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David Litvinoff
David Litvinoff (sometimes Litvinov; born David Levy; 3 February 1928 – 8 April 1975) was a consultant for the British film industry who traded on his knowledge of the criminal elements of the East End of London. A man for whom there are few truly reliable facts, it is unclear how genuine his expertise really was, though he certainly knew the Kray Twins and was particularly friendly with Ronnie Kray, according to a biography published in 2016. He entertained his showbiz friends with stories of the Krays' activities and his niece Vida described him as "the court jester to the rich, smart Chelsea set of the sixties". Early life and family Litvinoff was born in 1928 at Hare Marsh, Whitechapel, London, into a Jewish family with Russian origins. His mother and her first husband had fled tsarist pogroms in Odessa in 1913. She had four children with her first husband and five including David Litvinoff with her second husband Solomon Levy whom she married after the first was lost aft ...
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David Litvinoff
David Litvinoff (sometimes Litvinov; born David Levy; 3 February 1928 – 8 April 1975) was a consultant for the British film industry who traded on his knowledge of the criminal elements of the East End of London. A man for whom there are few truly reliable facts, it is unclear how genuine his expertise really was, though he certainly knew the Kray Twins and was particularly friendly with Ronnie Kray, according to a biography published in 2016. He entertained his showbiz friends with stories of the Krays' activities and his niece Vida described him as "the court jester to the rich, smart Chelsea set of the sixties". Early life and family Litvinoff was born in 1928 at Hare Marsh, Whitechapel, London, into a Jewish family with Russian origins. His mother and her first husband had fled tsarist pogroms in Odessa in 1913. She had four children with her first husband and five including David Litvinoff with her second husband Solomon Levy whom she married after the first was lost aft ...
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Institute Of Contemporary Arts
The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. Located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch, the ICA contains galleries, a theatre, two cinemas, a bookshop and a bar. Bengi Unsal became the director in 2022. History The ICA was founded by Roland Penrose, Peter Watson, Herbert Read, Peter Gregory, Geoffrey Grigson and E. L. T. Mesens in 1946. The ICA's founders intended to establish a space where artists, writers and scientists could debate ideas outside the traditional confines of the Royal Academy. The model for establishing the ICA was the earlier Leeds Arts Club, founded in 1903 by Alfred Orage, of which Herbert Read had been a leading member. Like the ICA, this too was a centre for multi-disciplinary debate, combined with avant-garde art exhibition and performances, within a framework that emphasised a radical social outlook. The ...
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Francis Bacon (artist)
Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his raw, unsettling imagery. Focusing on the human form, his subjects included Crucifixion of Jesus, crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical structures. Rejecting various classifications of his work, Bacon said he strove to render "the brutality of fact." He built up a reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art with his unique style. Bacon said that he saw images "in series", and his work, which numbers in the region of 590 extant paintings along with many others he destroyed,Harrison, Martin.Out of the Black Cavern. Christie's. Retrieved 4 November 201Archivedon 11 November 2019 typically focused on a single subject for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats. His output can be broadly described as sequences or variations on single motifs; including t ...
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Sloane Street
Sloane Street is a major London street in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea which runs north to south, from Knightsbridge to Sloane Square, crossing Pont Street about halfway along. History Sloane Street takes its name from Sir Hans Sloane, who purchased the surrounding area in 1712. Many of the properties in the street still belong to his descendants, the Earls Cadogan, via their company Cadogan Estates. Sloane Street has long been a fashionable shopping street, especially the northern section closest to Knightsbridge, which is known informally as Upper Sloane Street. Since the 1990s Sloane Street's status has increased further, and it is now on a par with Bond Street, which has been London's most exclusive shopping street for two centuries. The street has flagship stores for many of the world's most famous brands in fashion. In popular culture Sloane Street, along with Sloane Square, also gives its name to "Sloane Rangers", originally applied to the stereotypical ...
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Christopher Gibbs
Christopher Henry Gibbs (29 July 1938 – 28 July 2018) was a British antiques dealer and collector who was also an influential figure in men's fashion and interior design in 1960s London. He has been credited with inventing Swinging London, and has been called the "King of Chelsea" and "London's most famous antiques dealer". ''The New York Times'' described him as a "man of infinite taste, judgment and experience, the one who introduced a whole generation to the distressed bohemian style of interior design." Early life and education Gibbs was the fifth son of Hon. Sir Geoffrey Cokayne Gibbs KCMG and his wife Helen Margaret Leslie CBE, and the grandson of Herbert Gibbs, 1st Baron Hunsdon of Hunsdon. His elder brother is the financier Sir Roger Gibbs. He was educated at Eton College, from which he was expelled "for being generally totally impossible", Stanbridge Earls School and the University of Poitiers. Swinging London A style leader in 1960s London, Gibbs is credited with ...
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John Pearson (author)
John George Pearson (5 October 1930 – 13 November 2021) was an English novelist and an author of biographies, notably of Ian Fleming (the creator of James Bond), of the Sitwells, and of the Kray twins. Life and career Pearson was born in Epsom, Surrey. He was educated at King's College School, Wimbledon, and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he gained a double first in history. He then worked for ''The Economist'', BBC Television and ''The Sunday Times''. He was Ian Fleming's assistant at the ''Sunday Times'' and went on to write the first biography of Fleming, '' The Life of Ian Fleming'', published in 1966. Pearson was commissioned by Donald Campbell to chronicle his successful attempt on the Land Speed Record in 1964 in Bluebird CN7, resulting in the book ''Bluebird and the Dead Lake''. Pearson had also written "true crime" biographies, such as ''The Profession of Violence'', an account of the rise and fall of the Kray twins, who had hired him to write their biography in ...
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The Independent
''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was published on Saturday 26 March 2016, leaving only the online edition. The newspaper was controlled by Tony O'Reilly's Irish Independent News & Media from 1997 until it was sold to the Russian oligarch and former KGB Officer Alexander Lebedev in 2010. In 2017, Sultan Muhammad Abuljadayel bought a 30% stake in it. The daily edition was named National Newspaper of the Year at the 2004 British Press Awards. The website and mobile app had a combined monthly reach of 19,826,000 in 2021. History 1986 to 1990 Launched in 1986, the first issue of ''The Independent'' was published on 7 October in broadsheet format.Dennis Griffiths (ed.) ''The Encyclopedia of the British Press, 1422–1992'', London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992, p. 330 It was produc ...
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Derek Raymond
Robert William Arthur Cook (12 June 1931 – 30 July 1994), better known since the 1980s by his pen name Derek Raymond, was an English crime writer, credited with being a founder of British '' noir''. Biography Early life The eldest son of a textile magnate, Cook spent his early years at the family's London house, off Baker Street, tormenting a series of nannies. In 1937, in anticipation of the Second World War, the family retreated to the countryside, to a house near their Kentish castle. In 1944, Cook went to Eton, which he later characterised as a "hotbed of buggery" and "an excellent preparation for vice of any kind". He dropped out at the age of 17. During his National Service, Cook attained the rank of corporal (latrines). After a brief period working for the family business, selling lingerie in a department store in Neath, Wales, he spent most of the 1950s leading the life of a Chelsea layabout which he describes in his first, semi-autobiographical, novel ''The Crust on ...
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Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd (established 1949), often shortened to W&N or Weidenfeld, is a British publisher of fiction and reference books. It has been a division of the French-owned Orion Publishing Group since 1991. History George Weidenfeld and Nigel Nicolson founded Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1949 with a reception at Brown's Hotel, London. Among many other significant books, it published Vladimir Nabokov's ''Lolita'' (1959) and Nicolson's ''Portrait of a Marriage'' (1973), a frank biography of his mother Vita Sackville-West and father Harold Nicolson. In its early years Weidenfeld also published nonfiction works by Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Rose Macaulay, and novels by Mary McCarthy and Saul Bellow. Later it published titles by world leaders and historians, along with contemporary fiction and glossy illustrated books. Weidenfeld & Nicolson acquired the publisher Arthur Baker Ltd in 1959, and ran it as an imprint into the 1990s. Weidenfeld was one of Orion's first a ...
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Keith Richards
Keith Richards (born 18 December 1943), often referred to during the 1960s and 1970s as "Keith Richard", is an English musician and songwriter who has achieved international fame as the co-founder, guitarist, secondary vocalist, and co-principal songwriter of the Rolling Stones. His Jagger–Richards, songwriting partnership with Mick Jagger is one of the most successful in history. His career spans over six decades, and his guitar playing style has been a trademark of the Rolling Stones throughout the band's career. Richards gained press notoriety for his romantic involvements and illicit drug use, and he was often portrayed as a Counterculture, countercultural figure. Richards was born in and grew up in Dartford, Kent. He studied at the Wilmington Grammar School for Boys, Dartford Technical School and Sidcup Art College. After graduating, Richards befriended Jagger, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, and Brian Jones and joined the Rolling Stones. As a member of the Rolling Stones, R ...
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Man In A Headscarf (originally The Procurer) Lucien Freud
A man is an adult male human. Prior to adulthood, a male human is referred to as a boy (a male child or adolescent). Like most other male mammals, a man's genome usually inherits an X chromosome from the mother and a Y chromosome from the father. Sex differentiation of the male fetus is governed by the SRY gene on the Y chromosome. During puberty, hormones which stimulate androgen production result in the development of secondary sexual characteristics, thus exhibiting greater differences between the sexes. These include greater muscle mass, the growth of facial hair and a lower body fat composition. Male anatomy is distinguished from female anatomy by the male reproductive system, which includes the penis, testicles, sperm duct, prostate gland and the epididymis, and by secondary sex characteristics, including a narrower pelvis, narrower hips, and smaller breasts without mammary glands. Throughout human history, traditional gender roles have often defin ...
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Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair FRSL (born 11 June 1943) is a writer and filmmaker. Much of his work is rooted in London, recently within the influences of psychogeography. Biography Education Sinclair was born in Cardiff in 1943. From 1956 to 1961, he was educated at Cheltenham College, a boarding school for boys, followed by Trinity College, Dublin (where he edited ''Icarus''). He attended the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School). Development as author Sinclair's early work was mostly poetry, much of it published by his own small press, Albion Village Press. He was (and remains) connected with the British avant garde poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s – authors such as Edward Dorn, J. H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Peter Ackroyd and Brian Catling are often quoted in his work and even turn up in fictionalized form as characters. Later, taking over from John Muckle, Sinclair edited the Paladin Poetry Series and, in ...
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