The Magus (novel)
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The Magus (novel)
''The Magus'' (1965) is a postmodern novel by British author John Fowles, telling the story of Nicholas Urfe, a young British graduate who is teaching English on a small Greek island. Urfe becomes embroiled in the psychological illusions of a master trickster, which become increasingly dark and serious. Considered an example of metafiction, it was the first novel written by Fowles, but the third he published. In 1977 he published a revised edition. In 1999, ''The Magus'' was ranked on both lists of Modern Library 100 Best Novels, reaching number 93 on the editors' list and number 71 on the readers' list. In 2003, the novel was listed at number 67 on the BBC's survey The Big Read. Background ''The Magus'' was the first book John Fowles wrote, but his third to be published, after ''The Collector'' (1963) and ''The Aristos'' (1964). He started writing it in the 1950s, under the original title of ''The Godgame''. He based it partly on his experiences on the Greek island o ...
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Tom Adams (illustrator)
Thomas Charles Renwick Adams (March 29, 1926 – December 9, 2019) was a US-born Anglo-Scots illustrator and painter. Long active in a variety of visual formats, he is known for his work in book cover art, portrait painting, poster, advertising and album art. He is most widely known for his book cover art for the paperback editions of Agatha Christie. Family background and influence Adams was born into a family of town and urban planners. His grandfather, Thomas Adams (1871–1940), was an influential urban planner, who served as an advisor to Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt and went on to found the Civic Improvement League in 1915 and the Town Planning Institution of Canada in 1919. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that Thomas Adams was one of the principal founders of urban planning as a discipline. His two sons went on to make their mark in American and English town and urban planning. The younger son, Frederick Johnstone Adams, was a member of the facu ...
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Greek Mythology
A major branch of classical mythology, Greek mythology is the body of myths originally told by the Ancient Greece, ancient Greeks, and a genre of Ancient Greek folklore. These stories concern the Cosmogony, origin and Cosmology#Metaphysical cosmology, nature of the world, the lives and activities of List of Greek mythological figures, deities, Greek hero cult, heroes, and List of Greek mythological creatures, mythological creatures, and the origins and significance of the ancient Greeks' own cult (religious practice), cult and ritual practices. Modern scholars study the myths to shed light on the religious and political institutions of ancient Greece, and to better understand the nature of myth-making itself. The Greek myths were initially propagated in an oral tradition, oral-poetic tradition most likely by Minoan civilization, Minoan and Mycenaean Greece, Mycenaean singers starting in the 18th century BC; eventually the myths of the heroes of the Trojan War and its after ...
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Sir James Frazer
Sir James George Frazer (; 1 January 1854 – 7 May 1941) was a Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion. Personal life He was born on 1 January 1854 in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of Katherine Brown and Daniel F. Frazer, a chemist. Frazer attended school at Springfield Academy and Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh. He studied at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with honours in classics (his dissertation was published years later as ''The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory'') and remained a Classics Fellow all his life. From Trinity, he went on to study law at the Middle Temple, but never practised. Four times elected to Trinity's Title Alpha Fellowship, he was associated with the college for most of his life, except for the year 1907–1908, spent at the University of Liverpool. He was knighted in 1914, and a public lectureship in social ...
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Arthur Edward Waite
Arthur Edward Waite (2 October 1857 – 19 May 1942) was a British poet and scholarly mystic who wrote extensively on occult and esoteric matters, and was the co-creator of the Rider–Waite tarot deck (also called the Rider–Waite–Smith or Waite–Smith deck). As his biographer R. A. Gilbert described him, "Waite's name has survived because he was the first to attempt a systematic study of the history of Western occultism—viewed as a spiritual tradition rather than as aspects of protoscience or as the pathology of religion." He spent most of his life in or near London, connected to various publishing houses and editing a magazine, ''The Unknown World''. Early life and education Arthur Edward Waite was born on 2 October 1857 in Brooklyn, New York, United States, to unmarried parents. Waite's father, Capt. Charles F. Waite, died at sea when Arthur was very young, and his widowed mother, Emma Lovell, returned to her home country of England, where he was then raised. ...
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Marquis De Sade
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (; 2 June 1740 – 2 December 1814), was a French nobleman, revolutionary politician, philosopher and writer famous for his literary depictions of a libertine sexuality as well as numerous accusations of sex crimes. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts. In his lifetime some of these were published under his own name while others, which Sade denied having written, appeared anonymously. Sade is best known for his erotic works, which combined philosophical discourse with pornography, depicting sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence, suffering, anal sex (which he calls sodomy), child rape, crime, and blasphemy against Christianity. Many of the characters in his works are teenagers or adolescents. His work is a depiction of extreme absolute freedom, unrestrained by morality, religion, or law. The words ''sadism'' and '' sadist'' are derived from his name in reference to the works of f ...
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Sunday Times
''The Sunday Times'' is a British newspaper whose circulation makes it the largest in Britain's quality press market category. It was founded in 1821 as ''The New Observer''. It is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News UK, which is owned by News Corp. Times Newspapers also publishes ''The Times''. The two papers were founded independently and have been under common ownership since 1966. They were bought by News International in 1981. ''The Sunday Times'' has a circulation of just over 650,000, which exceeds that of its main rivals, including ''The'' ''Sunday Telegraph'' and ''The'' ''Observer'', combined. While some other national newspapers moved to a tabloid format in the early 2000s, ''The Sunday Times'' has retained the larger broadsheet format and has said that it would continue to do so. As of December 2019, it sells 75% more copies than its sister paper, ''The Times'', which is published from Monday to Saturday. The paper publishes ''The Sunday Times ...
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Sunday Telegraph
''The Sunday Telegraph'' is a British broadsheet newspaper, founded in February 1961 and published by the Telegraph Media Group, a division of Press Holdings. It is the sister paper of ''The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally. It was fo ...'', also published by the Telegraph Media Group. ''The Sunday Telegraph'' was originally a separate operation with a different editorial staff, but since 2013 the ''Telegraph'' has been a seven-day operation. Digital edition A digital only Christmas edition will be free on Christmas Day in 2022 like in 2005, 2011 and 2016. See also * References External links * 1961 establishments in England Publications established in 1961 Sunday newspapers published in the United Kingdom Telegraph Media Group {{UK-new ...
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Great Expectations
''Great Expectations'' is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (Great Expectations), Pip (the book is a ''bildungsroman''; a coming-of-age story). It is Dickens' second novel, after ''David Copperfield'', to be fully narrated in the first person.''Bleak House'' alternates between a third-person narrator and a first-person narrator, Esther Summerson, but the former is predominant. The novel was first published as a serial (literature), serial in Dickens's weekly periodical ''All the Year Round'', from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes. The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens's most celebrated scenes, starting in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch. ''Great Expectations'' is full of extreme imagery – poverty, prison ...
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Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today. Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school at the age of 12 to work in a boot-blacking factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. After three years he returned to school, before he began his literary career as a journalist. Dickens edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed readings extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, for education, and for other social ...
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Miss Havisham
Miss Havisham is a character in the Charles Dickens novel ''Great Expectations'' (1861). She is a wealthy spinster, once jilted at the altar, who insists on wearing her wedding dress for the rest of her life. She lives in a ruined mansion with her adopted daughter, Estella. Dickens describes her as looking like "the witch of the place". Although she has often been portrayed in film versions as very elderly, Dickens's own notes indicate that she is only in her mid-thirties at the start of the novel. However, it is indicated in the novel that her long seclusion without sunlight has aged her. She is one of the most gothic characters in the work of Dickens. Character history Miss Havisham's father was a wealthy brewer and her mother died shortly after she was born. Her father remarried and had an illegitimate son, Arthur, with the household cook. Miss Havisham's relationship with her half-brother was a strained one. She inherited most of her father's fortune and fell in love w ...
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Richard Jefferies
John Richard Jefferies (6 November 1848 – 14 August 1887) was an English nature writer, noted for his depiction of English rural life in essays, books of natural history, and novels. His childhood on a small Wiltshire farm had a great influence on him and provides the background to all his major works of fiction. Jefferies's corpus of writings covers a range of genres and topics, including ''Bevis'' (1882), a classic children's book, and ''After London'' (1885), a work of science fiction. For much of his adult life he suffered from tuberculosis, and his struggles with the illness and with poverty also play a role in his writing. Jefferies valued and cultivated an intensity of feeling in his experience of the world around him, a cultivation that he describes in detail in '' The Story of My Heart'' (1883). This work, an introspective depiction of his thoughts and feelings about the world, gained him the reputation of a nature mystic at the time, but it is his success in convey ...
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Le Grand Meaulnes
''Le Grand Meaulnes'' () is the only novel by French author Alain-Fournier, who was killed in the first month of World War I. The novel, published in 1913, a year before the author's death, is somewhat autobiographical – especially the name of the heroine Yvonne, for whom he had a doomed infatuation in Paris. Fifteen-year-old François Seurel narrates the story of his friendship with seventeen-year-old Augustin Meaulnes as Meaulnes searches for his lost love. Impulsive, reckless and heroic, Meaulnes embodies the romantic ideal, the search for the unobtainable, and the mysterious world between childhood and adulthood. Title The title, , is French for "The Great Meaulnes". The difficulties in translating the French ''grand'' (meaning big, tall, great, etc.) and ''le domaine perdu'' ("lost estate/domain/demesne") have led to a variety of English titles, including ''The Wanderer'', ''The Lost Domain'', ''Meaulnes: The Lost Domain'', ''The Wanderer or The End of Youth'', ''Le Grand ...
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