J Reeves British poet, born in London, educated at Jesus College, Oxford.

From 1932 to 1952 he taught English in a number of schools and teachers' training colleges, subsequently becoming a freelance author and editor. His first collection of poems, The Natural Need, was published in 1936 by the Seizin Press, run by Robert Graves and Laura Riding, whose work Reeves's early poetry sometimes resembles. Numerous further volumes include The Imprisoned Sea (1949), The Talking Skull (1958), and Poems and Paraphrases (1972); Collected Poems of 1974 is the fullest edition of his verse. His best work characteristically combines intensity of mood with an understated manner to distinctive and sometimes haunting lyrical effect. The rural descriptiveness of his less distinguished poetry is elsewhere the vehicle for an ironic pastoralism voicing his disaffection with urban modernity. His popular books of poetry for children were collected as The Wandering Moon and Other Poems (1973). As an editor, Reeves was prolific, producing many anthologies of prose and poetry, as well as selections from the work of Donne, Hopkins, Clare, and others.

Robert Frost
American poet, born in San Francisco; he grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, after the death of his father, a newspaper editor originally from New England, and was educated at Lawrence High school, where he was elected class poet in his final year. He attended Dartmouth College in 1892 and, having worked as a cobbler, a farmer, and editor of a local newspaper, studied at Harvard from 1897 to 1899. Following the appearance of one of his poems in the New York Independent in 1894 he privately published Twilight (1894) and began to concern himself with making his reputation as a poet. Receiving no encouragement in America, he travelled to Britain in 1912 and became acquainted with a number of the poets associated with the Georgian movement; he was closest to Edward Thomas, encouraging him as a poet and later describing him as the only brother I ever had. Two collections of his poetry, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), which firmly determine the New England regionalism of his uvre, appeared in England to favourable critical receptions; on his return to the USA in 1915 he was recognized as an established literary figure, a position he consolidated with the publication of Mountain Interval (1916)

Wilfred owen British poet, born at Plas Wilmot, Oswestry, Shropshire, the son of a railway official; he was educated at Shrewsbury Technical School. Having failed to win a scholarship to London University, in 1911 he became a lay assistant to the vicar of Dunsden, near Reading, and subsequently taught English in Bordeaux. He volunteered for active service in 1915 and was eventually commissioned into the Manchester Regiment. After sustaining shell-shock in the Battle of the Somme, he was sent to Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh in 1917, where he edited The Hydra, the hospital's magazine, and became friendly with Siegfried Sassoon, who later introduced him to Robert Graves. In August 1918 he returned to France and was awarded the Military Cross in the following month for gallantry under fire; he was killed one week before the Armistice in November 1918. Although Owen saw only four of his poems in print, in The Hydra, The Bookman, and The Nation, he had written much accomplished poetry, frequently reflecting his devoted admiration for Keats, before he joined the army. He worked intensely on his poetry of the war at Craiglockhart Hospital, where Sassoon assisted him in developing his harrowing realism. Certain poems, among them Inspection and The Chances, adopt the dramatically straightforward manner Sassoon devised to shock the complacent into awareness of conditions in the trenches. The emotional and imaginative range of his finest work is, however, much greater than Sassoon's. Dulce et Decorum Est, Futility, Anthem for Doomed Youth, and Strange Meeting are among the best-known of his richly elegiac evocations of the horror, futility, and pity of the war, their understated moral outrage inseparable from a compassionate depth of appeal to the humane instincts of the reader. His poetry is also remarkable for the power of its imagery and the great virtuosity of its metrical and musical effects. The editions of his poems prepared by Sassoon in 1920 and Blunden in 1931 established him as a major poet. The Complete Poems and Fragments (two volumes, 1983) was edited by Jon Stallworthy, whose biography of Owen appeared in 1974; the Collected Letters (1967) was edited by John Bell and Harold Owen, the poet's brother, whose Journey from Obscurity (19635) is a threevolume memoir of his family. See also war poetry.

Anderw motion British poet, biographer, and critic, born in London, educated at University College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry in 1975. After lecturing at the University of Hull, he edited Poetry Review until 1983, when he entered publishing, becoming an editor with Faber and Faber in 1989. In 1995 he succeeded Malcolm Bradbury as Chair of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. The Pleasure Steamers, his first substantial collection of poetry, appeared in 1978. Subsequent volumes include Secret Narratives (1983), Natural Causes (1987), Love in a Life (1991), and The Price of Everything (1994); a collected edition of his verse entitled Dangerous Play was produced in 1984. His characteristic technique of suggesting narrative coherence through imaginative correspondences of imagery and atmosphere was established early in his work. The suppleness and economy of his style is highly appropriate to the detached elegiac tenor of much of his verse. Natural Causes contains This Is Your Subject Speaking, a finely judged elegy for Philip Larkin, whom Motion knew at Hull; Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, his highly regarded biography of Larkin, appeared in 1993. His works as a critic include The Poetry of Edward Thomas (1980) and Philip Larkin (1982). His novels The Pale Companion (1989) and Famous for the Creatures (1991) successively chart the growth to early adulthood of a main protagonist named Francis Mayne. Among his other publications is the biographical study The Lamberts: George, Constant, and Kit (1986). With Blake Morrison, he edited The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982).

Thomas hardy British novelist and poet, born at Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester, Dorset, educated at the school in Dorchester run by the British and Foreign School Society. From 1856 to 1861 he was articled to a Dorchester ecclesiastical architect whose office was next door to the school run by William Barnes (180186), the Dorset dialect poet; with Barnes as his mentor, Hardy began writing verse at the age of 17. He worked for an architectural practice in London from 1862 to 1867, when he returned to his former position in Dorchester. Although he had formerly considered taking Holy Orders, at this time he became an agnostic. He completed The Poor Man and the Lady, his first novel, in 1868; the publishers Chapman and Hall showed interest, but their reader, George Meredith (18281909), advised against publication; the manuscript was eventually lost. Desperate Remedies (1871), his first novel to be published, was followed by Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873). Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), a work of great dramatic power and imaginative scope which deals with the destructive effects of sexual obsession, made clear his stature as a novelist. Its success enabled him to give up architecture for writing and to marry Emma Gifford, whom he had met on an architectural assignment at St Juliot, Cornwall, in 1874. Considerable strains eventually developed in the marriage; Emma's psychological instability, to which veiled allusions are thought to be made in the poem The Interloper, was among the causes. They took up residence in Max Gate, an imposing house near Dorchester built to Hardy's own design, in 1887. During its construction he worked on The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), which marked an advance in his artistry in the authenticity of its social and economic dimensions and the deeply compelling characterization of its tragic hero Michael Henchard. The compassionate presentation of Tess as a victim of conventional Victorian morality in Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), often regarded as his finest novel, gave rise to the controversy with which the book was received; for some reviewers it established Hardy as the greatest novelist of the day, while others denigrated it as unhealthily pessimistic and immoral. Such hostility intensified with the publication of his uncompromising treatment of the modern vice of unrest in Jude the Obscure (1895), in which the hero's unfulfilled desire for educational advancement is seen in the context of the decaying traditions of rural society. He later described the reception of Jude the Obscure as an experience completely curing me of further interest in novel-writing; there are, however, grounds for concluding that he felt he had completed his work as a novelist and wished to devote himself to poetry, which he had continued to write throughout his career

Seamus Heaney Irish poet and critic, born in Castledawson, Co. Derry, educated at Queen's University, Belfast, where he began lecturing in 1966. During the early 1960s he was part of the Belfast writers' group run by Philip Hobsbaum and was closely associated with the emergence of Ulster poetry. He moved to Glanmore in Country Wicklow in 1972 to devote himself to writing. Following a succession of visiting appointments at American universities, he became Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard in 1986 and was elected Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1989. His first two collections of verse, Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969), reflect his agricultural background with an immediacy and authenticity for which the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh a rural Irish precedent. Throughout his career he has continued to make remarkably full and varied use of themes and images drawn from his native locality. Ireland's troubled history and Heaney's uneasy identity as an Irish Catholic writer with firm allegiances to the English literary tradition assume increasing significance in his earlier volumes. The outbreak of sectarian violence in Ulster in 1969 was registered deeply in Wintering Out (1972). The collection initiated the imaginative engagement with the landscape of the peat bogs as a means of comprehending contemporary events which is sustained and intensified in North (1975). His sense of personal implication in Ulster's upheaval was explored at this time through the recollections of childhood in the prose poems of Stations (1975). A more private and lyrically meditative manner is resumed in Field Work (1979); the volume contains several memorable elegies for victims of sectarian killings, anticipating some of the Dantean dialogues with the dead in the title sequence of Station Island (1984). The collection contains a wide range of material amounting to a thorough survey of all his principal concerns; the twelve poems of Station Island involve him in an ordeal of confronting his origins and obligations, repeatedly through dramatically imagined encounters with the dead, who include the ghosts of Kavanagh and James Joyce. The book concludes with a new assertion of artistic freedom which is maintained in the liberating imaginative scope and heightened technical virtuosity of The Haw Lantern (1987) and Seeing Things (1991). His New Selected Poems, 1966 1987 appeared in 1990. Other works by Heaney include Sweeney Astray (1983), a version of the medieval Irish Buile Suibhne, of which a revised illustrated version appeared as Sweeney's Flight (1993). He has also gained a high reputation as a critic, showing a wide knowledge of European and American, as well as English and Irish, poetries in the collected essays of Preoccupations (1980) and The Government of the Tongue (1988). Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

Alan brownjohn British poet, born in Catford, South London, educated at Merton College, Oxford. After working as a schoolteacher from 1957 to 1965, he was a senior lecturer at Battersea College of Education until 1979, when he became a freelance writer. He was chairman of the Poetry Society from 1982 to 1988. He is one of the foremost poets to have been associated with the Group. His first substantial publication as a poet was The Railings (1961); succeeding volumes have included Sandgrains on a Tray (1969), A Song of Good Life (1975), A Night in the Gazebo (1980), Collected Poems 1952 1986 (1988), The Observation Car (1990), and In the Cruel Arcade (1994). On the cover-notes to The Railings, Brownjohn identified the principal concerns of his poetry as love, politics, culture, time, themes which have remained central throughout his work. The socialist beliefs informing much of his verse are inseparable from the individuality and humanity with which he conducts his investigations of the quality of life. Contemplative, documentary, and satirical modes are characteristic of his writing, which is noted for its technical scrupulousness, intelligence, and understated wit. The best-known of his numerous books for children is Brownjohn's Beasts (1970). His first novel, The Way You Tell Them, subtitled a yarn of the nineties, appeared in 1990. Among his other publications is a version of Goethe's Torquato Tasso (1985) and the critical study Philip Larkin (1975).

Robert hayden African-American poet, born in Detroit, educated at Wayne State University and the University of Michigan; he taught English at Fisk University before returning to the University of Michigan in 1968. In 1976 Hayden became the first African-American to be appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He worked as a researcher for the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration (19368) and the facts of African-American history with which he dealt formed the substance of much of his later poetry. Prominent historical black figures like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Nat Turner combine with more recent figures like Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, and Bessie Smith and with personal recollections. Elegies for Paradise Valley is a sequence of poems that recreate the Detroit neighbourhood in which Hayden grew up. The historical imagination is central to Hayden's work, especially in poems like Middle Passage, a collage which dramatizes through multiple voices a range of accounts of slavery focusing upon the conditions aboard the slave ship The Armistad and the slave-led rebellion that symbolizes the conflict between oppression and the indomitable desire for freedom. Hayden deliberately wrote of themes other than racial conflict and African-American history and culture: he adhered closely to the belief that poetry should speak universally and that the representation of a particular political moment should be such that it carries universal relevance. His collections include Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940), Figures of Time: Poems (1955), A Ballad of Remembrance (1962), Selected Poems (1966), Words in the Mourning Time (1970), Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems (1975), American Journal (1978), Collected Prose (1984), and Collected Poems (1985).

Sacha guitry French actor, dramatist and director, Sacha Guitry was born in 1885 in Saint-Petersburg where his father, actor Lucien Guitry, was under contract with the city's French theater. Early on, Sacha knew he was going to be an artist. Therefore, his studies were mediocre. His acting debuts were not too encouraging either. It is as playwright that Guitry obtained his first success in 1905 with two comedies, the one act play 'Le K.W.T.Z' and the full-length play 'Nono'. Guitry's career as dramatist was launched. In the following years, he became a particularly prolific and popular writer, mostly of spiritual, caustic comedies. In 1907, Guitry went back on stage to act in his own play 'Chez les Zoaques' and would perform in most of his subsequent plays. In 1916, he directed his first film, 'Ceux de chez nous', a patriotic documentary illustrating the works of some French artists like Auguste Renoir or Auguste Rodin. In 1917, he wrote and played in the movie 'Un Roman d'amour et d'aventures' under the direction of Ren Hervil and Louis Mercanton, an experience that left him unsatisfied. It is only in 1935 that he came back in the movie studio to direct and act in 'Pasteur', a biography of the famous scientific. The film, based on a play Guitry wrote in 1919, was a commercial failure, but during the shooting, Guitry fell in love with the process of filmmaking. From then on, he would continue to write and act in new stage plays, but making movie also became an important part of his life. He followed 'Pasteur' with 'Bonne chance', a comedy written directly for the screen. In 1936 alone, Guitry released no less than four movies, including the film versions of two of his best known plays: 'Faisons un rve' (written in 1916), and 'Mon Pre avait raison' (written in 1919). He also directed 'Le Roman d'un tricheur', this time from a short story he published in 1934. Despite lukewarm reviews, the movie was well received by the public and was also successful in the USA. It is now considered his most innovative film. In 1937, he wrote 'Les perles de la couronne', and co-directed it with Christian-Jacque. An ambitious and expensive historical fantasy featuring a prestigious casting, the film was both a critical and commercial success. Guitry continued in the same vein the following year with 'Remontons les Champs lyses'. The Second World War didn't stop his activities. During the occupation, he notably directed and played in the historical film 'Le Destin fabuleux de Dsir Clary' (1942), the sentimental drama 'Donne-moi tes yeux' (1943) and the biography 'La Malibran' (1944).

It is well established that during that period, Guitry had occasional contacts with members of the occupying forces, though he worked only with French independents producers, didn't allowed his plays to be performed in Germany, and had some problems with the German censorship. But he also managed to maintain a lavish lifestyle that was in sharp contrast with the life of deprivation that was the fate of most of his contemporaries.

William wordsworth William Wordsworth (1770-1850), British poet, credited with ushering in the English Romantic Movement with the publication of Lyrical Ballads(1798) in collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the Lake District. His father was John Wordsworth, Sir James Lowther's attorney. The magnificent landscape deeply affected Wordsworth's imagination and gave him a love of nature. He lost his mother when he was eight and five years later his father. The domestic problems separated Wordsworth from his beloved and neurotic sister Dorothy, who was a very important person in his life. With the help of his two uncles, Wordsworth entered a local school and continued his studies at Cambridge University. Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787, when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine . In that same year he entered St. John's College, Cambridge, from where he took his B.A. in 1791. During a summer vacation in 1790 Wordsworth went on a walking tour through revolutionary France and also traveled in Switzerland. On his second journey in France, Wordsworth had an affair with a French girl, Annette Vallon, a daughter of a barber-surgeon, by whom he had a illegitimate daughter Anne Caroline. The affair was basis of the poem "Vaudracour and Julia", but otherwise Wordsworth did his best to hide the affair from posterity.

Nelson mandela Nelson Mandela was born Rolihlahla Mandela on July 18, 1918, in the tiny village of Mvezo, on the banks of the Mbashe River in Transkei, South Africa. "Rolihlahla" in the Xhosa language literally means "pulling the branch of a tree," but more commonly translates as "troublemaker."

Nelson Mandela's father, who was destined to be a chief, served as a counselor to tribal chiefs for several years, but lost both his title and fortune over a dispute with the local colonial magistrate. Mandela was only an infant at the time, and his father's loss of status forced his mother to move the family to Qunu, an even smaller village north of Mvezo. The village was nestled in a narrow grassy valley; there were no roads, only foot paths that linked the pastures where livestock grazed. The family lived in huts and ate a local harvest of maize, sorghum, pumpkin and beans, which was all they could afford. Water came from springs and streams and cooking was done outdoors. Mandela played the games of young boys, acting out male rights-of-passage scenarios with toys he made from the natural materials available, including tree branches and clay.

At the suggestion of one of his father's friends, Mandela was baptized in the Methodist Church. He went on to become the first in his family to attend school. As was custom at the time, and probably due to the bias of the British educational system in South Africa, Mandela's teacher told him that his new first name would be Nelson.

When Mandela was 9 years old, his father died of lung disease, causing his life to change dramatically. He was adopted by Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo, the acting regent of the Thembu peoplea gesture done as a favor to Mandela's father, who, years earlier, had recommended Jongintaba be made chief. Mandela subsequently left the carefree life he knew in Qunu, fearing that he would never see his village again. He traveled by motorcar to Mqhekezweni, the provincial capital of Thembuland, to the chief's royal residence. Though he had not forgotten his beloved village of Qunu, he quickly adapted to the new, more sophisticated surroundings of Mqhekezweni.

Mandela was given the same status and responsibilities as the regent's two other children,

Gerald durrel Gerald Durrell was born in India in 1925. His family settled on Corfu when Durrell was a boy and he spent his time studying its wildlife. He relates these experiences in the trilogy beginning with My Family and Other Animals, and continuing with Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods. In his books he writes with wry humour and great perception about both the humans and the animals he meets.

On leaving Corfu he returned to England to work on the staff of Whipsnade Park as a student keeper. His adventures there are told with characteristic energy in Beasts in My Belfry. A few years later, Durrell began organising his own animal-collecting expeditions

O henry O. Henry (1862-1910) was a prolific American short-story writer, a master of surprise endings, who wrote about the life of ordinary people in New York City. A twist of plot, which turns on an ironic or coincidental circumstance, is typical of O. Henry's stories.

William Sydney Porter (O. Henry) was born in Greensboro, North Carolina. His father, Algernon Sidney Porter, was a physician. When William was three, his mother died, and he was raised by his paternal grandmother and aunt. William was an avid reader, but at the age of fifteen he left school, and then worked in a drug store and on a Texas ranch. He moved to Houston, where he had a number of jobs, including that of bank clerk. After moving to Austin, Texas, in 1882, he married.

In 1884 he started a humorous weekly The Rolling Stone. When the weekly failed, he joined the Houston Post as a reporter and columnist. In 1897 he was convicted of embezzling money, although there has been much debate over his actual guilt. In 1898 he entered a penitentiary at Columbus, Ohio.

While in prison O. Henry started to write short stories to earn money to support his daughter Margaret. His first work, "Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking" (1899), appeared in McClure's Magazine. After doing three years of the five years sentence, Porter emerged from the prison in 1901 and changed his name to O. Henry.

O. Henry moved to New York City in 1902 and from December 1903 to January 1906 he wrote a story a week for the New York World, also publishing in other magazines. Henry's first collection, Cabbages And Kings appeared in 1904. The second, The Four Million, was published two years later and included his well-known stories "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Furnished Room". The Trimmed Lamp (1907) included "The Last Leaf". Henry's best known work is perhaps the much anthologized "The Ransom of Red Chief", included in the collection Whirligigs (1910). The Heart Of The West (1907) presented tales of the Texas range. O. Henry published 10 collections and over 600 short stories during his lifetime.

O. Henry's last years were shadowed by alcoholism, ill health, and financial problems. He married Sara Lindsay Coleman in 1907, but the marriage was not happy, and they separated a year later. O. Henry died of cirrhosis of the liver on June 5, 1910, in New York. Three more collections, Sixes And Sevens (1911), Rolling Stones (1912) and Waifs And Strays (1917), appeared posthumously.

Punyakante wijenaike Punyakante Wijenaike, one of Sri Lanka's best-known English writers, was born in Colombo in 1933. Her writing is recognized for its simple yet powerful style, which holds the reader's attention. She published her first collection of short stories, The Third Woman, in 1963. Since then, she has published six novels and four collections of short stories, with more than 100 stories published in newspapers, journals and anthologies locally and internationally as well as broadcast in Sri Lanka and on BBC.

Although she has spent most of her life in Colombo, she initially used rural villages as her theme, only later turning to urban themes. Her writings highlight, "the tyranny of a community or a group towards its weaker members." Her 1998 novel, An Enemy Within, uncovers "the masks that tend to hide the reality of present times."

Her novel Giraya was adapted into a teledrama. She was awarded the Woman of Achievement Award in 1985. The rank of 'Kalasuri Class 1' (literary achievement) was conferred on her by the Government of Sri Lanka in 1988. In 1994 she won the Gratiaen Award for her novel Amulet and in 1996, the Commonwealth Short Story Competition for Radio along with a joint winner from Sierra Leone.

Frances ellen Watkins harper Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (September 24, 1825 February 22, 1911) was an African-American abolitionist, poet and author. Born free in Baltimore, Maryland, she had a long and prolific career, publishing her first book of poetry at age 20 and her first novel, the widely praised Iola Leroy, at age 67. In 1850, she became the first woman to teach sewing at the Union Seminary. In 1851, alongside William Still, chairman of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, she helped escaped slaves along the Underground Railroad on their way to Canada. She began her career as a public speaker and political activist after joining the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1853. Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects became her biggest commercial success. The Two Offers became the short story to be published by an African-American in the Anglo-African in 1859. She published Sketches of Southern Life in 1872. It detailed her experience touring the South and meeting newly freed blacks. In these poems she talked about the harsh conditions many of them lived in. After the Civil War she continued to fight for the rights of women, African Americans, and many other social causes. She helped or held high office in several national progressive organizations. In 1873 Harper became superintendent of the Colored Section of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Women's Christian Temperance Union. In 1894 she helped found the National Association of Colored Women and served as its vice president. Because of her many magazine articles, she was called the mother of African-American journalism. At the same time she also wrote for periodicals with a mainly white circulation. (Grohsmeyer*1+ ) Harper died February 22nd, 1911, nine years before women gained the right to vote. Her funeral service was held at the Unitarian Church on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. She was buried in Eden Cemetery, next to her daughter, who had died two years before.

Lord Byron George Gordon, the son of Captain John Byron and Catherine Gordon, was born in London in 1788. Born with a club-foot, he spent the first ten years in his mother's lodgings in Aberdeen. Although originally a rich women, her fortune had been squandered by her husband.

In 1798 George succeeded to the title, Baron Byron of Rochdale, on the death of his great-uncle. Money was now available to provide Lord Byron with an education at Harrow School and Trinty College, Cambridge.

Lord Byron's first collection of poems, Hours of Idleness, appeared in 1807. The poems were savagely attacked by Henry Brougham in the Edinburgh Review. Byron replied with the publication of his satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809).

In 1809 Byron set on his grand tour where he visited Spain, Malta, Albania and Greece. His poetical account of this grand tour, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812) established Byron as one of England's leading poets.

Lord Byron scandalized London by starting an affair with Lady Caroline Lamb and was ostracized when he was suspected of having a sexual relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, who gave birth to an illegitimate daughter.

Byron attending the House of Lords where he became a strong advocate of social reform. In 1811 he was one of the few men in Parliament to defend the actions of the Luddites and the following year spoke against the Frame Breaking Bill, by which the government intended to apply the death-penalty to Luddites. Byron's political views influenced the subject matter of his poems. Important examples include Song for the Luddites (1816) and The Landlords' Interest (1823). Byron also attacked his political opponents such as the Duke of Wellington and Lord Castlereagh in Wellington: The Best of the CutThroats (1819) and the The Intellectual Eunuch Castlereagh (1818). In 1815 Byron married Anne Isabella Milbanke but the relationship came to an end the following year. Byron moved to Venice where he met the Countess Teresa Guiccioli, who became his mistress. Some of Byron's best known work belongs to this period including Don Juan. The last cantos is a satirical description of social conditions in England and includes attacks on leading Tory politicians.

Lord Byron also began contributing to the radical journal, the Examiner, edited by his friend, Leigh Hunt. Leigh Hunt, like other radical journalists had suffered as as result of the Gagging Acts and had been imprisoned for his attacks on the monarchy and the government.

In 1822 Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Percy Bysshe Shelley travelled to Italy where the three men published the political journal, The Liberal. By publishing in Italy they remained free from the fear of being prosecuted by the British authorities. The first edition was mainly written by Leigh Hunt but also included work by William Hazlitt, Mary Shelley and Byron's Vision of Judgement sold 4,000 copies. Three more editions were published but after the death of Shelley in August, 1822, the Liberal came to an end.

For a long time Lord Byron had supported attempts by the Greek people to free themselves from Turkish rule. This included writing poems such as The Maid of Athens (1810). In 1823 he formed the Byron Brigade and joined the Greek insurgents who had risen against the Turks. However, in April, 1824, Lord Byron died of marsh fever in Missolonghi before he saw anymilitary action.

Tennyson Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS (6 August 1809 6 October 1892) was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets.[2]

Tennyson excelled at penning short lyrics, such as "Break, Break, Break", "The Charge of the Light Brigade", "Tears, Idle Tears" and "Crossing the Bar". Much of his verse was based on classical mythological themes, such as Ulysses, although In Memoriam A.H.H. was written to commemorate his best friend Arthur Hallam, a fellow poet and fellow student at Trinity College, Cambridge, who was engaged to Tennyson's sister, but died from a brain haemorrhage before they could marry. Tennyson also wrote some notable blank verse including Idylls of the King, "Ulysses," and "Tithonus." During his career, Tennyson attempted drama, but his plays enjoyed little success.

A number of phrases from Tennyson's work have become commonplaces of the English language, including "Nature, red in tooth and claw", "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all", "Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die", "My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure", "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield", "Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers", and "The old order changeth, yielding place to new". He is the ninth most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.[3]

Pete seeger Peter "Pete" Seeger (born May 3, 1919) is an American folk singer. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene", which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950.[1] Members of The Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, he reemerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, and environmental causes.

As a song writer, he is best known as the author or co-author of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (with Joe Hickerson), "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)", (composed with Lee Hays of The Weavers), and "Turn, Turn, Turn!", which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement and are still sung throughout the world. "Flowers" was a hit recording for The Kingston Trio (1962); Marlene Dietrich, who recorded it in English, German and French (1962); and Johnny Rivers (1965). "If I Had a Hammer" was a hit for Peter, Paul & Mary (1962) and Trini Lopez (1963), while The Byrds popularized "Turn, Turn, Turn!" in the mid-1960s, as did Judy Collins in 1964, and The Seekers in 1966. Seeger was one of the folksingers most responsible for popularizing the spiritual "We Shall Overcome" (also recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer-activists) that became the acknowledged anthem of the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement, soon after folk singer and activist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. In the PBS "American Masters" episode Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, Seeger states it was he who changed the lyric from the traditional "We will overcome" to the more singable "We shall overcome".

William shakespeare William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) 23 April 1616)[nb 1] was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist.[1] He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon".[2][nb 2] His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays,[nb 3] 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, two epitaphs on a man named John Combe, one epitaph on Elias James, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.[3]

Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance,, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.[4]

Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613.[5][nb 4] His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the 16th century. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.

Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as "not of an age, but for all time."[6] Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the 19th century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry".[7] In the 20th century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.peare

Jean arasanayagam

Jean Arasanayagam, born Jean Solomons into a comfortable- Dutch family in what was then colonial Ceylon, is a Sri Lankan poet who describes herself as a writer 'suckled on a breast shaped by the genetics of history'. Educated at home and abroad, her experience in England and Scotland resulted in a collection of poems Out of Our Prisons We Emerge. It was, as she comments, a re-exploration and rediscovery of a personal identity that had been buried beneath the overwhelming crisis of a country at war'. Eminent poet Jean Arasanayagam has been seen as a poet of the bi-cultural experience, and one who possesses a prophetic voice in viewing the tragic events of her country. Her themes also deal with her ancestral racial consciousness and with her personal experiences. William blake William Blake (28 November 1757 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language".[1] His visual artistry led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced".[2] In 2002, Blake was placed at number 38 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.[3] Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham[4] he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God",[5] or "Human existence itself".[6]

Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of the Romantic movement and "PreRomantic",[7] for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England indeed, to all forms of organised religion Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions,[8] as well as by such thinkers as Jakob Bhme and Emanuel Swedenborg.[9] Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th-century scholar William Rossetti characterised him as a "glorious luminary,"[10] and "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors".[11]

Bertolt brecht Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria (about 80 km or 50 mi north-west of Munich), to a devout Protestant mother and a Catholic father (who had been persuaded to have a Protestant wedding). The modest house where he was born is today preserved as a Brecht Museum.[2] His father worked for a paper mill, becoming its managing director in 1914.[3] Thanks to his mother's influence, Brecht knew the Bible, a familiarity that would have a life-long effect on his writing. From her, too, came the "dangerous image of the self-denying woman" that recurs in his drama.[4] Brecht's home life was comfortably middle class, despite what his occasional attempt to claim peasant origins implied.[5] At school in Augsburg he met Caspar Neher, with whom he formed a lifelong creative partnership, Neher designing many of the sets for Brecht's dramas and helping to forge the distinctive visual iconography of their epic theatre.

When he was 16, the First World War broke out. Initially enthusiastic, Brecht soon changed his mind on seeing his classmates "swallowed by the army".[3] On his father's recommendation, Brecht sought a loophole by registering for an additional medical course at Munich University, where he enrolled in 1917.[6] There he studied drama with Arthur Kutscher, who inspired in the young Brecht an admiration for the iconoclastic dramatist and cabaret-star Frank Wedekind.[7]

From July 1916, Brecht's newspaper articles began appearing under the new name "Bert Brecht" (his first theatre criticism for the Augsburger Volkswille appeared in October 1919).[8] Brecht was drafted into military service in the autumn of 1918, only to be posted back to Augsburg as a medical orderly in a military VD clinic; the war ended a month later.[3]

In July 1919, Brecht and Paula Banholzer (de) (who had begun a relationship in 1917) had a son, Frank. In 1920 Brecht's mother died.[9] Karl Valentin as the barber in Mysteries of a Barbershop (1923).

Some time in either 1920 or 1921, Brecht took a small part in the political cabaret of the Munich comedian Karl Valentin.[10] Brecht's diaries for the next few years record numerous visits to see Valentin perform.[11] Brecht compared Valentin to Chaplin, for his "virtually complete rejection of mimicry and cheap psychology".[12] Writing in his Messingkauf Dialogues years later, Brecht identified Valentin, along with Wedekind and Bchner, as his "chief influences" at that time:

But the man he [Brecht writes of himself in the third person] learnt most from was the clown Valentin, who performed in a beer-hall. He did short sketches in which he played refractory employees, orchestral musicians or photographers, who hated their employers and made them look ridiculous. The employer was played by his partner, Liesl Karlstadt, a popular woman comedian who used to pad herself out and speak in a deep bass voice.[13]

Brecht's first full-length play, Baal (written 1918), arose in response to an argument in one of Kutscher's drama seminars, initiating a trend that persisted throughout his career of creative activity that was generated by a desire to counter another work (both others' and his own, as his many adaptations and re-writes attest). "Anyone can be creative," he quipped, "it's rewriting other people that's a challenge."[14] Brecht completed his second major play, Drums in the Night, in February 1919.

In 1922 while still living in Munich, Brecht came to the attention of an influential Berlin critic, Herbert Ihering (de): "At 24 the writer Bert Brecht has changed Germany's literary complexion overnight"he enthused in his review of Brecht's first play to be produced, Drums in the Night"[he] has given our time a new tone, a new melody, a new vision. [...] It is a language you can feel on your tongue, in your gums, your ear, your spinal column."[15] In November it was announced that Brecht had been awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize (intended for unestablished writers and probably Germany's most significant literary award, until it was abolished in 1932) for his first three plays (Baal, Drums in the Night, and In the Jungle, although at that point only Drums had been produced).[16] The citation for the award insisted that: Poster for the Riverside Shakespeare Company's production of Brecht and Lion Feuchtwanger's Edward II. New York City, 1982.

"[Brecht's] language is vivid without being deliberately poetic, symbolical without being over literary. Brecht is a dramatist because his language is felt physically and in the round."[17]

That year he married the Viennese opera-singer Marianne Zoff. Their daughterHanne Hiob (1923 2009)was a successful German actress.[3]

In 1923, Brecht wrote a scenario for what was to become a short slapstick film, Mysteries of a Barbershop, directed by Erich Engel and starring Karl Valentin.[18] Despite a lack of success at the time, its experimental inventiveness and the subsequent success of many of its contributors have meant that it is now considered one of the most important films in German film history.[19] In May of that year,

Brecht's In the Jungle premiered in Munich, also directed by Engel. Opening night proved to be a "scandal"a phenomenon that would characterize many of his later productions during the Weimar Republicin which Nazis blew whistles and threw stink bombs at the actors on the stage.[11]

In 1924 Brecht worked with the novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger (whom he had met in 1919) on an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II that proved to be a milestone in Brecht's early theatrical and dramaturgical development.[20] Brecht's Edward II constituted his first attempt at collaborative writing and was the first of many classic texts he was to adapt. As his first solo directorial dbut, he later credited it as the germ of his conception of "epic theatre".[21] That September, a job as assistant dramaturg at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theaterat the time one of the leading three or four theatres in the worldbrought him to Berlin.[22]

Wh auden Wh auden Wystan Hugh Auden (pron.: /wstn hju dn/;[1] 21 February 1907 29 September 1973), who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,[2][3] born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.[4] His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content.[5][6] The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.

Auden grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, alternated between telegraphic modern styles and fluent traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939, where he became an American citizen in 1946. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined traditional forms and styles with new forms devised by Auden himself. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings.[7]

He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks"), "Muse des Beaux Arts", "Refugee Blues", "The Unknown Citizen", and "September 1, 1939", became known to a much wider public than during his lifetime through films, broadcasts, and popular media.[4]

William makepeace Thackeray Thackeray, an only child, was born in Calcutta,[1] India, where his father, Richmond Thackeray (1 September 1781 13 September 1815), was secretary to the board of revenue in the British East India Company. His mother, Anne Becher (17921864) was the second daughter of Harriet Becher and John Harman Becher, who was also a secretary (writer) for the East India Company.

William's father, Richmond, died in 1815, which caused his mother to send him to England in 1816 (whilst she remained in India). The ship on which he travelled made a short stopover at St. Helena where the imprisoned Napoleon was pointed out to him. Once in England he was educated at schools in Southampton and Chiswick and then at Charterhouse School, where he was a close friend of John Leech. He disliked Charterhouse,[2] parodying it in his later fiction as "Slaughterhouse." (Nevertheless Thackeray was honoured in the Charterhouse Chapel with a monument after his death.) Illness in his last year there (during which he reportedly grew to his full height of 6' 3") postponed his matriculation at Trinity College, Cambridge, until February 1829. Never too keen on academic studies, he left the University in 1830, though some of his earliest writing appeared in university publications The Snob and The Gownsman.[3]

He travelled for some time on the continent, visiting Paris and Weimar, where he met Goethe. He returned to England and began to study law at the Middle Temple, but soon gave that up. On reaching the age of 21, he came into his inheritance but he squandered much of it on gambling and by funding two unsuccessful newspapers, The National Standard and The Constitutional for which he had hoped to write. He also lost a good part of his fortune in the collapse of two Indian banks. Forced to consider a profession to support himself, he turned first to art, which he studied in Paris, but did not pursue it except in later years as the illustrator of some of his own novels and other writings. Thackeray portrayed by Eyre Crowe, 1845

Thackeray's years of semi-idleness ended after he married (20 August 1836) Isabella Gethin Shawe (18161893), second daughter of Isabella Creagh Shawe and Matthew Shawe, a colonel, who had died after extraordinary service, primarily in India. They had three children, all girls: Anne Isabella (1837 1919), Jane (died at 8 months) and Harriet Marian (18401875). He now began "writing for his life," as he put it, turning to journalism in an effort to support his young family.

He primarily worked for Fraser's Magazine, a sharp-witted and sharp-tongued conservative publication, for which he produced art criticism, short fictional sketches, and two longer fictional works, Catherine and The Luck of Barry Lyndon. From 1837 to 1840 he also reviewed books for The Times.[4] He was also

a regular contributor to The Morning Chronicle and The Foreign Quarterly Review. Later, through his connection to the illustrator John Leech, he began writing for the newly created Punch magazine, where he published The Snob Papers, later collected as The Book of Snobs. This work popularised the modern meaning of the word "snob."

Tragedy struck in his personal life as his wife succumbed to depression after the birth of their third child in 1840. Finding he could get no work done at home, he spent more and more time away, until September of that year, when he realised how grave her condition was. Struck by guilt, he took his ailing wife to Ireland. During the crossing she threw herself from a water-closet into the sea, but she was pulled from the waters. They fled back home after a four-week domestic battle with her mother. From November 1840 to February 1842 she was in and out of professional care, her condition waxing and waning. Caricature of Thackeray by Thackeray

She eventually deteriorated into a permanent state of detachment from reality, unaware of the world around her. Thackeray desperately sought cures for her, but nothing worked, and she ended up confined in a home near Paris. She remained there until 1893, outliving her husband by thirty years. After his wife's illness, Thackeray became a de facto widower, never establishing another permanent relationship. He did pursue other women, in particular Mrs. Jane Brookfield, and Sally Baxter. In 1851 Mr Brookfield barred Thackeray from further visits to or correspondence with Jane. Baxter, an American twenty years his junior whom he met during a lecture tour in New York City in 1852, married another man in 1855.

In the early 1840s, Thackeray had some success with two travel books, The Paris Sketch Book and The Irish Sketch Book. He achieved more recognition with his Snob Papers (serialised 1846/7, published in book form in 1848), but the work that really established his fame was the novel Vanity Fair, which first appeared in serialised installments beginning in January 1847. Even before Vanity Fair completed its serial run, Thackeray had become a celebrity, sought after by the very lords and ladies whom he satirised; they hailed him as the equal of Dickens.

He remained "at the top of the tree," as he put it, for the remaining decade and a half of his life, producing several large novels, notably Pendennis, The Newcomes, and The History of Henry Esmond, despite various illnesses, including a near fatal one that struck him in 1849 in the middle of writing Pendennis. He twice visited the United States on lecture tours during this period.

Thackeray also gave lectures in London on the English humorists of the eighteenth century, and on the first four Hanoverian monarchs. The latter series was published in book form as The Four Georges. In Oxford, he stood unsuccessfully as an independent for Parliament. He was narrowly beaten by Cardwell (1070 votes, against 1005 for Thackeray).

In 1860 Thackeray became editor of the newly established Cornhill Magazine, but was never comfortable as an editor, preferring to contribute to the magazine as a columnist, producing his Roundabout Papers for it.

His health worsened during the 1850s and he was plagued by a recurring stricture of the urethra that laid him up for days at a time. He also felt he had lost much of his creative impetus. He worsened matters by over-eating and drinking and avoiding exercise, though he enjoyed horseback riding (he kept a horse). He could not break his addiction to spicy peppers, further ruining his digestion. On 23 December 1863, after returning from dining out and before dressing for bed, Thackeray suffered a stroke and was found dead in his bed in the morning. His death at the age of fifty-two was entirely unexpected, and shocked his family, friends, and reading public. An estimated 7000 people attended his funeral at Kensington Gardens. He was buried on 29 December at Kensal Green Cemetery, and a memorial bust sculpted by Marochetti can be found in Westminster Abbey.

Hillaire belloc Belloc was born in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France to a French father and an English mother. He grew up in England where much of his boyhood was spent in Slindon, West Sussex, for which he often felt homesick in later life. This is evidenced in poems such as, "West Sussex Drinking Song", "The South Country", and even the more melancholy, "Ha'nacker Mill".

His mother Elizabeth Rayner Parkes (18291925) was also a writer and a great-granddaughter of the English chemist Joseph Priestley. In 1867, she married attorney Louis Belloc, son of the French painter Jean-Hilaire Belloc. In 1872, five years after they wed, Louis died, but not before being wiped out financially in a stock market crash. The young widow then brought her son Hilaire, along with his sister, Marie, back to England, where Hiliare remained, except for his voluntary enlistment as a young man in the French artillery.

After being educated at John Henry Newman's[6] Oratory School in Edgbaston, Birmingham, Belloc served his term of military service, as a French citizen, with an artillery regiment near Toul in 1891.

After his military service, Belloc proceeded to Balliol College, Oxford, as a History scholar. He went on to obtain first-class honours in History, and never lost his love for Balliol, as is illustrated by his verse, "Balliol made me, Balliol fed me/ Whatever I had she gave me again".

He was powerfully built, with great stamina, and walked extensively in Britain and Europe. While courting his future wife Elodie, whom he first met in 1890, the impecunious Belloc walked a good part of the way from the midwest of the United States to her home in northern California, paying for lodging at remote farm houses and ranches by sketching the owners and reciting poetry.

He was the brother of the novelist Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes. In 1896, he married Elodie Hogan, an American. In 1906, he purchased land and a house called King's Land at Shipley, West Sussex, where he brought up his family and lived until shortly before his death. Elodie and Belloc had five children before her 1914 death from influenza. After her death, Belloc wore mourning for the remainder of his life, keeping her room exactly as she had left it.[7]

His son Louis was killed in 1918 while serving in the Royal Flying Corps in northern France. Belloc placed a memorial tablet in the Cathedral at nearby Cambrai. It is in the same side chapel as the noted icon Our Lady of Cambrai.

Belloc suffered a stroke in 1941 and never recovered from its effects. He died on 16 July 1953 in Guildford, Surrey, following a fall he had at King's Land. He is buried at the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation of West Grinstead, where he had regularly attended Mass as a parishioner. [8] At his funeral Mass, homilist Monsignor Ronald Knox observed, "No man of his time fought so hard for the good things."

Lewis carol Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, best known by his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, was born in the village of Daresbury, England, on January 27, 1832. The eldest boy in a family of 11 children, Carroll was rather adept at entertaining himself and his siblings. His father, a clergyman, raised them in the rectory. As a boy, Carroll excelled in mathematics and won many academic prizes. At age 20, he was awarded a studentship (called a scholarship in other colleges) to Christ College. Apart from serving as a lecturer in mathematics, he was an avid photographer and wrote essays, political pamphlets and poetry. "The Hunting of the Snark" displays his wonderful ability in the genre of literary nonsense. Carroll suffered from a bad stammer, but he found himself vocally fluent when speaking with children. The relationships he had with young people in his adult years are of great interest, as they undoubtedly inspired his best-known writings and have been a point of disturbed speculation over the years. Carroll loved to entertain children, and it was Alice, the daughter of Henry George Liddell, who can be credited with his pinnacle inspiration. Alice Liddell remembers spending many hours with Carroll, sitting on his couch while he told fantastic tales of dream worlds. During an afternoon picnic with Alice and her two sisters, Carroll told the first iteration of what would later become Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. When Alice arrived home, she exclaimed that he must write the story down for her.

He fulfilled the small girl's request, and through a series of coincidences, the story fell into the hands of the novelist Henry Kingsley, who urged Carroll to publish it. The book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was released in 1865. It gained steady popularity, and as a result, Carroll wrote the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). By the time of his death, Alice had become the most popular children's book in England, and by 1932 it was one of the most popular in the world.

Anita desai

Anita Mazumdar was born in Mussoorie, India, to a German mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman, D. N. Mazumdar.[3] She grew up speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English outside the house. Although German is her first language she did not visit Germany until later in life as an adult. She first learned to read and write in English at school and as a result English became her "literary language".[4] She began to write in English at the age of seven and published her first story at the age of nine.[3]

She was a student at Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School in Delhi and received her B.A. in English literature in 1957 from the Miranda House of the University of Delhi. The following year she married Ashvin Desai, the director of a computer software company and author of the book: Between Eternities: Ideas on Life and The Cosmos. They have four children, including Booker Prize-winning novelist Kiran Desai. Her children were taken to Thul (near Alibagh) for weekends, where Desai set her novel The Village by the Sea.[3] For that work she won the 1983 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-alifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers.[2]

Desai published her first novel, Cry The Peacock, in 1963. She considers Clear Light Of Day (1980) her most autobiographical work as it is set during her coming of age and also in the same neighbourhood in which she grew up.[5] In 1984 she published In Custody about an Urdu poet in his declining days which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1993 she became a creative writing teacher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[6] Her novel, The Zigzag Way, set in 20th-century Mexico, appeared in 2004 and her latest collection of short stories, The Artist of Disappearance was published in 2011.

Desai has taught at Mount Holyoke College, Baruch College and Smith College. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and of Girton College, Cambridge University (to which she dedicated Baumgartner's Bombay).[7] In addition, she writes for the New York Review of Books.

Cecil rajendra Malaysian poet Cecil Rajendra's poems turn up in the most odd places: at a church-sponsored conference on the evils of tourism, in a Black South African liberation movement's newsletter, in a masscirculation Japanese daily paper, in a Filipino law professor's human rights lectures, in a geography textbook for British schoolchildren, in a Bengali magazine, in a book about militarism, in a Time magazine cover story, in a Penang taxi driver's glove compartment -- but seldom in literary journals.

"My poems tend to be more a part of Third World studies than literature studies," Rajendra says. "They find themselves in all sorts of places, and I am most pleased about it."

He is genuinely not interested in literary acclaim, nor abuse, though he has received plenty of both. Rajendra judges his work strictly in terms of its effectiveness in awakening people to the burning social issues that afflict Malaysia and the Third World generally -- oppression, injustice and exploitation, corruption and greed, want, hunger and poverty, ecological ruin.

His poetry is part of a total commitment. A lawyer by profession, he handles mainly pro bono cases where a principle of justice is involved, defending factory workers who find themselves on the wrong side of the country's highly oppressive labour laws, taking drugs cases involving youths from fishing villages shattered by ill-considered tourism projects, representing peasants denied justice because once in the witness box or dock they are struck dumb by the augustness of the proceedings, the belittling effect of the legal stage props, the theatrical pomposity of the official fancy dress.