduce the four scenes in oil. In 1851, Ingram chose Evans to engrave three prints for Ida Pfeiffer's Travels in the Holy Land, he used three blocks for the work: the key-block, outlining the illustration, was printed in a dark-brown hue. For the same firm, Evans completed an order for a book-cover using bright reds and blues on white paper; that year he received the first commission to print a book, written by Fanny Fern and illustrated by Foster. Evans had enough business to apprentice his two younger brothers and Herbert, to buy a hand-press. Soon he moved his premises to Racquet Court, bought three more hand-presses.
In the early 1850s, Evans designed book-covers known as yellow-backs, a "book bound in yellow-glazed paper over boards". He became the printer of choice for many London publishers, he developed the yellow-back as he disliked the white paper book-covers that became soiled and discoloured. Yellow-backs were used for unsold editions, so that they functioned as reprints or waste. Other terms for the books were "Penny dreadfuls", "railway novels" and "mustard plaisters". For the illustrations, Evans commissioned artists such as George Cruikshank, Randolph Caldecott and Walter Crane. Evans' first cover was brightly coloured, utilising only reds and blues, overprinting blue over black to create what appeared as a black background, he continued the practice of using red and blue, engraving "in graduation" for lighter tints of reds used for faces and hands, engraving the blue blocks in a manner that created textures and patterns. Evans realised books that may have been unsuccessful in a first printing were easy to sell with well-designed
Monopoly
A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity. This contrasts with a monopsony which relates to a single entity's control of a market to purchase a good or service, with oligopoly which consists of a few sellers dominating a market. Monopolies are thus characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce the good or service, a lack of viable substitute goods, the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller's marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit; the verb monopolise or monopolize refers to the process by which a company gains the ability to raise prices or exclude competitors. In economics, a monopoly is a single seller. In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices. Although monopolies may be big businesses, size is not a characteristic of a monopoly. A small business may still have the power to raise prices in a small industry.
A monopoly is distinguished from a monopsony, in which there is only one buyer of a product or service. A monopoly should be distinguished from a cartel, in which several providers act together to coordinate services, prices or sale of goods. Monopolies and oligopolies are all situations in which one or a few entities have market power and therefore interact with their customers, or suppliers in ways that distort the market. Monopolies can be established by a government, form or form by integration. In many jurisdictions, competition laws restrict monopolies. Holding a dominant position or a monopoly in a market is not illegal in itself, however certain categories of behavior can be considered abusive and therefore incur legal sanctions when business is dominant. A government-granted monopoly or legal monopoly, by contrast, is sanctioned by the state to provide an incentive to invest in a risky venture or enrich a domestic interest group. Patents and trademarks are sometimes used as examples of government-granted monopolies.
The government may reserve the venture for itself, thus forming a government monopoly. Monopolies may be occurring due to limited competition because the industry is resource intensive and requires substantial costs to operate. In economics, the idea of monopoly is important in the study of management structures, which directly concerns normative aspects of economic competition, provides the basis for topics such as industrial organization and economics of regulation. There are four basic types of market structures in traditional economic analysis: perfect competition, monopolistic competition and monopoly. A monopoly is a structure in which a single supplier sells a given product. If there is a single seller in a certain market and there are no close substitutes for the product the market structure is that of a "pure monopoly". Sometimes, there are many sellers in an industry and/or there exist many close substitutes for the goods being produced, but companies retain some market power; this is termed monopolistic competition.
In general, the main results from this theory compare price-fixing methods across market structures, analyze the effect of a certain structure on welfare, vary technological/demand assumptions in order to assess the consequences for an abstract model of society. Most economic textbooks follow the practice of explaining the perfect competition model because this helps to understand "departures" from it; the boundaries of what constitutes a market and what does not are relevant distinctions to make in economic analysis. In a general equilibrium context, a good is a specific concept including geographical and time-related characteristics. Most studies of market structure relax a little their definition of a good, allowing for more flexibility in the identification of substitute goods. Profit Maximizer: Maximizes profits. Price Maker: Decides the price of the good or product to be sold, but does so by determining the quantity in order to demand the price desired by the firm. High Barriers: Other sellers are unable to enter the market of the monopoly.
Single seller: In a monopoly, there is one seller of the good, who produces all the output. Therefore, the whole market is being served by a single company, for practical purposes, the company is the same as the industry. Price Discrimination: A monopolist can change the price or quantity of the product, he or she sells higher quantities at a lower price in a elastic market, sells lower quantities at a higher price in a less elastic market. Monopolies derive their market power from barriers to entry – circumstances that prevent or impede a potential competitor's ability to compete in a market. There are three major types of barriers to entry: economic and deliberate. Economic barriers: Economic barriers include economies of scale, capital requirements, cost advantages and technological superiority. Economies of scale: Decreasing unit costs for larger volumes of production. Decreasing costs coupled with large initial costs, If for example the industry is large enough to support one company of minimum efficient scale other companies entering the industry will operate at a size, less than MES, so cannot produce at an average cost, competitive with the dominant company.
If long-term aver
George Eld
George Eld was a London printer of the Jacobean era, who produced important works of English Renaissance drama and literature, including key texts by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton. Eld was the son of a carpenter from Derbyshire, he served an eight-year apprenticeship to bookseller Robert Bolton, starting in 1592, became a "freeman" of the Stationers Company on 13 January 1600. He established himself in his own printing business in 1604, at the sign of the White Horse in Fleet Lane, by marrying the widow of not one but two master printers, his shop featured two or three presses, four compositors – a substantial operation for the time. Eld entered into a partnership with Miles Fletcher in 1617. In Eld's historical era, most stationers concentrated on either bookselling. Eld was a printer during his career, working on specific projects for specific booksellers. In his two-decade career, Eld printed a wide variety of works, he is the "G. E." who printed William Camden's Remains of a Greater Work for Simon Waterson, John Selden's The Duello for John Helme, Peter Gosselin's The State Mysteries of the Jesuits for Nicholas Bourne.
Eld worked for Thomas Thorpe. These included the first quartos of Jonson's Sejanus and The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Beauty, they issued John Marston's What You Will, George Chapman's All Fools and The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron. Thorpe and Eld were involved in two "dubious publishing enterprises" – one, a failed attempt to print a work to which they did not have the rights, the other, a successful such attempt of some work by Thomas Coryat. Thorpe and Eld's most significant project was the 1609 first edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets. In 1612, Thorpe and Eld issued a work of modern Shakespearean controversy, the Funeral Elegy that Donald Foster proposed as a work by Shakespeare, without convincing most scholars and critics. More Shakespeare: Eld printed the 1609 quarto of Troilus and Cressida, for Richard Bonian and Henry Walley; some critics have complained that the text in this volume is so poor that it should be classed as a "bad quarto. Eld has been identified as the printer of John Smethwick's third quarto of Hamlet.
Eld printed the 1609 second quarto of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus for John Wright. And for William Aspley, he printed one of the most controversial plays of Eastward Ho. Eld printed first editions of a range of other texts in Jacobean drama: Samuel Daniel's The Queen's Arcadia, for publisher Simon Waterson; the anonymous Return from Parnassus, for John Wright. The anonymous Caesar's Revenge for John Wright. Barnabe Barnes's The Devil's Charter, again for John Wright. Day and Wilkins's The Travels of the Three English Brothers, once again for Wright. Thomas Tomkis's Lingua, for Simon Waterson. Lording Barry's Ram Alley, for Robert Wilson. Chapman's Lincoln's Inn, for George Norton. Nathan Field's Amends for Ladies, for Matthew Walbancke. Like some printers of his generation – Richard Field is a good example – Eld published work on his own authority, he was active in drama here too: Eld printed and published both Q1 and Q2 of The Revenger's Tragedy. The play is now attributed to Middleton. Middleton's A Trick to Catch the Old One, again the first two quartos.
A printer who published had to arrange for a bookseller to sell the work in question. Yet when the third edition of A Trick appeared in 1616, Eld was no longer the publisher; the Puritan, one of the plays of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, was published by Eld in 1607. Another play now assigned to Middleton, Eld attributed it to "W. S." Eld published Northward Ho, by Thomas Dekker and John Webster, in 1607. Eld published beyond the confines of Jacobean drama as well, with works like John Healey's 1610 translation of The City of God by St. Augustine. In 1622 he issued a volume of satires by John Taylor the Water Poet called The Water Cormorant His Complaint, he published the types of religious books that were so common in his era, like Bishop Gervase Babington's Works, Containing Comfortable Notes on the Five Books of Moses. And Eld published and printed many now-obscure works by forgotten authors; the title page of his 1606 edition of Robert Pricket's Time's Anatomy bears the inscription "to be sold by John Hodgets" – another demonstration of the printer/publisher's need for a retail outlet for his products.
In 1607, Eld printed and published Edward Grimeston's A General Inventory of the History of France, the book that provided Chapman source material for his tragedies on then-recent French history. Eld fol
Bookselling
Bookselling is the commercial trading of books, the retail and distribution end of the publishing process. People who engage in bookselling are called bookwomen, or bookmen; the founding of libraries in 300 BC stimulated the energies of the Athenian booksellers. In Rome, toward the end of the republic, it became the fashion to have a library, Roman booksellers carried on a flourishing trade; the spread of Christianity created a great demand for copies of the Gospels, other sacred books, on for missals and other devotional volumes for both church and private use. The modern system of bookselling dates from soon after the introduction of printing. In the course of the 16th and 17th centuries the Low Countries for a time became the chief centre of the bookselling world. Modern book selling has changed with the advent of the Internet. With major websites such as Amazon, eBay, other big book distributors offering affiliate programs, book sales have now, more than been put in the hands of the small business owner.
Bookstores may be either part of local independent bookstores. Stores can range in size offering from several hundred to several hundred thousand titles, they may be a combination of both. Sizes for the larger bookstores exceed half a million titles. Bookstores sell other printed matter besides books, such as newspapers and maps. Colleges and universities have their own student bookstore on campus that focuses on providing course textbooks and scholarly books, although some on-campus bookstores are owned by large chains such as WHSmith or Waterstone's in the United Kingdom, or Barnes & Noble College Booksellers in the United States, a private firm controlled by the chair of Barnes & Noble. Another common type of bookstore is the used bookstore or second-hand bookshop which buys and sells used and out-of-print books in a variety of conditions. A range of titles are available including in print and out of print books. Book collectors tend to frequent used book stores. Large online bookstores offer used books for sale, too.
Individuals wishing to sell their used books using online bookstores agree to terms outlined by the bookstore: for example, paying the online bookstore a predetermined commission once the books have sold. In Paris, the Bouquinistes are antiquarian and used booksellers who have had outdoor stalls and boxes along both sides of the Seine for hundreds of years, regulated by law since the 1850s and contributing to the scenic ambience of the city. In the book of Jeremiah the prophet is represented as dictating to Baruch the scribe, who described the mode in which his book was written; these scribes were the earliest booksellers, supplied copies as they were demanded. Aristotle possessed a somewhat extensive library, Plato is recorded to have paid the large sum of one hundred minae for three small treatises of Philolaus the Pythagorean; when the Alexandrian library was founded about 300 BC, various expedients were used for the purpose of procuring books, this appears to have stimulated the energies of the Athenian booksellers.
In Rome, toward the end of the republic, it became the fashion to have a library as part of the household furniture. Roman booksellers carried on a flourishing trade, their shops were chiefly in the Argiletum, in the Vicus Sandalarius. On the door, or on the side posts, was a list of the books on sale. In the time of Augustus the great booksellers were the Sosii. According to Justinian, a law was passed granting to the scribes the ownership of the material written. Abbasid Caliphate in the east and Caliphate of Córdoba in the west, encouraged the development of bookshops and book dealers across the entire Muslim world, in Islāmic cities such as Damascus, Córdoba. According to Encyclopædia Britannica: There is a popular turn of phrase from the 1960s, "Books are written in Cairo, published in Beirut, read in Baghdad". One of the most famous and prestigious Arab publishers is Dar al-Asab; the first wave of French booksellers came soon after Johannes Gutenberg introduced his new printing technologies in Europe.
The oldest known bookstore still opened. Its owner in 1545 was Étienne Rouzeau, it now belongs to publisher Albin Michel. In 1810 Napoleon created a system by which, a would-be bookseller had to apply for a license, supply four references testifying to his morality, four confirmations of his professional ability to perform the job. All references had to be certified by the local mayor. If the application was accepted, the bookseller would have to swear an oath of loyalty to the régime; the application process was conducted to ensure that the new bookstore was not a place that distributed rebellious publications. The brevet process continued until 1870; the spread of Christianity created a great demand for copies of the Gospels, other sacred books, on for missals and other devotional volumes for both church and private use. Before the Reformation and the introduction of printing and stationers who sold books formed guilds; some of these stationers had stations built against the walls of cathedrals.
Besides the sworn stationers there were many booksellers in Oxford.
Rupert Murdoch
Keith Rupert Murdoch, is an Australian-born American media mogul. Murdoch's father, Sir Keith Murdoch, was a reporter and editor who became a senior executive of The Herald and Weekly Times publishing company, covering all Australian states except New South Wales. After his father's death in 1952, Murdoch declined to join his late father's registered public company and created his own private company, News Limited. In the 1950s and 1960s, Murdoch acquired a number of newspapers in Australia and New Zealand before expanding into the United Kingdom in 1969, taking over the News of the World, followed by The Sun. In 1974, Murdoch moved to New York City, to expand into the U. S. market. In 1981, Murdoch bought The Times, his first British broadsheet and, in 1985, became a naturalized U. S. citizen, giving up his Australian citizenship, to satisfy the legal requirement for U. S. television ownership. In 1986, keen to adopt newer electronic publishing technologies, Murdoch consolidated his UK printing operations in Wapping, causing bitter industrial disputes.
His holding company News Corporation acquired Twentieth Century Fox, HarperCollins, The Wall Street Journal. Murdoch formed the British broadcaster BSkyB in 1990 and, during the 1990s, expanded into Asian networks and South American television. By 2000, Murdoch's News Corporation owned over 800 companies in more than 50 countries, with a net worth of over $5 billion. In July 2011, Murdoch faced allegations that his companies, including the News of the World, owned by News Corporation, had been hacking the phones of celebrities and public citizens. Murdoch faced police and government investigations into bribery and corruption by the British government and FBI investigations in the U. S. On 21 July 2012, Murdoch resigned as a director of News International. On 1 July 2015, Murdoch left his post as CEO of 21st Century Fox; however and his family would continue to own both 21st Century Fox and News Corp through the Murdoch Family Trust. In July 2016, after the resignation of Roger Ailes due to accusations of sexual harassment, Murdoch was named the acting CEO of Fox News.
Keith Rupert Murdoch was born on 11 March 1931 in Melbourne, Australia, the son of Sir Keith Murdoch and Dame Elisabeth Murdoch. He is of English and Scottish ancestry. Murdoch's parents were born in Melbourne. Keith Murdoch was a war correspondent and a regional newspaper magnate owning two newspapers in Adelaide, South Australia, a radio station in a faraway mining town, chairman of the powerful Herald and Weekly Times group. In life, Keith Rupert chose to go by his second name, the first name of his maternal grandfather. Keith Murdoch the elder asked to meet with his future wife after seeing her debutante photograph in one of his own newspapers and they married in 1928, when she was aged 19 and he was 23 years older. In addition to Rupert, the couple had three daughters: Janet Calvert-Jones, Anne Kantor and Helen Handbury. Murdoch attended Geelong Grammar School, where he was co-editor of the school's official journal The Corian and editor of the student journal If Revived, he took his school's cricket team to the National Junior Finals.
He worked part-time at the Melbourne Herald and was groomed by his father to take over the family business. Murdoch studied Philosophy and Economics at Worcester College, Oxford in England, where he kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms and came to be known as "Red Rupert", he was a member of the Oxford University Labour Party, stood for Secretary of the Labour Club and managed Oxford Student Publications Limited, the publishing house of Cherwell. After his father's death from cancer in 1952, his mother Elisabeth did charity work as life governor of the Royal Women's Hospital in Melbourne and established the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute. At the age of 102, she had 74 descendants. Murdoch completed an MA before working as a sub-editor with the Daily Express for two years. Following his father's death, when he was 21, Murdoch returned from Oxford to take charge of what was left of the family business. After liquidation of his father's Herald stake to pay taxes, what was left was News Limited, established in 1923.
Rupert Murdoch turned The News, its main asset, into a major success. He began to direct his attention to acquisition and expansion, buying the troubled Sunday Times in Perth, Western Australia and over the next few years acquiring suburban and provincial newspapers in New South Wales, Queensland and the Northern Territory, including the Sydney afternoon tabloid, The Daily Mirror; the Economist describes Murdoch as "inventing the modern tabloid", as he developed a pattern for his newspapers, increasing sports and scandal coverage and adopting eye-catching headlines. Murdoch's first foray outside Australia involved the purchase of a controlling interest in the New Zealand daily The Dominion. In January 1964, while touring New Zealand with friends in a rented Morris Minor after sailing across the Tasman, Murdoch read of a takeover bid for the Wellington paper by the British-based Canadian newspaper magnate, Lord Thomson of Fleet. On the spur of the moment, he launched a counter-bid. A four-way battle for control ensued in which the 32-year-old Murdoch was successful.
In 1964, Murdoch launched The Australian, Australia's first national daily newspaper, based first in Canberra and in Sydney. In 1972, Murdoch acquired the Sydney morning tabloid The Daily Telegraph from Australian media mogul Sir Frank Packer, who regretted selling it to him. In 1984, Murdoch was appointed Com
Copyright
Copyright is a legal right, existing in many countries, that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights to determine whether, under what conditions, this original work may be used by others. This is only for a limited time. Copyright is one of two types of intellectual property rights, the other is industrial property rights; the exclusive rights are not absolute but limited by limitations and exceptions to copyright law, including fair use. A major limitation on copyright on ideas is that copyright protects only the original expression of ideas, not the underlying ideas themselves. Copyright is applicable to certain forms of creative work. Some, but not all jurisdictions require "fixing" copyrighted works in a tangible form, it is shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, who are referred to as rights holders. These rights include reproduction, control over derivative works, public performance, moral rights such as attribution. Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered "territorial rights".
This means that copyrights granted by the law of a certain state, do not extend beyond the territory of that specific jurisdiction. Copyrights of this type vary by country; the public law duration of a copyright expires 50 to 100 years after the creator dies, depending on the jurisdiction. Some countries require certain copyright formalities to establishing copyright, others recognize copyright in any completed work, without formal registration. Copyright is enforced as a civil matter, though some jurisdictions do apply criminal sanctions. Most jurisdictions recognize copyright limitations, allowing "fair" exceptions to the creator's exclusivity of copyright and giving users certain rights; the development of digital media and computer network technologies have prompted reinterpretation of these exceptions, introduced new difficulties in enforcing copyright, inspired additional challenges to the philosophical basis of copyright law. Businesses with great economic dependence upon copyright, such as those in the music business, have advocated the extension and expansion of copyright and sought additional legal and technological enforcement.
Copyright licenses can be granted by those deputized by the original claimant, private companies may request this as a condition of doing business with them. Services of internet platform providers like YouTube, GitHub, DropBox, WhatsApp or Twitter only can be used when users grant the platform provider beforehand the right to co-use all uploaded content, including all material exchanged per email, chat or cloud-storage; these copyrights only apply for the firm that operates such a platform, no matter in what jurisdiction the platform-services are being offered. Private companies in general do not recognize exceptions or give users more rights than the right to use the platform according certain rules. Copyright came about with wider literacy; as a legal concept, its origins in Britain were from a reaction to printers' monopolies at the beginning of the 18th century. The English Parliament was concerned about the unregulated copying of books and passed the Licensing of the Press Act 1662, which established a register of licensed books and required a copy to be deposited with the Stationers' Company continuing the licensing of material that had long been in effect.
Copyright laws allow products of creative human activities, such as literary and artistic production, to be preferentially exploited and thus incentivized. Different cultural attitudes, social organizations, economic models and legal frameworks are seen to account for why copyright emerged in Europe and not, for example, in Asia. In the Middle Ages in Europe, there was a lack of any concept of literary property due to the general relations of production, the specific organization of literary production and the role of culture in society; the latter refers to the tendency of oral societies, such as that of Europe in the medieval period, to view knowledge as the product and expression of the collective, rather than to see it as individual property. However, with copyright laws, intellectual production comes to be seen as a product of an individual, with attendant rights; the most significant point is that patent and copyright laws support the expansion of the range of creative human activities that can be commodified.
This parallels the ways in which capitalism led to the commodification of many aspects of social life that earlier had no monetary or economic value per se. Copyright has grown from a legal concept regulating copying rights in the publishing of books and maps to one with a significant effect on nearly every modern industry, covering such items as sound recordings, photographs and architectural works. Seen as the first real copyright law, the 1709 British Statute of Anne gave the publishers rights for a fixed period, after which the copyright expired; the act alluded to individual rights of the artist. It began, "Whereas Printers and other Persons, have of late taken the Liberty of Printing... Books, other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors... to their great Detriment, too to the Ruin of them and their Families:". A right to benefit financially from the work is articulated, court rulings and legislation have recognized a right to control the work, such as ensuring that the integrity of it is preserved.
An irrevocable
William Hague
William Jefferson Hague, Baron Hague of Richmond, is a British Conservative politician and life peer. He represented Richmond, Yorkshire, as its Member of Parliament from 1989 to 2015 and was the Leader of the Opposition from 1997 to 2001, he was Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs from 2010 to 2014 and was the Leader of the House of Commons from 2014 to 2015. Hague was educated at Wath Comprehensive School, the University of Oxford and INSEAD, subsequently being returned to the House of Commons at a by-election in 1989. Hague rose through the ranks of the government of John Major and was appointed to Cabinet in 1995 as Secretary of State for Wales. Following the Conservatives' defeat at the 1997 general election by the Labour Party, he was elected Leader of the Conservative Party at the age of 36, he resigned as Conservative Leader after the 2001 general election following his party's second defeat, at which the Conservatives made a net gain of just one seat. He returned to the backbenches, pursuing a career as an author, writing biographies of William Pitt the Younger and William Wilberforce.
He held several directorships, worked as a consultant and public speaker. After David Cameron was elected Leader of the Conservative Party in 2005, Hague was reappointed to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Foreign Secretary, he assumed the role of "Senior Member of the Shadow Cabinet" serving as Cameron's deputy. After the formation of the Coalition Government in 2010, Hague was appointed First Secretary of State and Foreign Secretary. Cameron described him as his "de facto political deputy". On 14 July 2014, Hague became Leader of the House of Commons, he did not stand for re-election at the 2015 general election. Hague was awarded a life peerage in the 2015 Dissolution Honours List on 9 October 2015. Hague was born on 26 March 1961 in Rotherham, England, he boarded at Ripon Grammar School and attended Wath Comprehensive School, a state secondary school near Rotherham. His parents and Stella Hague, ran a soft drinks manufacturing business where he worked during school holidays, his childhood nurse, Bessie Camm, went on to be the oldest living person in Britain from 2016 until her death in 2018, aged 113.
He first made the national news at the age of 16 by addressing the Conservatives at their 1977 Annual National Conference. In his speech he told the delegates: "half of you won't be here in 30 or 40 years' time... but that others would have to live with consequences of a Labour Government if it stayed in power". Writing in his diary at the time Kenneth Rose noted that Peter Carrington told him that "he and several other frontbench Tories were nauseated by the much-heralded speech of a sixteen-year-old schoolboy called William Hague. Peter said to Norman St John Stevas:'If he is as priggish and self-assured as that at sixteen, what will he be like in thirty years' time? Norman replied:'Like Michael Heseltine'". Hague read Philosophy and Economics at Magdalen College, graduating with first-class honours, he was President of the Oxford University Conservative Association, but was "convicted of electoral malpractice" in the election process. OUCA's official historian, David Blair, notes that Hague was elected on a platform pledging to clean up OUCA, but that this was "tarnished by accusations that he misused his position as Returning Officer to help the Magdalen candidate for the presidency, Peter Havey.
Hague was playing the classic game of using his powers as President to keep his faction in power, Havey was duly elected.... There were accusations of blatant ballot box stuffing", he served as President of the Oxford Union, an established route into politics. After Oxford, Hague went on to study for a Master of Business Administration degree at INSEAD, he worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, where Archie Norman was his mentor. Hague contested Wentworth unsuccessfully in 1987, before being elected to Parliament at a by-election in 1989 as Member for the safe Conservative seat of Richmond, North Yorkshire, where he succeeded former Home Secretary Leon Brittan. Following his election he became the then-youngest Conservative MP and despite having only become an MP, Hague was invited to join Government in 1990, serving as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont. After Lamont was sacked in 1993, Hague moved to the Department of Social Security where he was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State.
The following year he was promoted as Minister of State in the DSS with responsibility for Social Security and Disabled People. His fast rise up through Government was attributed to his debating skills. Hague was appointed a Cabinet Minister in 1995 as Secretary of State for Wales, he continued serving in Cabinet until the Conservatives were replaced by Labour at the 1997 general election. Following the 1997 general election defeat, Hague was elected Leader of the Conservative Party in succession to John Major, defeating more experienced figures such as Kenneth Clarke and Michael Howard. At the age of 36, Hague was tasked with rebuilding the Conservative Party by attempting to build a more modern image. £250,000 was spent on the "Listening to Britain" campaign to try to put the Conservatives back in touch with the public after losing power.
