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William Plomer
William Charles Franklyn Plomer (10 December 1903 – 20 September 1973) was a South African and British novelist, poet and literary editor. He also wrote a series of librettos for Benjamin Britten. He wrote some of his poetry under the pseudonym Robert Pagan. Born of British parents in Transvaal Colony, he moved to England in 1929 after spending a few years in Japan. Although not as well known as many of his peers, he is recognised as a modernist and his work was highly esteemed by other writers, including Virginia Woolf and Nadine Gordimer. He was homosexual, and at least one of his novels portrays a gay relationship, but whether he lived as openly gay himself is unclear. Early life: South Africa Plomer was born in Pietersburg, in the Transvaal Colony (now Polokwane in the Limpopo Province of South Africa) on 10 December 1903, to Charles Campbell Plomer (d. 1955) and Edythe, daughter of farmer Edward Waite-Browne. His parents were English; his father was a colonial civil se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Plomer
William Charles Franklyn Plomer (10 December 1903 – 20 September 1973) was a South African and British novelist, poet and literary editor. He also wrote a series of librettos for Benjamin Britten. He wrote some of his poetry under the pseudonym Robert Pagan. Born of British parents in Transvaal Colony, he moved to England in 1929 after spending a few years in Japan. Although not as well known as many of his peers, he is recognised as a modernist and his work was highly esteemed by other writers, including Virginia Woolf and Nadine Gordimer. He was homosexual, and at least one of his novels portrays a gay relationship, but whether he lived as openly gay himself is unclear. Early life: South Africa Plomer was born in Pietersburg, in the Transvaal Colony (now Polokwane in the Limpopo Province of South Africa) on 10 December 1903, to Charles Campbell Plomer (d. 1955) and Edythe, daughter of farmer Edward Waite-Browne. His parents were English; his father was a colonial civil se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tower Of London
The Tower of London, officially His Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London, is a historic castle on the north bank of the River Thames in central London. It lies within the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, which is separated from the eastern edge of the square mile of the City of London by the open space known as Tower Hill. It was founded towards the end of 1066 as part of the Norman Conquest. The White Tower (Tower of London), White Tower, which gives the entire castle its name, was built by William the Conqueror in 1078 and was a resented symbol of oppression, inflicted upon London by the new Normans, Norman ruling class. The castle was also used as a prison from 1100 (Ranulf Flambard) until 1952 (Kray twins), although that was not its primary purpose. A grand palace early in its history, it served as a royal residence. As a whole, the Tower is a complex of several buildings set within two concentric rings of defensive walls and a moat. There were severa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stephen Spender
Sir Stephen Harold Spender (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995) was an English poet, novelist and essayist whose work concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by the United States Library of Congress in 1965. Early life Spender was born in Kensington, London, to journalist Harold Spender and Violet Hilda Schuster, a painter and poet, of German Jewish heritage. He went first to Hall School in Hampstead and then at 13 to Gresham's School, Holt and later Charlecote School in Worthing, but he was unhappy there. On the death of his mother, he was transferred to University College School (Hampstead), which he later described as "that gentlest of schools". Spender left for Nantes and Lausanne and then went up to University College, Oxford (much later, in 1973, he was made an honorary fellow). Spender said at various times throughout his life that he never passed any exam. Perhaps his closest friend and th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christopher Isherwood
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include '' Goodbye to Berlin'' (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel which inspired the musical ''Cabaret''; ''A Single Man'' (1964), adapted as a film by Tom Ford in 2009; and '' Christopher and His Kind'' (1976), a memoir which "carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement". Biography Early life and work Isherwood was born in 1904 on his family's estate in Cheshire near Stockport in the north-west of England. He was the elder son of Francis Edward Bradshaw Isherwood (1869–1915), known as Frank, a professional soldier in the York and Lancaster Regiment, and Kathleen Bradshaw Isherwood, nee Machell Smith (1868–1960), the only daughter of a successful wine merchant. He was the grandson of John Henry Isherwood, squire of Marple Hall and Wyberslegh Hall, Cheshire, and he included ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Leonard Woolf
Leonard Sidney Woolf (; – ) was a British political theorist, author, publisher, and civil servant. He was married to author Virginia Woolf. As a member of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society, Woolf was an avid publisher of his own work and his wife's novels. A writer himself, Woolf created nineteen individual works and wrote six autobiographies. Leonard and Virginia did not have any children. Early life Woolf was born in London in 1880 the third of ten children of Solomon Rees Sidney Woolf (known as Sidney Woolf), a barrister and Queen's Counsel, and Marie (née de Jongh). His family was Jewish. After his father died in 1892, Woolf was sent to board at Arlington House School near Brighton, Sussex. From 1894 to 1899, he attended St Paul's School, and in 1899 he won a classical scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected to the Cambridge Apostles. Other contemporary members included Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, G. E. Moore, and E. M. Forst ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national republics; in practice, both its government and its economy were highly centralized until its final years. It was a one-party state governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with the city of Moscow serving as its capital as well as that of its largest and most populous republic: the Russian SFSR. Other major cities included Leningrad (Russian SFSR), Kiev (Ukrainian SSR), Minsk ( Byelorussian SSR), Tashkent (Uzbek SSR), Alma-Ata (Kazakh SSR), and Novosibirsk (Russian SFSR). It was the largest country in the world, covering over and spanning eleven time zones. The country's roots lay in the October Revolution of 1917, when the Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Russian Provisional Government ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sherard Vines
Walter Sherard Vines (1890–1974), known as Sherard Vines, was an English author and academic. He began publishing poetry in the 1910s, then in the 1920s spent five years teaching at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan. While in Japan and after his return to England, where he took up a post at University College Hull, he continued to publish poetry, fiction and criticism. His works include ''The Course of English Classicism from the Tudor to Victorian Age'' (1930), a study of classicism in British art; ''Yofuku, or, Japan in Trousers'' (1931), a travel book about his experiences in Japan which was critical of aspects of Japanese culture; and ''A Hundred Years of English Literature'' (1959), a survey of the literature of Britain, the British Empire and the United States. Early life and career Sherard Vines was born in Oxford in 1890. His father, Sydney Howard Vines, was Sherardian Professor of Botany at the University of Oxford and named his son after William Sherard. He attended ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Natal Witness
''The Witness'' (previously ''The Natal Witness'') is a daily newspaper published in Pietermaritzburg. It mainly serves readers in Pietermaritzburg, Durban and the inland areas of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It is the oldest continuously published newspaper in South Africa, having first been published on 27 February 1846. Until 2000, when it became 50 percent owned by the Naspers subsidiary Media24 group, it was the last independently owned mainstream daily newspaper in South Africa. Media24 signed an agreement to buy the remaining 50% shares in the Natal Witness Printing and Publishing company in July 2010. History The Buchanan years, 1846–1872 The founding editor and first proprietor of the newspaper was David Dale Buchanan, who was born in New Lanark, Scotland on 17 December 1817. In 1829 at age 12 he arrived in Cape Town in the company of his elder brother, William. In Cape Town, he came into contact with men like Thomas Pringle and John Fairbairn who played a promi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zulu Language
Zulu (), or isiZulu as an endonym, is a Southern Bantu language of the Nguni branch spoken in Southern Africa. It is the language of the Zulu people, with about 12 million native speakers, who primarily inhabit the province of KwaZulu-Natal of South Africa. Zulu is the most widely spoken home language in South Africa (24% of the population), and it is understood by over 50% of its population. It became one of South Africa's 11 official languages in 1994. According to Ethnologue, it is the second-most-widely spoken of the Bantu languages, after Swahili. Like many other Bantu languages, it is written with the Latin alphabet. In South African English, the language is often referred to in its native form, ''isiZulu''. Geographical distribution Zulu migrant populations have taken it to adjacent regions, especially Zimbabwe, where the Northern Ndebele language ( isiNdebele) is closely related to Zulu. Xhosa, the predominant language in the Eastern Cape, is often considered ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Afrikaans
Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans gradually began to develop distinguishing characteristics during the course of the 18th century. Now spoken in South Africa, Namibia and (to a lesser extent) Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, estimates circa 2010 of the total number of Afrikaans speakers range between 15 and 23 million. Most linguists consider Afrikaans to be a partly creole language. An estimated 90 to 95% of the vocabulary is of Dutch origin with adopted words from other languages including German and the Khoisan languages of Southern Africa. Differences with Dutch include a more analytic-type morphology and grammar, and some pronunciations. There is a large degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages, especially in written form. About 13.5% of the South ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Laurens Van Der Post
Sir Laurens Jan van der Post, (13 December 1906 – 15 December 1996) was a South African Afrikaner writer, farmer, soldier, educator, journalist, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer and conservationist. He was noted for his interest in Jungianism and the Kalahari Bushmen, his experiences during World War II, as well as his relationships with notable figures such as the future King Charles III and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. After his death, there was controversy over claims that he had exaggerated many aspects of his life, as well his sexual abuse and impregnation of a 14-year-old girl. Biography Early years and education Van der Post was born in the small town of Philippolis in the Orange River Colony, the post-Boer War British name for what had previously been the Afrikaner Orange Free State in what is today South Africa. His father, Christiaan Willem Hendrik van der Post (1856–1914), a Hollander from Leiden, had emigrated to South Africa with his parents ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Roy Campbell (Poet)
Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell, better known as Roy Campbell (2 October 1901 – 23 April 1957), was a South African poet, literary critic, literary translator, war poet, and satirist. Born into a White South African family of Scottish descent in Durban, Colony of Natal, Campbell was sent to England to attend Oxford University. Instead, Campbell drifted into London's literary bohemia. Following his marriage to bohemian Mary Garman, Campbell wrote the well-received poem ''The Flaming Terrapin'' which brought the Campbells into the highest circles of British literature. After supporting racial equality during a stay in South Africa as editor of the literary magazine ''Voorslag'', Campbell returned to England and became involved with the Bloomsbury Group. Campbell ultimately decided that the Bloomsbury Group was snobbish, promiscuous, nihilistic, and anti-Christian. Campbell lampooned them in a mock-epic poem called ''The Georgiad'', which damaged Campbell's reputation in l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
