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Roger Deakin
Roger Stuart Deakin (11 February 1943 – 19 August 2006) was an English writer, documentary-maker and environmentalist. He was a co-founder and trustee of Common Ground, the arts, culture and environment organisation. ''Waterlog'', the only book he published in his lifetime, topped the UK best seller charts and founded the wild swimming movement. Life Deakin was born in Watford, Hertfordshire, and was an only child. His father was a railway clerk, from Walsall in the Midlands, who died when Deakin was 17. Educated at The Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, an independent school, based at the time in Hampstead in north west London, followed by Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, Deakin read English, under the auspices of writer Kingsley Amis. Deakin first worked in advertising as a copywriter and creative director for Colman Prentis and Varley, while living in Bayswater, London. He was responsible for the National Coal Board slogan "Come home to a real fire". Followin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Watford
Watford () is a town and borough in Hertfordshire, England, 15 miles northwest of Central London, on the River Colne. Initially a small market town, the Grand Junction Canal encouraged the construction of paper-making mills, print works, and breweries. While industry has declined in Watford, its location near London and transport links has attracted several companies to site their headquarters in the town. Cassiobury Park is a public park that was once the manor estate of the Earls of Essex. The town developed next to the River Colne on land belonging to St Albans Abbey. In the 12th century, a charter was granted allowing a market, and the building of St Mary's Church began. The town grew partly due to travellers going to Berkhamsted Castle and the royal palace at Kings Langley. A mansion was built at Cassiobury in the 16th century. This was partly rebuilt in the 17th century and another country house was built at The Grove. The Grand Junction Canal in 1798 and th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Macfarlane (travel Writer)
Robert Macfarlane (born 15 August 1976) is a British writer and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He is best known for his books on landscape, nature, place, people and language, which include ''The Old Ways'' (2012), ''Landmarks'' (2015), ''The Lost Words'' (2017) and '' Underland'' (2019). In 2017 he received The E. M. Forster Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is married to professor of modern Chinese history and literature Julia Lovell. Early life and education Macfarlane was born in Halam, Nottinghamshire, and attended Nottingham High School. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He began a PhD at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 2000, and in 2001 was elected a Fellow of the college. Family His father John Macfarlane is a respiratory physician who co-authored the CURB-65 score of pneumonia in 2003. His brother James is also a consultant physician in respiratory medicine. He is married to Ju ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alice Roberts
Alice May Roberts (born 19 May 1973) is an English biological anthropologist, biologist, television presenter and author. Since 2012 she has been Professor of the Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham. She was President of the charity Humanists UK between January 2019 and May 2022. She is now a Vice President of the organisation. Early life and education Roberts was born in Bristol in 1973, the daughter of an aeronautical engineer and an English and arts teacher. She grew up in the Bristol suburb of Westbury-on-Trym where she attended The Red Maids' School. In December 1988, she won the BBC1 ''Blue Peter'' Young Artists competition, appearing with her picture and the presenters on the front cover of the 10 December 1988 edition of the ''Radio Times''. Roberts studied medicine at the University of Wales College of Medicine (now part of Cardiff University) and graduated in 1997 with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MB BCh) degree, having ga ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Freedom To Roam
The freedom to roam, or "everyman's right", is the general public's right to access certain public or privately owned land, lakes, and rivers for recreation and exercise. The right is sometimes called the right of public access to the wilderness or the "right to roam". In Scotland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Austria, Czech Republic and Switzerland, the freedom to roam takes the form of general public rights which are sometimes codified in law. The access is ancient in parts of Northern Europe and has been regarded as sufficiently basic that it was not formalised in law until modern times. However, the right usually does not include any substantial economic exploitation, such as hunting or logging, or disruptive activities, such as making fires and driving offroad vehicles. In countries without such general rights, there may be a network of rights of way, or some nature reserves with footpaths. Europe Nordic countries Ancient traces p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Open Water Swimming
Open water swimming is a swimming discipline which takes place in outdoor bodies of water such as open oceans, lakes, and rivers. The beginning of the modern age of open water human swimming, swimming is sometimes taken to be May 3, 1810, when Lord Byron swam several miles to cross the Dardanelles, Hellespont (now known as the Dardanelles) from Europe to Asia. In the first edition of the modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, the swimming competition was held in open water. In 2000, the Olympic Games first included a triathlon with a 1500 m swim leg, and in 2008, a Swimming at the 2008 Summer Olympics – Men's marathon 10 kilometre, 10 km open water swim. The FINA World Aquatics Championships has featured open water swimming events since 1992. The FINA World Open Water Swimming Championships was held from 2000 to 2010. Since 2007, the FINA Marathon Swim World Series, FINA 10 km Marathon Swimming World Cup is held in several events around the world. The activity has g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Burt Lancaster
Burton Stephen Lancaster (November 2, 1913 – October 20, 1994) was an American actor and producer. Initially known for playing tough guys with a tender heart, he went on to achieve success with more complex and challenging roles over a 45-year career in film and, later, television. He was a four-time nominee for the Academy Award for Best Actor (winning once), and he also won two BAFTA Awards and one Golden Globe Award for Best Lead Actor. The American Film Institute ranks Lancaster as of the greatest male stars of classic Hollywood cinema. Lancaster performed as a circus acrobat in the 1930s. After serving in World War II, the 33-year-old Lancaster landed a role in a Broadway play and drew the attention of a Hollywood agent. His breakthrough role was in the film noir ''The Killers'' in 1946 alongside Ava Gardner. A critical success, it launched both of their careers. Not long after in 1948, Lancaster starred alongside Barbara Stanwyck in the commercially and criticall ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Swimmer (1968 Film)
''The Swimmer'' is a 1968 American surrealist drama film starring Burt Lancaster. The film was written and directed by Academy Award-nominated husband-and-wife team of Eleanor Perry (screenplay adaptation) and Frank Perry (director). The story is based on the 1964 short story " The Swimmer" by John Cheever, which appeared in the July 18, 1964, issue of ''The New Yorker''. The 95-minute movie adds new characters and scenes consistent with those in the original 12-page short story. Plot On a sunny day in an affluent suburb in Connecticut, a fit and tanned middle-aged man in a bathing suit, Ned Merrill, drops by a pool party being held by old friends. They offer him a cocktail while nursing hangovers from the night before. As they share stories, Ned realizes there is a series of backyard swimming pools that could form a "river" back to his house, making it possible for him to "swim his way home". Ned dives into the pool, emerging at the other end and beginning his journey. Ned's be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Cheever
John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American short story writer and novelist. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan; the Westchester suburbs; old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born; and Italy, especially Rome. His short stories included " The Enormous Radio", "Goodbye, My Brother", " The Five-Forty-Eight", "The Country Husband", and " The Swimmer", and he also wrote five novels: ''The Wapshot Chronicle'' (National Book Award, 1958),from the Awards 50-year anniversary publications and from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) '' The Wapshot Scandal'' (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), '' Bullet Park'' (1969), '' Falconer'' (1977) and a novella '' Oh What a Paradise It Seems'' (1982). His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous soc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Swimmer (short Story)
"The Swimmer" is a short story by American author John Cheever, originally published in ''The New Yorker'' on July 18, 1964, and then in the 1964 short fiction collection ''The Brigadier and the Golf Widow''. The story was collected in ''The Stories of John Cheever'' (1978), published by Alfred A. Knopf. Considered one of Cheever's most outstanding works, "The Swimmer" has received exhaustive analysis from critics and biographers. In 1968, "The Swimmer" was adapted into a film of the same name, starring Burt Lancaster. This is the only literary work by Cheever that has appeared on screen. Plot The story is told from a third-person omniscient point-of-view, in which the focal character is Neddy Merrill, a suburban resident of the New York State County of Westchester, spanning two of Cheever's fictional communities of Shady Hill and Bullet Park. Neddy Merrill is lounging poolside at the residence of his well-to-do neighbors, the Westerhazy's. By all appearances, he is ente ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chatto And Windus
Chatto & Windus is an imprint of Penguin Random House that was formerly an independent book publishing company founded in London in 1855 by John Camden Hotten. Following Hotten's death, the firm would reorganize under the names of his business partner Andrew Chatto and poet William Edward Windus. The company was purchased by Random House in 1987 and is now a sub-imprint of Vintage Books within the Penguin UK division. History The firm developed out of the publishing business of John Camden Hotten, founded in 1855. After his death in 1873, it was sold to Hotten's junior partner Andrew Chatto (1841–1913), who took on the poet William Edward Windus (1827-1910), son of the patron of J. M. W. Turner, Benjamin Godfrey Windus (1790-1867), as partner. Chatto & Windus published Mark Twain, W. S. Gilbert, Wilkie Collins, H. G. Wells, Wyndham Lewis, Richard Aldington, Frederick Rolfe (as Fr. Rolfe), Aldous Huxley, Samuel Beckett, the "unfinished" novel ''Weir of Hermiston'' (1896) by R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allotment (gardening)
An allotment (British English), or in North America, a community garden, is a plot of land made available for individual, non-commercial gardening or growing food plants, so forming a kitchen garden away from the residence of the user. Such plots are formed by subdividing a piece of land into a few or up to several hundred parcels that are assigned to individuals or families. Such parcels are cultivated individually, contrary to other community garden types where the entire area is tended collectively by a group of people. In countries that do not use the term "allotment (garden)", a "community garden" may refer to individual small garden plots as well as to a single, large piece of land gardened collectively by a group of people. The term "victory garden" is also still sometimes used, especially when a community garden dates back to the First or Second World War. The individual size of a parcel typically suits the needs of a family, and often the plots include a shed for tools a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hank Wangford
Samuel Hutt, known by the stage name Hank Wangford (born 15 November 1940), is an English country and western songwriter. "Hank is a good smoke screen. He can do things I can't do. He's my clown," says Dr. Hutt, who has been struggling to balance his musical and medical interests ever since medical school at Cambridge University. His 1960s practice in a drug-addiction centre brought him into contact with a lot of rockers and wide renown as London's long-haired, rock-and-roll doctor, and later a television series. "If The Who had a first night, the tickets would be sent. I actually had more of an identity crisis with that than with Hank, because Hank is a fool. I quite like him. Dr. Sam was definitely threatening to become a monster." Early and personal life It has been said that Hank was born in Wangford, Suffolk, England. and that may be where Sam Hutt conceived his stage name. In his appearance in the film, ''A Brief History of Brocket Hall'', Sam Hutt says that he was born i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
