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Alistair Ferguson Ritchie
Alistair Ferguson Ritchie (1890–1954) was a crossword compiler, under the pseudonym Afrit. The son of a post office clerk, he was born in 1890 and brought up in King’s Lynn. He was head boy at King Edward VII Grammar School there and graduated from Queens' College, Cambridge in 1911. He trained for Holy Orders at Bishop’s Hostel, Liverpool and was ordained deacon in 1912, and priest in 1913 . From 1912 to 1918 he was curate at St Paul’s church, Southport and from 1918 to 1924 he was St Mary’s church, Waterloo and also an assistant master at Merchant Taylors' School, Crosby. From there he went to Wells as Head of the Cathedral School and also as a priest vicar at the cathedral. He resigned as Priest Vicar in 1935 as the growing school needed his full attention. In 1946 he was made a prebendary (honorary canon) of Wells Cathedral in recognition of his service to Wells and the diocese. In 1920 he married, Violet Minett who also taught at Merchant Taylor’s, Crosby, and t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Crossword
A crossword is a word puzzle that usually takes the form of a square or a rectangular grid of white- and black-shaded squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues which lead to the answers. In languages that are written left-to-right, the answer words and phrases are placed in the grid from left to right ("across") and from top to bottom ("down"). The shaded squares are used to separate the words or phrases. Types Crossword grids such as those appearing in most North American newspapers and magazines feature solid areas of white squares. Every letter is checked (i.e. is part of both an "across" word and a "down" word) and usually each answer must contain at least three letters. In such puzzles shaded squares are typically limited to about one-sixth of the total. Crossword grids elsewhere, such as in Britain, South Africa, India and Australia, have a lattice-like structure, with a higher percentage of shaded squares ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Sketch
''The Sketch'' was a British illustrated weekly journal. It ran for 2,989 issues between 1 February 1893 and 17 June 1959. It was published by the Illustrated London News Company and was primarily a society magazine with regular features on royalty, aristocracy and high society, as well as theatre, cinema and the arts. It had a high photographic content with many studies of society ladies and their children as well as regular layouts of point to point racing meetings and similar events. Clement Shorter and William Ingram started ''The Sketch'' in 1893. Shorter was the first editor, from 1893 to 1900, succeeded by John Latey (until his death in 1902) and then Keble Howard.Philip Waller, ''Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918'', pp. 351–2 Bruce Ingram was editor from 1905 to 1946. The magazine is remembered for first publishing the illustrations of Bonzo the dog by George E. Studdy (from 1921). It featured series of short stories within ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
People From King's Lynn
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, or legal responsibility. The defining features of personhood and, consequently, what makes a person count as a person, differ widely among cultures and contexts. In addition to the question of personhood, of what makes a being count as a person to begin with, there are further questions about personal identity and self: both about what makes any particular person that particular person instead of another, and about what makes a person at one time the same person as they were or will be at another time despite any intervening changes. The plural form "people" is often used to refer to an entire nation or ethnic group (as in "a people"), and this was the original meaning of the word; it subsequently acquired its use as a plural form of per ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Crossword Compilers
A crossword is a word puzzle that usually takes the form of a square or a rectangular grid of white- and black-shaded squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues which lead to the answers. In languages that are written left-to-right, the answer words and phrases are placed in the grid from left to right ("across") and from top to bottom ("down"). The shaded squares are used to separate the words or phrases. Types Crossword grids such as those appearing in most North American newspapers and magazines feature solid areas of white squares. Every letter is checked (i.e. is part of both an "across" word and a "down" word) and usually each answer must contain at least three letters. In such puzzles shaded squares are typically limited to about one-sixth of the total. Crossword grids elsewhere, such as in Britain, South Africa, India and Australia, have a lattice-like structure, with a higher percentage of shaded squares ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1954 Deaths
Events January * January 1 – The Soviet Union ceases to demand war reparations from West Germany. * January 3 – The Italian broadcaster RAI officially begins transmitting. * January 7 – Georgetown-IBM experiment: The first public demonstration of a machine translation system is held in New York, at the head office of IBM. * January 10 – BOAC Flight 781, a de Havilland Comet jet plane, disintegrates in mid-air due to metal fatigue, and crashes in the Mediterranean near Elba; all 35 people on board are killed. * January 12 – Avalanches in Austria kill more than 200. * January 15 – Mau Mau leader Waruhiu Itote is captured in Kenya. * January 17 – In Yugoslavia, Milovan Đilas, one of the leading members of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, is relieved of his duties. * January 20 – The US-based National Negro Network is established, with 46 member radio stations. * January 21 – The first nuclear-powered subm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1890 Births
Year 189 ( CLXXXIX) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Silanus and Silanus (or, less frequently, year 942 ''Ab urbe condita''). The denomination 189 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years. Events By place Roman Empire * Plague (possibly smallpox) kills as many as 2,000 people per day in Rome. Farmers are unable to harvest their crops, and food shortages bring riots in the city. China * Liu Bian succeeds Emperor Ling, as Chinese emperor of the Han Dynasty. * Dong Zhuo has Liu Bian deposed, and installs Emperor Xian as emperor. * Two thousand eunuchs in the palace are slaughtered in a violent purge in Luoyang, the capital of Han. By topic Arts and sciences * Galen publishes his ''"Treatise on the various temperaments"'' (aka ''O ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Sphere (magazine)
''The Sphere: An Illustrated Newspaper for the Home'' and, later, ''The Sphere: The Empire's Illustrated Weekly'', was a British newspaper, published by London Illustrated Newspapers weekly from 27 January 1900 until the closure of the paper on 27 June 1964. Background The first issue came out at the height of the Boer War and was a product of that conflict and the public appetite for images. At the time, it was in direct competition with ''The Graphic'' and ''Illustrated London News'', and evidence of this rivalry can be seen in the latter's publication shortly after of a new illustrated paper entitled ''The Spear'' in an attempt to confuse readers. During World War I, the weekly issues were called 'war numbers' and over two hundred appeared between 1914 and 1919. In all, it totalled 3,343 issues, plus a special supplement issued in January 1965, entitled ''Winston Churchill: A Memorial Tribute''. ''The Sphere'' was founded by Clement Shorter (1857–1926), who also founded '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Printer's Devilry
A Printer's Devilry is a form of cryptic crossword puzzle, first invented by Afrit (Alistair Ferguson Ritchie) in 1937. A Printer's Devilry puzzle does not follow the standard Ximenean rules of crossword setting, since the clues do not define the answers. Instead, each clue consists of a sentence from which a string of letters has been removed and, where necessary, the punctuation and word breaks in the clue rearranged to form a new more-or-less grammatical sentence. The challenge to the solver is to find the missing letters, which will spell out a word or phrase that should be entered into the grid. History Afrit's first Printer's Devilry puzzle appeared in '' The Listener'' on 2 June, 1937 in puzzle 377. Its original preamble, setting out the rules, read as follows: Other later crossword setters have picked up the form, including XimenesPuzzle: ; Slip: and Azed, and it has also found use in mixed puzzles that combine several different clue types on a single grid. Ximenes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Playfair Cipher
The Playfair cipher or Playfair square or Wheatstone–Playfair cipher is a manual symmetric encryption technique and was the first literal digram substitution cipher. The scheme was invented in 1854 by Charles Wheatstone, but bears the name of Lord Playfair for promoting its use. The technique encrypts pairs of letters (''bigrams'' or ''digrams''), instead of single letters as in the simple substitution cipher and rather more complex Vigenère cipher systems then in use. The Playfair is thus significantly harder to break since the frequency analysis used for simple substitution ciphers does not work with it. The frequency analysis of bigrams is possible, but considerably more difficult. With 600 possible bigrams rather than the 26 possible monograms (single symbols, usually letters in this context), a considerably larger cipher text is required in order to be useful. History The Playfair cipher was the first cipher to encrypt pairs of letters in cryptologic history. Wheat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Listener (magazine)
''The Listener'' was a weekly magazine established by the BBC in January 1929 which ceased publication in 1991. The entire digitised archive was made available for purchase online to libraries, educational and research institutions in 2011. It was first published on 16 January 1929, under the editorship of Richard S. Lambert, and was developed as a medium of record for the reproduction of broadcast talks. It also previewed major literary and musical broadcasts, reviewed new books, and printed a selected list of the more intellectual broadcasts for the coming week. Its published aim was to be "a medium for intelligent reception of broadcast programmes by way of amplification and explanation of those features which cannot now be dealt with in the editorial columns of the ''Radio Times''". The title reflected the fact that at the time the BBC broadcast via radio only. (The BBC version of ''The Listener'' was preceded by another magazine with the same title which was the ''Journ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pen Name
A pen name, also called a ''nom de plume'' or a literary double, is a pseudonym (or, in some cases, a variant form of a real name) adopted by an author and printed on the title page or by-line of their works in place of their real name. A pen name may be used to make the author's name more distinctive, to disguise the author's gender, to distance the author from their other works, to protect the author from retribution for their writings, to merge multiple persons into a single identifiable author, or for any of a number of reasons related to the marketing or aesthetic presentation of the work. The author's real identity may be known only to the publisher or may become common knowledge. Etymology The French-language phrase is occasionally still seen as a synonym for the English term "pen name", which is a "back-translation" and originated in England rather than France. H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler, in ''The King's English'' state that the term ''nom de plume'' evolv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
King’s Lynn
King's Lynn, known until 1537 as Bishop's Lynn and colloquially as Lynn, is a port and market town in the borough of King's Lynn and West Norfolk in the county of Norfolk, England. It is located north of London, north-east of Peterborough, north-north-east of Cambridge and west of Norwich. History Toponymy The etymology of King's Lynn is uncertain. The name ''Lynn'' may signify a body of water near the town – the Welsh word means a lake; but the name is plausibly of Old English, Anglo-Saxon origin, from ''lean'' meaning a Tenure (law), tenure in fee or farm. As the 1085 Domesday Book mentions saltings at Lena (Lynn), an area of partitioned pools may have existed there at the time. Other places with Lynn in the name include Dublin, Ireland. An Dubh Linn....the Black Pool. The presence of salt, which was relatively rare and expensive in the early medieval period, may have added to the interest of Herbert de Losinga and other prominent Normans in the modest parish. The tow ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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