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Undercut (novel)
''The Word of a Gentleman'' (1981) (later retitled ''Undercut'') was the third of five novels written by Peter Niesewand, the South African journalist who spent 73 days in solitary confinement for his coverage of Ian Smith's government in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Set in the fictional former British colony of St David's Island, it has no principal protagonists beyond the corrupt trio of Claud Montrose, Alec Clifton, and Stephen Luther, but the subversive influence of the American agent Clive Lyle is progressively revealed as the story unfolds. The fate of the unjustly imprisoned Stephen Ayer and his wife Nora are the focus of many chapters (and the book opens with a quotation from Oscar Wilde's ''The Ballad of Reading Gaol''); these reflect Niesewand's detention by Desmond Lardner-Burke under P. K. van der Byl and Smith Smith may refer to: People * Metalsmith, or simply smith, a craftsman fashioning tools or works of art out of various metals * Smith (given name) * Smith (sur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Niesewand
Peter Joseph Niesewand (30 June 1944 – 4 February 1983), journalist and novelist, was born in South Africa but grew up in Rhodesia where he ran a news bureau, filing for the BBC, United Press, AFP, and many newspapers, notably the Guardian. On 20 February 1973 he was arrested and spent 73 days in solitary confinement for his criticism of conditions under Ian Smith's government and his coverage of the guerrilla war. His sentence of two years hard labour for revealing official secrets was commuted on appeal after an international outcry. He was deported on release from prison, and left with his wife of three years, Nonie, and young son Oliver. He emigrated to the United Kingdom to complete his only non-fiction book, "''In Camera: Secret Justice in Rhodesia''", and was named 1973 International Journalist of the Year, an award he won again in 1976 for his coverage of the Lebanese civil war, again for the ''Guardian''. As their Asia correspondent he also covered the 1979 Soviet ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
South Africa
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countries of Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe; and to the east and northeast by Mozambique and Eswatini. It also completely enclaves the country Lesotho. It is the southernmost country on the mainland of the Old World, and the second-most populous country located entirely south of the equator, after Tanzania. South Africa is a biodiversity hotspot, with unique biomes, plant and animal life. With over 60 million people, the country is the world's 24th-most populous nation and covers an area of . South Africa has three capital cities, with the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government based in Pretoria, Bloemfontein, and Cape Town respectively. The largest city is Johannesburg. About 80% of the population are Black South Afri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ian Smith
Ian Douglas Smith (8 April 1919 – 20 November 2007) was a Rhodesian politician, farmer, and fighter pilot who served as Prime Minister of Rhodesia (known as Southern Rhodesia until October 1964 and now known as Zimbabwe) from 1964 to 1979. He was the country's first premier not born abroad, and led the predominantly white government that unilaterally declared independence from the United Kingdom in November 1965 following prolonged dispute over the terms, particularly British demands for black majority rule. He remained Prime Minister for almost all of the 14 years of international isolation that followed, and oversaw Rhodesia's security forces during most of the Bush War, which pitted the unrecognised administration against communist-backed black nationalist guerrilla groups. Smith, who has been described as personifying white Rhodesia, remains a highly controversial figure. Smith was born to British immigrants in Selukwe, a small town in the Southern Rhodesian ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rhodesia
Rhodesia (, ), officially from 1970 the Republic of Rhodesia, was an unrecognised state in Southern Africa from 1965 to 1979, equivalent in territory to modern Zimbabwe. Rhodesia was the ''de facto'' successor state to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, which had been self-governing since achieving responsible government in 1923. A landlocked nation, Rhodesia was bordered by South Africa to the south, Bechuanaland (later Botswana) to the southwest, Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia) to the northwest, and Mozambique ( a Portuguese province until 1975) to the east. From 1965 to 1979, Rhodesia was one of two independent states on the African continent governed by a white minority of European descent and culture, the other being South Africa. In the late 19th century, the territory north of the Transvaal was chartered to the British South Africa Company, led by Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes and his Pioneer Column marched north in 1890, acquiring a huge block of territory that ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe (), officially the Republic of Zimbabwe, is a landlocked country located in Southeast Africa, between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers, bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the south-west, Zambia to the north, and Mozambique to the east. The capital and largest city is Harare. The second largest city is Bulawayo. A country of roughly 15 million people, Zimbabwe has 16 official languages, with English, Shona language, Shona, and Northern Ndebele language, Ndebele the most common. Beginning in the 9th century, during its late Iron Age, the Bantu peoples, Bantu people (who would become the ethnic Shona people, Shona) built the city-state of Great Zimbabwe which became one of the major African trade centres by the 11th century, controlling the gold, ivory and copper trades with the Swahili coast, which were connected to Arab and Indian states. By the mid 15th century, the city-state had been abandoned. From there, the Kingdom of Zimbabwe was established, fol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Clive Lyle
Clive Lyle is a fictional character appearing in the last three of the five novels written by Peter Niesewand, the late South African journalist who spent 73 days in solitary confinement for his coverage of the last years of Ian Smith's government in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He features as a United States agent, working variously for the CIA and the DIA, and he uses his ambiguous (or perhaps merely ambivalent) sexuality ("Is that omosexualitytrue about you, Clive?" / "Not necessarily") to great advantage in '' The Word of a Gentleman'' and, more generally, on the face of it seems to treat sexual activity as not much more than simply a means to an end - notwithstanding an intriguing scene in Niesewand's fourth novel, 'Fallback', in which a presumably inebriated Lyle, hosting a (very unimpressed) male intimate, recklessly causes beer to be spilled on his own carpet, apparently without regret. Lyle contrasts sharply with the recognisably humane David Cane in '' Fallback'': Cane is sa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel ''The Picture of Dorian Gray'', and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46. Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. A young Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, Wilde read Literae Humaniores#Greats, Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional Classics, classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Ballad Of Reading Gaol
''The Ballad of Reading Gaol'' is a poem by Oscar Wilde, written in exile in Berneval-le-Grand, after his release from Reading Gaol () on 19 May 1897. Wilde had been incarcerated in Reading after being convicted of gross indecency with other men in 1895 and sentenced to two years' hard labour in prison. During his imprisonment, on Tuesday, 7 July 1896, a hanging took place. Charles Thomas Wooldridge had been a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards. He was convicted of cutting the throat of his wife, Laura Ellen,GRO Register of Deaths: JUN qtr 1896 Wooldridge, Laura Ellen aged 23 Windsor 2c 241 earlier that year at Clewer, near Windsor. He was aged 30 when executed.GRO Register of Deaths: SEP qtr 1896 Wooldridge, Charles Thomas aged 30 Reading 2c 210 Wilde wrote the poem in mid-1897 while staying with Robert Ross in Berneval-le-Grand. The poem narrates the execution of Wooldridge; it moves from an objective story-telling to symbolic identification with the prisoners as a whole. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Des Lardner-Burke
Desmond William Lardner-Burke ID (17 October 1909 – 1984) was a politician in Rhodesia. Early years Desmond Lardner-Burke was born in Kimberley in the Cape of Good Hope on 17 October 1909, and was educated at St. Andrew's College, Grahamstown. Lardner-Burke became a lawyer. He became a leading member of the Dominion Party, and in 1957 was a founder member of the Southern Rhodesian Association, of which he soon became leader. In 1962, this merged with Ian Smith's United Group and other organisations to found the Rhodesian Front, of which he was a prominent member. Lardner-Burke was a supporter of white supremacy, and claimed to support the views of Cecil Rhodes. In 1971, he preached a sermon from the pulpit of the Cathedral of St Mary and All Saints, Salisbury, in which he claimed that Christ had never declared that everyone was equal, nor that everyone was entitled to equal treatment. He attempted to illustrate how Christian theology could be shown to support apartheid. At ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nonie Niesewand
Nonie may refer to: * 2382 Nonie, a main-belt asteroid * Nonie Buencamino (born 1966), a Filipino actor * Nonie Darwish Nonie Darwish ( ar, نوني درويش; born Nahid Darwish, 1949) is an Egyptian-American writer, founder of ''Arabs for Israel'' movement, and is Director of Former Muslims United. Darwish is an outspoken critic of Islam. The Southern Poverty L ... (born 1949), an Egyptian-American human rights activist * Nonie Lynch (born Nonie Crawford; 1910–2011), an Irish traditional singer * Nonie May Stewart Worthington Leeds (1878-1923), a wealthy American heiress * Ruth Winona Tao (a.k.a. Nonie Tao, born 1963), an American-born Chinese film actress {{disambiguation, given name ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1981 Novels
Events January * January 1 ** Greece enters the European Economic Community, predecessor of the European Union. ** Palau becomes a self-governing territory. * January 10 – Salvadoran Civil War: The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, FMLN launches its first major offensive, gaining control of most of Morazán Department, Morazán and Chalatenango Department, Chalatenango departments. * January 15 – Pope John Paul II receives a delegation led by Polish Solidarity (Polish trade union), Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa at the Vatican City, Vatican. * January 20 – Iran releases the 52 Americans held for 444 days, minutes after Ronald Reagan is First inauguration of Ronald Reagan, sworn in as the 40th President of the United States, ending the Iran hostage crisis. * January 21 – The first DMC DeLorean, DeLorean automobile, a stainless steel sports car with gull-wing doors, rolls off the production line in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland. * January 24 – An 1981 Dawu ea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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