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The Scorpion God
''The Scorpion God'' is a collection of three novellas by William Golding published in 1971. They are all set in the distant past: "The Scorpion God" in Ancient Egypt, "Clonk Clonk" in pre-historic Africa, and "Envoy Extraordinary" in Ancient Rome. A draft of "The Scorpion God" had been written but abandoned in 1964, "Clonk Clonk" was newly written for the book, and "Envoy Extraordinary" had been published before, in 1956. "Envoy Extraordinary" became a play called ''The Brass Butterfly'' which was performed first in Oxford and later in London and New York. This was Golding's first publication since ''The Pyramid'' in 1967 and his last until '' Darkness Visible'' in 1979, which he started to write in 1975 after a long period of "creative hibernation", the beginning of which is described in a journal he started at the time, under the heading 'History of a Crisis'. Themes Critical opinion differs about whether the three novellas are bound by a common theme other than their setting ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Golding
Sir William Gerald Golding (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel ''Lord of the Flies'' (1954), he published another twelve volumes of fiction in his lifetime. In 1980, he was awarded the Booker Prize for ''Rites of Passage (novel), Rites of Passage'', the first novel in what became his sea trilogy, ''To the Ends of the Earth''. He was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature. As a result of his contributions to literature, Golding was Knight Bachelor, knighted in 1988. The house was known as ''Karenza'', the Cornish language, Cornish word for ''love'', and he spent many childhood holidays there. He grew up in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father, Alec Golding, was a science master at Marlborough Grammar School (1905 to retirement), the school the young Golding and his elder brother Joseph attended. His mother, Mildred (Curnoe), kept house at 29, The Green, Marlborough, and was a campaigner for f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Queen (magazine)
''Queen'' (originally ''The Queen'') magazine was a British society publication briefly established by Samuel Beeton in 1861. It became '' The Queen: The Ladies Newspaper and Court Chronicle'' before returning to ''The Queen''. In 1958, the magazine was sold to Jocelyn Stevens Sir Jocelyn Edward Greville Stevens, (14 February 1932 – 9 October 2014) was the publisher of ''Queen'' magazine and a London newspaper executive. Education and career Stevens attended Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge, and Sandhurs ..., who dropped the prefix "''The''" and used it as his vehicle to represent the younger side of the British Establishment, sometimes referred to as the "Chelsea Set" under the editorial direction of Beatrix Miller. In 1964, the magazine gave birth to Radio Caroline, the first daytime commercial pirate radio station serving London, England. Stevens sold ''Queen'' in 1968. From 1970, the new publication became known as ''Harper's & Queen'' after a merger of two ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Walter Sullivan (novelist)
Walter Laurence Sullivan (January 4, 1924 in Nashville, Tennessee – August 15, 2006 in Nashville) was a southern novelist and literary critic. He published a number of works and was an English professor at Vanderbilt University for more than fifty years. He wrote chiefly about the literature, the society, and the values of the South. He was a founding charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Life Walter Sullivan was born in Nashville. His father died three months after he was born, and Walter, an only child, spent his childhood living with his mother and various aunts, uncles, and grandparents. After attending local schools, he began his studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville in 1941, studying creative writing under Donald Davidson. He served in the Marines during World War II but the war ended before he was assigned to combat. He resumed his studies at Vanderbilt and graduated in 1947. He married Jane Harrison and they moved to Iowa City, where he earn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Twilight Of The Gods And Other Tales
''The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales'' is a collection of fantasy short stories by Richard Garnett, generally considered a classic in the genre. Its title notwithstanding, the collection "has nothing to do with the Norse gods—although it draws upon everything else, from Arabic legends and Chinese fairy tales to Roman history and Greek mythology."Lin Carter, ed. ''Discoveries in Fantasy'', Ballantine Books, 1972, p. 61. The title story actually concerns the release of Prometheus, upon the ultimate eclipse of Greek paganism by Christianity, from the torture to which he was sentenced by Zeus. Publication The collection was first published in hardcover by T. Fisher Unwin in 1888. A "new and augmented edition" was published by John Lane in 1903. In this form the collection continued to be reprinted and available through 1911. An edition with an introduction by T. E. Lawrence and illustrations by Henry Keen was published in 1924 by John Lane and by Dodd, Mead in the United Stat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Garnett (writer)
Richard Garnett C.B. (27 February 1835 – 13 April 1906) was a scholar, librarian, biographer and poet. He was son of Richard Garnett, an author, philologist (historical linguist) and assistant keeper of printed books in the British Museum, i.e. what is now the British Library. Life Born at Lichfield in Staffordshire, and educated at a school in Bloomsbury, he entered the British Museum in 1851 as an assistant librarian. Anthony Panizzi, a close friend of Garnett's father, invited the then 16-year-old Richard to work at the British Museum following his father's death. In 1875, he became superintendent of the Reading Room, in 1881, editor of the General Catalogue of Printed Books, and in 1890, succeeding George Bullen, he was Keeper of Printed Books until his retirement in 1899. His literary works include numerous translations from the Greek, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; several books of verse; the book of short stories '' The Twilight of the Gods'' (1888, 16 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Cole (actor)
George Edward Cole, OBE (22 April 1925 – 5 August 2015) was an English actor whose career spanned 75 years. He was best known for playing Arthur Daley in the long-running ITV comedy-drama show ''Minder'' and Flash Harry in the early ''St Trinian's'' films. Early life Cole was born in Tooting, London. He was given up for adoption at ten days of age and adopted by George and Florence Cole, a Tooting council employee and charwoman (cleaner) respectively. He attended secondary school in nearby Morden. He left school at 14 to be a butcher's boy and had an ambition to join the Merchant Navy but landed a part in a touring musical and chose acting as a career. He recalled during that year (1939) he was in Dublin on the day of Britain's entry into World War II when he witnessed an effigy of Neville Chamberlain being publicly burned without interference from the local police. Career Aged 15, Cole was cast in the film ''Cottage to Let'' (1941) opposite Scottish actor Alastair Sim. S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alistair Sim
Alastair George Bell Sim, CBE (9 October 1900 – 19 August 1976) was a Scottish character actor who began his theatrical career at the age of thirty and quickly became established as a popular West End performer, remaining so until his death in 1976. Starting in 1935, he also appeared in more than fifty British films, including an iconic adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novella ''A Christmas Carol'', released in 1951 as ''Scrooge'' in Great Britain and as ''A Christmas Carol'' in the United States. Though an accomplished dramatic actor, he is often remembered for his comically sinister performances. After a series of false starts, including a spell as a jobbing labourer and another as a clerk in a local government office, Sim's love of and talent for poetry reading won him several prizes and led to his appointment as a lecturer in elocution at the University of Edinburgh in 1925. He also ran his own private elocution and drama school, from which, with the help of the pl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Radio Play
Radio drama (or audio drama, audio play, radio play, radio theatre, or audio theatre) is a dramatized, purely acoustic performance. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine the characters and story: "It is auditory in the physical dimension but equally powerful as a visual force in the psychological dimension." Radio drama includes plays specifically written for radio, docudrama, dramatized works of fiction, as well as plays originally written for the theatre, including musical theatre, and opera. Radio drama achieved widespread popularity within a decade of its initial development in the 1920s. By the 1940s, it was a leading international popular entertainment. With the advent of television in the 1950s radio drama began losing its audience. However, it remains popular in much of the world. Recordings of OTR (old-time radio) survive today in the audio archives of collectors, libraries and museums, as well a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Four Great Inventions
The Four Great Inventions () are inventions from ancient China that are celebrated in Chinese culture for their historical significance and as symbols of ancient China's advanced science and technology. They are the compass, History of gunpowder, gunpowder, papermaking and History of printing, printing. China held the world's leading position in many fields in the study of nature from the 1st century BC to the 15th century AD, with the four great inventions having the greatest global significance. These four inventions had a profound impact on the development of civilization throughout the world. However, some modern Chinese scholars have opined that other List of Chinese inventions, Chinese inventions were perhaps more sophisticated and had a greater impact on Chinese civilization – the Four Great Inventions serve merely to highlight the technological interaction between East Asia, East and West. Evolution “The Three Great Inventions” was first proposed by the British p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steam Engine
A steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid. The steam engine uses the force produced by steam pressure to push a piston back and forth inside a cylinder. This pushing force can be transformed, by a connecting rod and crank, into rotational force for work. The term "steam engine" is generally applied only to reciprocating engines as just described, not to the steam turbine. Steam engines are external combustion engines, where the working fluid is separated from the combustion products. The ideal thermodynamic cycle used to analyze this process is called the Rankine cycle. In general usage, the term ''steam engine'' can refer to either complete steam plants (including boilers etc.), such as railway steam locomotives and portable engines, or may refer to the piston or turbine machinery alone, as in the beam engine and stationary steam engine. Although steam-driven devices were known as early as the aeolipile in the f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mervyn Peake
Mervyn Laurence Peake (9 July 1911 – 17 November 1968) was an English writer, artist, poet, and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the '' Gormenghast'' books. The four works were part of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, the completion of which was prevented by his death. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R. R. Tolkien, but Peake's surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology. Peake also wrote poetry and literary nonsense in verse form, short stories for adults and children ('' Letters from a Lost Uncle'', 1948), stage and radio plays, and ''Mr Pye'' (1953), a relatively tightly-structured novel in which God implicitly mocks the evangelical pretensions and cosy world-view of the eponymous hero. Peake first made his reputation as a painter and illustrator during the 1930s and 1940s, when he lived ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boy In Darkness
''Boy in Darkness'' is a novella by English writer Mervyn Peake. It was first published in 1956 by Eyre & Spottiswoode as part of the anthology ''Sometime, Never: Three Tales of Imagination'' (with other stories by William Golding and John Wyndham). A "corrupt" version of ''Boy in Darkness'' (a typist had misread Peake's handwriting in some places) was published both in an anthology, ''The Inner Landscape'' (published in 1969 by Allison & Busby, edited anonymously by Michael Moorcock), and separately in 1976 (by educational publisher Wheaton & Co.) with an introduction by Peake's widow, Maeve Gilmore. Referring to the corrupt text, she wrote that "although the Boy in ''Boy in Darkness'' is assuredly Titus Groan, eakedid not call him so by name"; however, adding the name Titus was one of the specific changes that Peake made between writing and publishing his novella. The correct text has recently become available again in an anthology entitled ''Boy in Darkness and Other Stories'', ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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