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• 
  

• 
  Berlin Wall
  The Berlin Wall (German: Berliner Mauer) was a barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) starting on 13 August 1961, that completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin. The barrier included guard towers placed along large concrete walls, which circumscribed a wide area (later known as the "death strip") that contained anti-vehicle trenches, "fakir beds" and other defenses. The Eastern Bloc claimed that the wall was erected to protect its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the "will of the people" in building a socialist state in East Germany. In practice, the Wall served to prevent the massive emigration and defection that marked Germany and the communist Eastern Bloc during the post-World War II period.
  The Berlin Wall was officially referred to as the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart" (German: Antifaschistischer Schutzwall) by GDR authorities, implying that neighbouring West Germany had not been fully de-Nazified. The West Berlin city government sometimes referred to it as the "Wall of Shame"—a term coined by mayor Willy Brandt—while condemning the Wall's restriction on freedom of movement. Along with the separate and much longer Inner German border (IGB) that demarcated the border between East and West Germany, both borders came to symbolize the "Iron Curtain" that separated Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.
  
  wn.com/Berlin_Wall
• 
  Brazzaville
  Brazzaville is the capital and largest city of the Republic of the Congo and is located on the Congo River. As of the 2001 census, it has a population of 1,018,541 in the city proper, and about 1.5 million in total when including the suburbs located in the Pool Region. The populous city of Kinshasa (more than 10 million inhabitants in 2009), capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, lies just across the Congo River from Brazzaville. Together with Kinshasa, the combined conurbation of Kinshasa-Brazzaville has thus nearly 12 million inhabitants (although significant political and infrastructure challenges prevent the two cities from functioning with any meaningful connection). Over a third of the population of the Republic of Congo lives in the capital, and it is home to 40% of non-agricultural employment. It is also a financial and administrative capital.
  In order to distinguish between the two African countries with "Congo" in their names, the Republic of the Congo is sometimes called Congo-Brazzaville, as opposed to Congo-Kinshasa (the Democratic Republic of the Congo, known from 1971 to 1997 as Zaire, the capital of which is Kinshasa). Kinshasa lies on the southern bank of the Congo, across from Brazzaville. This is the only place in the world where two national capital cities are situated on opposite banks of a river, within sight of each other.
  
  wn.com/Brazzaville
• 
  British Empire
  The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the largest empire in history and, for over a century, was the foremost global power. By 1922 the British Empire held sway over about 458 million people, one-fifth of the world's population at the time, and covered more than 33,700,000 km² (13,012,000 sq mi), almost a quarter of the Earth's total land area. As a result, its political, linguistic and cultural legacy is widespread. At the peak of its power, it was often said that "the sun never sets on the British Empire" because its span across the globe ensured that the sun was always shining on at least one of its numerous territories.
  During the Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal and Spain pioneered European exploration of the globe, and in the process established large overseas empires. Envious of the great wealth these empires generated, England, France and the Netherlands began to establish colonies and trade networks of their own in the Americas and Asia. A series of wars in the 17th and 18th centuries with the Netherlands and France left England (and then, following union between England and Scotland in 1707, Great Britain) the dominant colonial power in North America and India. The loss of the Thirteen Colonies in North America in 1783 after a war of independence deprived Britain of some of its oldest and most populous colonies.
  
  wn.com/British_Empire
• 
  Broadcasting House
  Broadcasting House is the headquarters and registered office of the BBC in Portland Place and Langham Place, London.
  The building includes the BBC Radio Theatre from where music and speech programmes are recorded in front of a studio audience. The radio stations BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, and BBC Radio 4 Extra are also broadcast from studios within the building.
  As part of a long term consolidation of the BBC's property portfolio, additional services including BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 1Xtra, BBC Radio 6 Music and the BBC World Service will move into Broadcasting House following an extensive renovation of the building. The move also includes that of BBC News and BBC World News from Television Centre into a newly constructed newsroom.
  Construction of Broadcasting House began in 1932, and the building opened to the BBC's offices and radio operations on 14 May 1934, eight years after the corporation's establishment. George Val Myer designed the building in collaboration with the BBC's civil engineer, M T Tudsbery. The original interiors were the work of Raymond McGrath, an Australian-Irish architect. He directed a team which included Serge Chermayeff and Wells Coates and designed the vaudeville studio, the associated green and dressing rooms, and the dance and chamber music studios in a flowing Art Deco style. It was later said of his efforts that "the designs for the BBC gave the first real fillip to industrial design in England".^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Broadcasting_House
• 
  Burma
  Burma ⁱ/ˈbɜrmə/ BUR-mə, also known as Myanmar ⁱ/ˌmjɑːnˈmɑr/ MYAHN--MAR, is a country in South Asia and Southeast Asia. It is bordered by India, Bangladesh, China, Laos and Thailand. One-third of Burma's total perimeter of 1,930 kilometres (1,200 mi) forms an uninterrupted coastline along the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. At 676,578 km² (261,227 sq mi), it is the 40th largest country in the world and the second largest country in Southeast Asia. Burma is also the 24th most populous country in the world with over 60.28 million people.
  Burma is home to some of the early civilizations of Southeast Asia including the Pyu and the Mon. In the 9th century, the Burmans of the Kingdom of Nanzhao, entered the upper Irrawaddy valley and, following the establishment of the Pagan Empire in the 1050s, the Burmese language and culture slowly became dominant in the country. During this period, Theravada Buddhism gradually became the predominant religion of the country. The Pagan Empire fell due to the Mongol invasions (1277–1301), and several warring states emerged. In the second half of the 16th century, the country was reunified by the Taungoo Dynasty which for a brief period was the largest empire in the history of Southeast Asia. The early 19th century Konbaung Dynasty ruled over an area that included modern Burma as well as Manipur and Assam. The country was colonized by Britain following three Anglo-Burmese Wars (1824–1885).
  
  wn.com/Burma
• 
  Colchester
  Coordinates: 51°53′30″N 0°54′11″E / 51.8917°N 0.903°E / 51.8917; 0.903
  Colchester ⁱ/ˈkoʊltʃɛstə/ is an historic town and the largest settlement within the borough of Colchester in Essex, England.
  At the time of the census in 2001, it had a population of 104,390. However, the population is rapidly increasing, and has been named as one of Britain's fastest growing towns. As the oldest recorded Roman town in Britain, Colchester claims to be the oldest town in Britain. It was for a time the capital of Roman Britain and also claims to have the United Kingdom's oldest recorded market. The town is a member of the Most Ancient European Towns Network.
  Colchester is 60 miles (97 km) northeast of London. It is connected to the capital by the A12 road and the Great Eastern Main Line. It is seen as a popular town for commuters, and is less than 30 miles away from Stansted Airport.
  Colchester is home to Colchester Castle and Colchester United Football Club. It has a Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament.
  
  wn.com/Colchester
• 
  Korea
  Korea (/kəˈriːə/ kə-REE-ə; Korean: 한국 Hanguk [hanɡuːk] or 조선 Joseon [tɕosʌn] – (see etymology) is an East Asian region that is divided into two separate sovereign states — North Korea and South Korea. Located on the Korean Peninsula, Korea is bordered by China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the east by the Korea Strait and the Sea of Japan (East Sea), and separated from Taiwan to the south by the East China Sea.
  Archaeological and linguistic evidence suggest the origins of the Korean people might have been Altaic language-speaking people from south-central Siberia,^{[dubious – discuss]} who populated ancient Korea in successive waves from the Neolithic age to the Bronze Age. The adoption of the Chinese writing system ("Hanja" in Korean) in the 2nd century BC, and Buddhism in the 4th century AD, had profound effects on the Three Kingdoms of Korea.
  The Three Kingdoms of Korea was first united during the Silla dynasty under the king Munmu of Silla. The united Silla dynasty fell to Goryeo Dynasty in 935 at the end of Later Three Kingdoms of Korea era. Goryeo was a highly cultural state and created the Jikji in the 14th century, using the world's first movable metal type printing press. The Mongol invasions in the 13th century, however, greatly weakened the nation which was forced to become a tributary state. After the Mongol Empire's collapse, severe political strife followed and Goryeo was replaced by the Joseon Dynasty in 1388.
  
  wn.com/Korea
• 
  NKVD
  The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Народный комиссариат внутренних дел, Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del), abbreviated NKVD (НКВД  listen (help·info)) was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin.
  The NKVD contained the regular, public police force of the USSR (including traffic police, firefighting, border guards and archives) but is better known for the activities of the Gulag and the Main Directorate for State Security (GUGB), which eventually became the Committee for State Security (KGB). It conducted mass extrajudicial executions, ran the Gulag system of forced labor camps, suppressed underground resistance, conducted mass deportations of entire nationalities and Kulaks to unpopulated regions of the country, guarded state borders, conducted espionage and political assassinations abroad, was responsible for influencing foreign governments, and enforced Stalinist policy within communist movements in other countries.
  
  wn.com/NKVD
• 
  Soviet Union
  The Soviet Union (Russian: Советский Союз, tr. Sovetsky Soyuz), officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR; Russian: Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик, tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik; IPA: [sɐˈjus sɐˈvʲetskʲɪx sətsɨəlʲɪˈstʲitɕɪskʲɪx rʲɪsˈpublʲɪk] ( listen); abbreviated СССР, SSSR), was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991.
  The Soviet Union was a single-party state ruled by the Communist Party from its foundation until 1990. A union of 15 subnational Soviet republics, the Soviet state was structured under a highly centralized government and economy.
  The Russian Revolution of 1917 caused the downfall of the Russian Empire. Following the Russian Revolution, there was a struggle for power between the Bolshevik party, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the anti-communist White movement. In December 1922, the Bolsheviks won the civil war, and the Soviet Union was formed with the merger of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.
  
  wn.com/Soviet_Union
• 
  Stanford University
  Coordinates: 37°26′N 122°10′W / 37.43°N 122.17°W / 37.43; -122.17
  The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is an American private research university located in Stanford, California on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus near Palo Alto, California, United States. It is situated in the northwestern Silicon Valley, approximately 20 miles (32 km) northwest of San Jose and 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco.
  Leland Stanford, a Californian railroad tycoon and politician, and his wife Jane Lathrop Stanford founded the university in 1891 in honor of their son, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died of typhoid two months before his 16th birthday. The university was established as a coeducational and nondenominational institution, but struggled financially after the senior Stanford's 1893 death and after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, Provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates' entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would become known as Silicon Valley. By 1970, Stanford was home to a linear accelerator, was one of the original four ARPANET nodes, and had transformed itself into a major research university in computer science, mathematics, natural sciences, and social sciences.
  
  wn.com/Stanford_University
• 
  Tangier
  Tangier, also Tangiers (Berber: Tanja, ⵜⴰⵏⵊⴰ, archaic Berber name: Tingi, Arabic: طنجة Ṭanjah, Spanish: Tánger, French: Tanger), is a city in northern Morocco with a population of about 700,000 (2012 estimates). It lies on the North African coast at the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Spartel. It is the capital of the Tangier-Tetouan Region and of the Tangier-Asilah prefecture of Morocco.
  The history of Tangier is very rich due to the historical presence of many civilizations and cultures starting from the 5th century BC. Between the period of being a Berber settlement and then a Phoenician town to the independence era around the 1950s, Tangier was a refuge for many cultures. In 1923, Tangier was considered as an international status by foreign colonial powers, and became a destination for many European and American diplomats, spies, writers and businessmen.
  The city is currently undergoing rapid development and modernization. Projects include new 5-star hotels along the bay, a modern business district called Tangier City Center, a new airport terminal and a new football stadium. Tangier's economy is also set to benefit greatly from the new Tanger-Med port.
  
  wn.com/Tangier

• 11020 Orwell
  11020 Orwell is an asteroid. It was discovered on July 31, 1984 by Antonín Mrkos at the Czech observatory in Kleť.
  George Orwell is the pseudonym of British writer Eric Blair (1903–1950), forever associated with the year of discovery, 1984, due to the enduring popularity of his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell is one of only a handful of writers to have an asteroid named after him.
  According to the records of Klet Observatory: "The name was suggested by J. Tichá and endorsed by B. G. Marsden, who made the identification involving this aptly designated object".
  
  wn.com/11020_Orwell
• 
  Adolf Hitler
  Adolf Hitler (German: [ˈadɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ] ( listen); 20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and dictator of Nazi Germany (as Führer und Reichskanzler) from 1934 to 1945. Hitler is commonly associated with the rise of fascism in Europe, World War II, and the Holocaust.
  A decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the German Workers' Party, precursor of the Nazi Party, in 1919, and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923, he attempted a coup d'état, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, in Munich. The failed coup resulted in Hitler's imprisonment, during which time he wrote his memoir, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). After his release in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, antisemitism, and anticommunism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. After his appointment as chancellor in 1933, he transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism. His aim was to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in continental Europe.
  
  wn.com/Adolf_Hitler
• 
  Alan Moore
  Alan Oswald Moore (born 18 November 1953) is an English writer primarily known for his work in comic books, a medium where he has produced a number of critically acclaimed and popular series, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell. Frequently described as the best graphic novel writer in history, he has also been described as "one of the most important British writers of the last fifty years". He has occasionally used such pseudonyms as Curt Vile, Jill de Ray, and Translucia Baboon.
  Moore started out writing for British underground and alternative fanzines in the late 1970s before achieving success publishing comic strips in such magazines as 2000 AD and Warrior. He was subsequently picked up by the American DC Comics, and as "the first comics writer living in Britain to do prominent work in America", he worked on big name characters such as Batman (Batman: The Killing Joke) and Superman (Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?), substantially developed the minor character Swamp Thing, and penned original titles such as Watchmen. During that decade, Moore helped to bring about greater social respectability for the medium in the United States and United Kingdom, and has subsequently been credited with the development of the term "graphic novel" over "comic book". In the late 1980s and early 1990s he left the comic industry mainstream and went independent for a while, working on experimental work such as the epic From Hell, pornographic Lost Girls, and the prose novel Voice of the Fire. He subsequently returned to the mainstream later in the 1990s, working for Image Comics, before developing America's Best Comics, an imprint through which he published works such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the occult-based Promethea.
  
  wn.com/Alan_Moore
• 
  Aldous Huxley
  Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, film stories and scripts. Huxley spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death.
  Aldous Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist, and he was latterly interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. He is also well known for advocating and taking psychedelics.
  By the end of his life Huxley was widely recognized to be one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time and respected as an important researcher into visual communication and sight-related theories as well.
  Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, UK, in 1894. He was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster Leonard Huxley and his first wife, Julia Arnold, who founded Prior's Field School. Julia was the niece of poet and critic Matthew Arnold and the sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic and controversialist ("Darwin's Bulldog"). His brother Julian Huxley and half-brother Andrew Huxley also became outstanding biologists. Aldous had another brother, Noel Trevelyan (1891–1914), who committed suicide after a period of clinical depression.
  
  wn.com/Aldous_Huxley
• 
  Alexey Stakhanov
  Alexey Grigoryevich Stakhanov (Russian: Алексе́й Григо́рьевич Стаха́нов; 3 January 1906 – 5 November 1977) was a miner in the Soviet Union, Hero of Socialist Labor (1970), and a member of the CPSU (1936). He became a celebrity in 1935 as part of a movement that was intended to increase worker productivity and demonstrate the superiority of the socialist economic system.
  Stakhanov was born in Lugovaya near Oryol. In 1927, he began working in a mine called "Tsentralnaya-Irmino" in Kadievka (Donbass). In 1933, Stakhanov became a jackhammer operator. In 1935, he took a local course in mining. On 31 August 1935, it was reported that he had mined a record 102 tonnes of coal in 5 hours and 45 minutes (14 times his quota). On 19 September, Stakhanov was reported to have set a new record by mining 227 tonnes of coal in a single shift. His example was held up in newspapers and posters as a model for others to follow, and he even appeared on the cover of Time magazine.
  In 1936–1941, Stakhanov was a student of the Industrial Academy in Moscow. In 1941–1942, he was appointed director of mine No. 31 in Karaganda. Between 1943 and 1957, Stakhanov worked in the Ministry of Coal Industry of the USSR. In 1957–1959, he was deputy director of the Chistyakovantratsit trust, and after that, assistant chief engineer at the mine management office No. 2/43 of the Torezantratsit trust until his retirement in 1974.
  
  wn.com/Alexey_Stakhanov
• 
  Anthony Burgess
  John Burgess Wilson (25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993) – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic.
  The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works. It was adapted into a highly controversial 1971 film by Stanley Kubrick, which Burgess said was chiefly responsible for the popularity of the book. Burgess produced numerous other novels, including the Enderby quartet, and Earthly Powers. He was a prominent critic, writing acclaimed studies of classic writers such as William Shakespeare, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway. In 2008, The Times placed Burgess number 17 on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Burgess was an accomplished musician and linguist. He composed over 250 musical works, including a first symphony around age 18, wrote a number of libretti, and translated, among other works, Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and Carmen.
  
  wn.com/Anthony_Burgess
• 
  Anthony Phillips
  Anthony Edwin "Ant" Phillips (b. 23 December 1951, Chiswick, west London) is an English multi instrumentalist, best known as a founding member of the band Genesis. He played guitar and sang backing vocals until leaving in 1970, following the recording of their second album, Trespass. He left due to suffering from stage fright, after being told by his doctor that the best thing would be to leave the band. He is known for his twelve string guitar work, and his influence can be heard throughout Genesis's early output.
  Genesis's first album after Phillips's departure, Nursery Cryme, featured two songs which were holdovers from the days when Phillips was in the band: "The Musical Box" (originally called F#) and "The Fountain Of Salmacis".
  After leaving Genesis, Phillips studied classical music (especially classical guitar) and made recordings in collaboration with Harry Williamson, Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins, among others.He played the keyboards on the demos for Peter Gabriel in 1976. His first solo album, The Geese and the Ghost, was issued in 1977.
  
  wn.com/Anthony_Phillips
• Antonín Mrkos
  Antonín Mrkos (Czech pronunciation: [ˈantoɲiːn ˈmr̩kos]; 27 January 1918 – 29 May 1996) was a Czech astronomer, born in Střemchoví, Czechoslovakia.
  Mrkos entered the University in Brno in 1938. His studies were interrupted by the onset of World War II, and in 1945 he became a staff member at the Skalnaté Pleso Observatory in Slovakia. It was from here that he carried out his extremely active cometary programme and became the discoverer of several unusual comets, the most famous of them the bright Comet 1957d.
  He was the second Czech in Antarctica and the first Czechoslovak to reach the Southern pole of inaccessibility as a member of the 3rd Soviet Antarctic Expedition (1957–1959). The Czechoslovakian flag was the second flag raised after the flag of the USSR. He returned to Antarctica as the head of the 4 member Czechoslovakian crew in the 7th Soviet Antarctic Expedition (1961 – 1963). He was studying auroras among other things. He was invited for what would have been his third expedition to the Antarctic but couldn't participate because of an almost fatal accident. It's thought someone tried to injure or to kill him by adding a bottle of strongly concentrated detergent among his other bottles of mineral water. Since this accident he could only eat liquid meals for the rest of his life.
  
  wn.com/Antonín_Mrkos
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  Arthur Koestler
  Arthur Koestler CBE (5 September 1905, Budapest – 1 March 1983, London) was a Hungarian-British author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931 Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany but, disillusioned by Stalinist atrocities, he resigned in 1938. In 1940 he published his novel Darkness at Noon, an anti-totalitarian work, which gained him international fame.
  Over the next 43 years from his residence in Great Britain, Koestler espoused many political causes and wrote novels, memoirs, biographies, and numerous essays. In 1968, he was awarded the prestigious Sonning Prize "for outstanding contribution to European culture" and, in 1972, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). In 1976, Koestler was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and, in 1979, with terminal leukaemia. In 1983 he and his wife committed suicide at home in London.
  
  wn.com/Arthur_Koestler
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  Bertrand Latour
  Bertrand Latour (born August 1963) is a French writer.
  Latour was born in Pantin, Seine-Saint-Denis. His first book, Comme Un Beau Grand Slow Collé, was published by Éditions Denoël in 2004. In 2007, his second book, Les Yeux Plus Gros Que L'Amérique, was published by Groupe Flammarion. He also wrote the preface to the first Vietnamese translation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (Editions Underbahn, 2006). His third book, Un Milliard Et Des Poussières, was published by Hachette (publishing) in 2008 and by Le Livre de poche in 2011. His fourth book La Deuxième Vie De Victor Hurvoas was published by Le Passage in 2011.
  
  
  
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• Betty X
  Betty X, (born Zoe Pierce-Gibson) is an American musician, artist, and writer known for her controversial stage persona and image as the lead singer of the eponymous band Betty X. Her stage name was formed the combination of 1950's American icons, domestic goddess Betty Crocker, pin-up model Bettie Page with the human rights activist icon Malcolm X. Betty is also the founding member of Satan in High Heels and works with guest musicians to co-write songs. She was the founder and front woman for her previous punk cabaret band Salon Betty. She is also well known in the underground art/music scene for her guerrilla art and outrageous on-stage antics. She is currently releasing sociopolitical videos on her new video company Brave New Video, and writing a fictionalized auto-biography titled Memoirs of a Pain Junkie.
  Betty was born and raised in Seattle, Washington into a musical family. Betty is the third child of Janice (née Pierce) and Michael Thompson-Gibson. Betty is of British and Irish descent on her mother's side, and 11th cousin of former President George W. Bush. She is also of Cherokee descendent and great-granddaughter of Chief John Ross (Cherokee chief) of the Cherokee Nation on her father's side.
  
  wn.com/Betty_X
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  Cory Doctorow
  Cory Efram Doctorow (/ˈkɒri ˈdɒktəroʊ/; born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian-Britishblogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the weblog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and "post-scarcity" economics.
  Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to Trotskyist teachers, Doctorow was raised in a Jewish activist household. His father was born in a refugee camp in Azerbaijan and Doctorow became involved with nuclear disarmament activism and as a Greenpeace campaigner as a child. He received his high school diploma from SEED School, an anarchistic "free school" in Toronto, and attended four universities without attaining a degree.
  He later served on the board of directors for the Grindstone Island Co-operative in Big Rideau Lake in Ontario.
  During 1992 Doctorow went on a volunteer visit to Costa Rica with Youth Challenge International (YCI), which he found "profoundly good and profoundly enriching".
  
  wn.com/Cory_Doctorow
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  David Bowie
  David Bowie ( /ˈboʊ.i/ BOH-ee; born David Robert Jones on 8 January 1947) is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. He is known for his distinctive voice and the intellectual depth and eclecticism of his work.
  Bowie first caught the eye and ear of the public in July 1969, when his song "Space Oddity" reached the top five of the UK Singles Chart. After a three-year period of experimentation he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single "Starman" and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Bowie's impact at that time, as described by biographer David Buckley, "challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture." The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona proved merely one facet of a career marked by continual reinvention, musical innovation and striking visual presentation.
  
  wn.com/David_Bowie
• Emmanuel Goldstein
  Emmanuel Goldstein is a character in George Orwell's classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. He is the number one enemy of the people according to Big Brother and the Party, who heads a mysterious and possibly fictitious anti-party organization called The Brotherhood. Despite being a key part of the story, he is only actually seen and heard on telescreen, and may in fact be nothing more than a useful propaganda fabrication of the Ministry of Truth.
  However, Goldstein's persona as an enemy of the state serves to distract, unite and focus the anger of the people of Oceania. Ostensibly, Goldstein serves an important role as both a convenient scapegoat for the totalitarian regime in 1984, and justifying reason for more military buildup, surveillance and elimination of civil liberties.
  In the novel, Goldstein is rumoured to be a former top member of the ruling (and sole) Party who had broken away early in the movement and started an organization known as "The Brotherhood", dedicated to the fall of The Party. The novel raises but leaves unanswered the questions of whether Goldstein, "The Brotherhood," or even "Big Brother" really exist.
  
  wn.com/Emmanuel_Goldstein
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  Erich Fromm
  Erich SeligmannFromm (March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was associated with what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
  Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, at Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Orthodox Jewish parents. He started his academic studies in 1918 at the University of Frankfurt am Main with two semesters of jurisprudence. During the summer semester of 1919, Fromm studied at the University of Heidelberg, where he switched from studying jurisprudence to sociology under Alfred Weber (brother of the better known sociologist Max Weber), the psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jaspers, and Heinrich Rickert. Fromm received his PhD in sociology from Heidelberg in 1922. During the mid 1920s, he was trained to become a psychoanalyst through Frieda Reichmann's psychoanalytic sanatorium in Heidelberg. He began his own clinical practice in 1927. In 1930, he joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and completed his psychoanalytical training.
  
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  Fredric Warburg
  Fredric John Warburg (November 27, 1898 - May 25, 1981) was an English publisher best known for his association with the British author George Orwell. During a career spanning a large part of the 20th century and ending in 1971, Warburg published Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) as well as Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and works by other leading figures such as Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. Other notable publications include the controversial The Third Eye by Lobsang Rampa in 1956, Pierre Boulle's classic The Bridge over the River Kwai, Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, and William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960).
  Warburg was born on November 27, 1898, to John Cimon Warburg (1867, London - 1931, London) (a photographer) and Violet Amalia (1868 - ) (née Sichel), both of Jewish descent. John Cimon was the oldest son of Fredric Elias Warburg (1832, Gothenburg, Sweden - 1899, London) and Emma (1844–1925) (née Raphael). Frederic Elias came to London in c.1860. Fredric Elias was the son of Samuel Warburg (18 September 1800, Gothenburg, Sweden – 16 February1881, Stockholm, Sweden) and Emma (1809–1880) (née Gluckstadt). Samuel was the son of Simon Elias Warburg (1760, Hamburg, Germany - 1828, Gothenburg, Sweden), son of Elias Samuel Warburg (1729, Altona, Germany - 4 January 1805, Altona, Germany). Elias Samuel was the son of Samuel Moses Warburg (1690 - 18 April 1759, Altona, Germany), son of Moses Warburg (1660 - 28 May 1701, Altona, Germany). Moses was the son of Jacob Samuel Warburg (1625 - 28 May 1668, Hamburg, Germany), son of Levi Juspa-Joseph Warburg (1600–1678). Levi Juspa-Joseph was the son of Jacob Simon Warburg (before 1582 - 13 September 1636). Jacob was the son of Samuel Warburg (before 1555 - 1595), son of the founder of the Warburg family, Simon von Cassel (before 1530 - 1566), who on moving from the town of Cassel on January 3, 1599 to Warburg, both in Germany changed his name to von Warburg.
  
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  George Orwell
  Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist and journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and a belief in democratic socialism.
  Considered perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture, Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945), which together have sold more copies than any two books by any other 20th-century author. His book Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, is widely acclaimed, as are his numerous essays on politics, literature, language and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
  Orwell's influence on popular and political culture endures, and several of his neologisms, along with the term Orwellian—a byword for totalitarian or manipulative social practices—have entered the vernacular.
  
  wn.com/George_Orwell
• Giles Farnaby
  Giles Farnaby (c. 1563 – November 1640) was an English composer and virginalist of the Renaissance and Baroque periods.
  Giles Farnaby was born about 1563, perhaps in Truro, Cornwall, England or near London. His father, Thomas, was a Cittizen and Joyner of London, and Giles may have been related to Thomas Farnaby (c. 1575–1647), the famous schoolmaster of Kent. But it was his cousin Nicholas Farnaby (c. 1560–1630), who may have turned him to music. Nicholas was a virginal maker, at this time a generic word that included the entire family of plucked keyboard instruments: the harpsichord, virginal, muselar and doubtless the clavichord, and it is for these instruments that Farnaby's compositions are best known. Like his father however, Giles trained as a joiner or cabinet-maker, starting his apprenticeship in about 1583, and gave this trade as his occupation for most of his life.
  He married Katherine Roane on 28 May 1587, and first lived in the parish of St. Helen's Bishopsgate, in London. The couple had a daughter, Philadelphia, baptised on 8 August 1591, when the Farnabys moved to the neighbouring parish of St. Peter's, Westcheap, and later a son, Richard Farnaby (1594–1623). After Philadelphia's premature death, prior to 1602, the Farnabys had three more children: a son Joy (1599), a daughter, also baptised Philadelphia (1602), and a last son, Edward (1604).
  
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  Grigory Zinoviev
  Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev (Russian: Григо́рий Евсе́евич Зино́вьев, IPA: [ɡrʲɪˈɡorʲɪj zʲɪˈnovʲjɪf]; September 23 [O.S. September 11] 1883 – August 25, 1936), born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum (Russian: Радомысльский), was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician. Zinoviev is best remembered as the longtime head of the Communist International and as the chief defendant in a 1936 show trial, the Trial of the Sixteen that marked the start of the so-called Great Terror in the USSR and resulted in his execution the day after his conviction.
  Gregory Zinoviev was born in Yelizavetgrad, Imperial Russia (currently Kirovohrad, Ukraine), to Jewish dairy farmers, who educated him at home. Between 1923 and 1935 the city was known as Zinovyevsk. Gregory Zinoviev was known in early life under the names of Apfelbaum or Radomyslovsky and later adopted several designations, such as Shatski, Grigoriev, Grigori and Zinoviev, by the two last of which he is most frequently called. He studied philosophy, literature and history. He became interested in politics, and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901. He was a member of its Bolshevik faction from the time of its creation in 1903. Between 1903 and the fall of the Russian Empire in February 1917, he was a leading Bolshevik and one of Lenin's closest associates, working both within Russia and abroad as circumstances permitted. He was elected to the RSDLP's Central Committee in 1907 and sided with Lenin in 1908 when the Bolshevik faction split into Lenin's supporters and Alexander Bogdanov's followers. Zinoviev remained Lenin's constant aide-de-camp and representative in various socialist organizations until 1917.
  
  wn.com/Grigory_Zinoviev
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  Haruki Murakami
  Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹, Murakami Haruki^?, born January 12, 1949) is a Japanese writer and translator. His works of fiction and non-fiction have garnered critical acclaim and numerous awards, including the Franz Kafka Prize and the Jerusalem Prize, among others.
  Murakami's fiction, often criticized by Japan's literary establishment, is humorous and surreal, focusing on themes of alienation and loneliness. He is considered an important figure in postmodern literature. The Guardian praised Murakami as "among the world's greatest living novelists" for his works and achievements.
  Murakami was born in Japan during the post–World War II baby boom. Although born in Kyoto, he spent his youth in Shukugawa (Nishinomiya), Ashiya and Kobe. His father was the son of a Buddhist priest, and his mother the daughter of an Osaka merchant. Both taught Japanese literature.
  Since childhood, Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western music and literature. He grew up reading a wide range of works by American writers, such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan. These Western influences often distinguish Murakami from other Japanese writers.
  
  wn.com/Haruki_Murakami
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  Hugh Hopper
  Hugh Colin Hopper (29 April 1945 – 7 June 2009) was a progressive rock and jazz fusion bass guitarist. He was a prominent member of the Canterbury scene, as a member of Soft Machine and various other related bands.
  Starting in 1963 as bassist with The Daevid Allen Trio, alongside drummer Robert Wyatt, he alternated between free jazz and rhythm and blues. In 1964 with Brian Hopper (his brother), Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers and Richard Sinclair he formed The Wilde Flowers, a pop music group. Although they never released any records during their existence (a compilation was released 30 years later), The Wilde Flowers are acknowledged as the founders of the Canterbury scene and spawned its two most important groups, Soft Machine and Caravan.
  Hopper's role with Soft Machine was initially as the group's road manager, but he already composed for their first album The Soft Machine and played bass on one of its tracks. In 1969 he was recruited to be the group's bassist for their second album, Volume Two and, with Mike Ratledge and Robert Wyatt, he took part in a recording session for a solo album of Syd Barrett's (formerly of Pink Floyd, with whom the early Soft Machine had regularly gigged ). Hopper continued with Soft Machine, playing bass and contributing numerous compositions until 1973. During his tenure the group evolved from a psychedelic pop group to an instrumental jazz-rock fusion band. In 1972, shortly before leaving Soft Machine, he recorded the first record under his own name, 1984 (named after George Orwell's novel). This was a decidedly non-commercial record featuring lengthy solo pieces using tape loops as well as shorter pieces with a group.
  
  wn.com/Hugh_Hopper
• Jacintha Buddicom
  Jacintha Buddicom (10 May 1901 – 1994) was a poet and a childhood friend of George Orwell (Eric Blair).
  Buddicom was born at Plymouth but moved with her family to Shiplake, Berkshire. There she first met Eric Blair in the summer of 1914 when he was standing on his head in a field at the bottom of the Buddicoms' garden. When asked why, he replied, "You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are the right way up."
  From that summer afternoon, Eric and his younger sister Avril became very close friends with Buddicom and her younger brother and sister, Prosper and Guinever. With Prosper and Guiny, Blair enjoyed shooting, fishing and birdwatching, while with Jacintha he preferred to read and write poetry and dream of future intellectual adventures. At this time he told Buddicom that at some point he might write a book in a style similar to that of H. G. Wells A Modern Utopia, although Nineteen Eighty-Four turned out to be far different from Buddicom’s expectations.
  Buddicom was educated at Oxford High School, but neither of them achieved their mutual dream of going to Oxford University. The couple lost touch shortly after Blair went to Burma. She became unsympathetic at the letters he wrote complaining about his life, and stopped writing back. The reason for this is explained in the Postscript edition [2006] of Eric & Us, which suggests that the then eighteen-year-old Blair may have attempted to rape Buddicom shortly before his departure to Burma.
  
  wn.com/Jacintha_Buddicom
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  Jack London
  John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. He is best remembered as the author of Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life".^{[citation needed]} He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen", and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.
  London was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers and wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics such as his dystopian novel, The Iron Heel and his non-fiction exposé, The People of the Abyss.
  Jack London's mother, Flora Wellman, was the fifth and youngest child of Pennsylvania Canal builder Marshall Wellman and his first wife, Eleanor Garrett Jones. Marshall Wellman was a great-great-great-grandson of Puritan Thomas Wellman. Flora left Ohio and moved to the Pacific coast when her father remarried after her mother died. In San Francisco, Flora worked as a music teacher and spiritualist claiming to channel the spirit of an Indian chief.
  
  wn.com/Jack_London
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  James Burnham
  James Burnham (November 22, 1905 – July 28, 1987) was an American philosopher and political theorist. A radical activist in the 1930s and an important factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement, in later years Burnham left Marxism and turned to the political Right, serving as a public intellectual of the American conservative movement, and producing the work for which he is best known, The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. Burnham is also remembered as a regular contributor to America's leading conservative publication, National Review, on a variety of topics.
  Born in Chicago, Illinois on November 22, 1905, James Burnham was the son of Claude George Burnham, an English immigrant and executive with the Burlington Railroad. James was raised as a Roman Catholic but rejected Catholicism as a college student, professing atheism for much of his life (although returning to the church shortly before his death). He graduated at the top of his class at Princeton University before attending Balliol College, Oxford University, where his professors included J.R.R. Tolkien and Martin D'Arcy. In 1929, he became a professor of philosophy at New York University.
  
  wn.com/James_Burnham
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  Jimmy Page
  James Patrick "Jimmy" Page, OBE (born 9 January 1944) is an English guitarist, songwriter, and record producer. He began his career as a studio session guitarist in London and was subsequently a member of The Yardbirds from 1966 to 1968, after which he founded the English rock band Led Zeppelin.
  Jimmy Page is viewed by critics, fans and fellow musicians alike as one of the most influential and important guitarists and songwriters in rock music.Rolling Stone magazine has described him as "the pontiff of power riffing & probably the most digitally sampled artist in pop today after James Brown." In 2010, Jimmy Page was ranked No.2 in Gibson's list of "Top 50 Guitarists of All Time" and, in 2007, No.4 on Classic Rock Magazine's "100 Wildest Guitar Heroes". Page was ranked third in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" in 2011. He has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice; once as a member of The Yardbirds (1992), and once as a member of Led Zeppelin (1995).
  
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  John Hurt
  John Vincent Hurt, CBE (born 22 January 1940) is an English actor and former voice actor. Among other honours, he has received two Academy Award nominations, a Golden Globe Award, and four BAFTA Awards, with the fourth being a Lifetime Achievement recognition.
  Hurt is known for his leading roles as Joseph Merrick (billed as John Merrick) in The Elephant Man, Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Mr. Braddock in The Hit, Stephen Ward in Scandal, and Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant and An Englishman in New York. Recognizable for his distinctive rich voice, he has also enjoyed a successful voice acting career, starring in films such as Watership Down, The Lord of the Rings and Dogville, as well as BBC television series Merlin.
  Hurt initially came to prominence for his role as Richard Rich in the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons, and has since appeared in such popular motion pictures as: Alien, Midnight Express, Rob Roy, V for Vendetta, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the first, penultimate, and last Harry Potter films, the Hellboy film series, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Hurt is one of England's best-known, most prolific and sought-after actors, and has had a versatile film career spanning six decades. He is also known for his many Shakespearean roles. His character's final scene in Alien is consistently named as one of the most memorable in cinematic history.
  
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  Joseph Stalin
  Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин; born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Джугашвили; 18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and later held the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. While the office of the General Secretary was officially elective and not initially regarded as the top position in the Soviet state, Stalin managed to use it to consolidate more and more power in his hands after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924 and gradually put down all opposition groups within the Communist Party. This included Leon Trotsky, a socialist theorist and the principal critic of Stalin among the early Soviet leaders, who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Whereas Trotsky was an exponent of permanent revolution, it was Stalin's concept of socialism in one country that became the primary focus of Soviet politics.
  
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  Karin Boye
   Karin Maria Boye (help·info) (October 26, 1900 – April 24, 1941) was a Swedish poet and novelist.
  Boye was born in Gothenburg (Göteborg), Sweden and moved with her family to Stockholm in 1909. She studied at Uppsala University from 1921 to 1926 and debuted in 1922 with a collection of poems, "Clouds" (Swedish: Moln). During her time in Uppsala and until 1930, Boye was a member of the Swedish Clarté League, a socialist group in those days very anti-Fascist.
  In 1931 Boye, together with Erik Mesterton and Josef Riwkin, founded the poetry magazine Spektrum, introducing T. S. Eliot and the Surrealists to Swedish readers. She translated many of Eliot's works into Swedish; she and Mesterton translated "The Waste Land".
  Boye is perhaps most famous for her poems, of which the most well-known ought to be "Yes, of course it hurts" (Swedish: Ja visst gör det ont) and "In motion" (I rörelse) from her collections of poems "The Hearths" (Härdarna), 1927, and "For the sake of the tree" (För trädets skull), 1935. She was also a member of the Swedish literary institution Samfundet De Nio (chair number 6) from 1931 until her death in 1941.
  
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  Lavrentiy Beria
  Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (Georgian: ლავრენტი პავლეს ძე ბერია, Lavrenti Pavles dze Beria; Russian: Лавре́нтий Па́влович Бе́рия; 29 March 1899 – 23 December 1953) was a Soviet politician, Marshal of the Soviet Union and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus (NKVD) under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and Deputy Premier in the postwar years (1946–1953).
  Beria was the longest lived and most influential of Stalin's secret police chiefs, wielding his most substantial influence during and after World War II. He simultaneously administered vast sections of the Soviet state and served as de facto Marshal of the Soviet Union in command of the NKVD field units responsible for anti-partisan operations on the Eastern Front during World War II, as well as for acting as barrier troops and the apprehension of thousands of "turncoats, deserters, cowards and suspected malingerers". Beria administered the vast expansion of the Gulag labor camps and was primarily responsible for overseeing the secret defense institutions known as sharashkas, critical to the war effort. He also played the decisive role in coordinating the Soviet partisans, developing an impressive intelligence and sabotage network behind German lines. He attended the Yalta Conference with Stalin, who introduced him to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt as "our Himmler". After the war, he organized the communist takeover of the countries of Central Europe and Eastern Europe. Beria's uncompromising ruthlessness in his duties and skill at producing results culminated in his success in overseeing the Soviet atomic bomb project. Stalin gave it absolute priority and the project was completed in under five years in no small part due to Soviet espionage against the West organized by Beria's NKVD.
  
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  Leon Trotsky
  Leon Trotsky (Russian: Лев Троцкий, pronounced [ˈlʲef ˈtrot͡skʲɪj] ( listen); 7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940), born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army.
  Trotsky was initially a supporter of the Menshevik Internationalists faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He joined the Bolsheviks immediately prior to the 1917 October Revolution, and eventually became a leader within the Party. During the early days of the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army as People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. He was a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918–20). He was also among the first members of the Politburo.
  After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was successively removed from power, expelled from the Communist Party, deported from the Soviet Union and assassinated on Stalin's orders. An early advocate of Red Army intervention against European fascism, Trotsky also opposed Stalin's non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s.
  
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  Lev Kamenev
  Lev Borisovich Kamenev (Russian: Лев Бори́сович Ка́менев, IPA: [ˈlʲef ˈkamʲɪnʲɪf] ( listen); 18 July [O.S. 6 July] 1883 – 25 August 1936), born Rozenfeld (Russian: Ро́зенфельд), was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a prominent Soviet politician. He served briefly as the first head of state of the new republic in 1917, and from 1923-24 the acting Premier in the last year of Lenin's life.
  
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  Margaret Atwood
  Margaret Eleanor Atwood, CC OOnt FRSC (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honored authors of fiction in recent history. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award seven times, winning twice. Atwood has increasingly been mentioned as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
  While she is best known for her work as a novelist, she is also a poet, having published 15 books of poetry to date. Many of her poems have been inspired by myths and fairy tales, which have been interests of hers from an early age. Atwood has published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper's, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, and many other magazines. She has also published four collections of stories and three collections of unclassifiable short prose works.
  
  wn.com/Margaret_Atwood
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  Nam June Paik
  Nam June Paik (July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist.
  Paik is credited with an early usage (1974) of the term "super highway" in application to telecommunications.
  Born in Seoul during the period of the Japanese annexation of Korea, the youngest of five siblings, Paik had 2 older brothers and 2 older sisters. His father owned a major textile manufacturing firm. As he was growing up, he was trained as a classical pianist. In 1950, Paik and his family had to flee from their home in Korea, during the Korean War. His family first fled to Hong Kong, but later moved to Japan. Six years later he graduated from the University of Tokyo where he wrote a thesis on the composer Arnold Schoenberg.
  Paik then moved to Germany to study music history at Munich University. While studying in Germany, Paik met the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage and the conceptual artists Joseph Beuys and Wolf Vostell who inspired him to work in the field of electronic art.
  
  wn.com/Nam_June_Paik
• 
  Nikolai Bukharin
  Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (Russian: Никола́й Ива́нович Буха́рин; 9 October [O.S. 27 September] 1888 – 15 March 1938) was a Russian Marxist, Bolshevik revolutionary, and Soviet politician. He was a member of the Politburo (1924–1929) and Central Committee (1917–1937), chairman of the Communist International (Comintern, 1926–1929), and the editor in chief of Pravda (1918–1929), the journal Bolshevik (1924–1929), Izvestia (1934–1936), and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. He authored Imperialism and World Economy (1918), The ABC of Communism (1919. co-authored with Yevgeni Preobrazhensky), and Historical Materialism (1921) among others. Initially a supporter of Joseph Stalin after Vladimir Lenin's death, he came to oppose a large number of Stalin's policies and was one of Stalin's most prominent victims during the "Moscow Trials" and purges of the Old Bolsheviks in the late 1930s.
  Nikolai Bukharin was born on September 27 (October 9, new style), 1888 in Moscow. He was the second son of two schoolteachers, Ivan Gavrilovich and Liubov Ivanova Bukharin. His childhood is vividly recounted in his mostly autobiographic novel How It All Began.
  
  wn.com/Nikolai_Bukharin
• 
  Nikolai Yezhov
  Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov or Ezhov (Russian: Никола́й Иванович Ежо́в) (IPA: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj jɪˈʐof]; May 1, 1895 – February 4, 1940) was the senior figure in the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) under Joseph Stalin during the period of the Great Purge. His reign is sometimes known as the "Yezhovshchina" (Russian: Ежовщина), "the Yezhov era", a term that began to be used during the de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s. During the beginning of World War II his status within the USSR became that of a political unperson.
  Yezhov was born in Saint Petersburg, according to his official Soviet biography, though other records^[specify] point to the possibility that he was born in Marijampolė. In a form filled out in 1921, Yezhov claimed some ability to speak Polish and Lithuanian.
  He completed only his elementary education. From 1909 to 1915, he worked as a tailor's assistant and factory worker. From 1915 until 1917, Yezhov served in the Imperial Russian Army. He joined the Bolsheviks on May 5, 1917 in Vitebsk, seven months before the October Revolution. During the Russian Civil War, 1919–1921, he fought in the Red Army. After February 1922, he worked in the political system, mostly as a secretary of various regional committees of the Communist Party. In 1927, he was transferred to the Accounting and Distribution Department of the Communist Party where he worked as an instructor and acting head of the department. From 1929 to 1930, he was the Deputy People's Commissar for Agriculture. In November 1930, he was appointed to the Head of several departments of the Communist Party: department of special affairs, department of personnel and department of industry. In 1934, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party; in the next year he became a secretary of the Central Committee. From February 1935 to March 1939, he was also the Chairman of the Central Commission for Party Control.
  
  wn.com/Nikolai_Yezhov
• 
  Ray Bradbury
  Ray Douglas Bradbury (born August 22, 1920) is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th and 21st century American writers of speculative fiction. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into television shows or films.
  Bradbury was born in 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois to Esther Moberg Bradbury, a Swedish immigrant, and Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, a power and telephone lineman.
  Ray Bradbury is related to the American Shakespeare scholar Douglas Spaulding. He is also directly descended from Mary Bradbury, who was tried, convicted and sentenced to hang as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. She was married to Captain Thomas Bradbury of Salisbury, Massachusetts.
  Bradbury was a reader and writer throughout his youth who was greatly influenced by the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Bradbury was especially impressed with Poe's ability to draw readers into his works. In his youth, he spent much time in the Carnegie library in Waukegan, Illinois, reading such authors as H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and his favorite author, Edgar Rice Burroughs who wrote novels such as Tarzan of the Apes and The Warlord of Mars. He loved Burroughs' The Warlord of Mars so much that at the age of twelve he wrote his own sequel. An aunt read him short stories when he was a child. He used this library as a setting for much of his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, and depicted Waukegan as "Green Town" in some of his other semi-autobiographical novels—Dandelion Wine, Farewell Summer—as well as in many of his short stories.
  
  wn.com/Ray_Bradbury
• Rayner Heppenstall
  John Rayner Heppenstall (27 July 1911 in Lockwood, Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England – 23 May 1981 in Deal, Kent, England) was a British novelist, poet, diarist, and a BBC radio producer.
  He was a student at the University of Leeds, where he read English and Modern Languages, graduating in 1932. He had a brief teaching career, in Dagenham.
  Coming to London in 1934, he rapidly made initial contacts in the literary world. A short study Middleton Murry: A Study in Excellent Normality (1934) brought him for a time into John Middleton Murry's Adelphi commune at "The Oaks", where in 1935 he worked as a cook. In 1935, also, he met Dylan Thomas, sent to meet him by Sir Richard Rees of the Adelphi magazine. In short order he became a Catholic convert, and married Margaret Edwards in 1937. In the mid-1930s he was influenced by Eric Gill.
  He was a friend of George Orwell, encountered also in 1935 through Thomas and Rees, and later wrote about him in his memoir Four Absentees. Heppenstall, Orwell and the Irish poet Michael Sayers shared a flat, in Lawford Road, Camden. Heppenstall once came home drunk and noisy, and when Orwell emerged from his bedroom and asked him to pipe down, Heppenstall took a swing at him. Orwell then beat him up with a shooting-stick, and the following morning told him to move out. Friendship was restored, but after Orwell's death, Heppenstall wrote an account of the incident called The Shooting-Stick.
  
  wn.com/Rayner_Heppenstall
• 
  Rick Wakeman
  Richard Christopher Wakeman (born 18 May 1949) is an English keyboard player, composer and songwriter best known for being the former keyboardist in the progressive rock band Yes. He is also known for his solo albums, contributing to the BBC comedy series Grumpy Old Men and for Rick's Place, his former radio show on Planet Rock that aired until December 2010.
  Wakeman was born in West London. He purchased his first electronic keyboard at 12 years of age. In 1968, he studied the piano, clarinet, orchestration and modern music at the Royal College of Music before leaving after a year in favour of session music work. He went on to feature on songs by artists including Black Sabbath,David Bowie, T. Rex, Elton John and Cat Stevens. Wakeman joined the folk group Strawbs in 1969 and played on three of their albums. He first joined Yes in 1971 to replace Tony Kaye, and left the group in 1974 to work on his solo career. He returned in 1976 before leaving with lead vocalist Jon Anderson in 1980. Wakeman was part of the side project Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe, a group of ex-Yes members formed in 1989, and the eight-member Yes line-up that followed until his third departure in 1992. He returned for two years in 1995 and once more in 2002, where he was part of the band's 35th anniversary tour until its end in 2004.
  
  wn.com/Rick_Wakeman
• 
  Roy Harper
  Roy Harper (born 12 June 1941) is an English folk/rock singer-songwriter and guitarist who has been a professional musician since 1964. He has released a large catalogue of albums (21 studio albums and 10 live albums) most of which are available on his record label Science Friction (as CD and / or Music download).
  Musically, American blues musician Leadbelly and folk singer Woody Guthrie were his earliest influences, and whilst in his teens, jazz musician Miles Davis. Harper was also exposed to classical music in his childhood and has pointed to the influence of Jean Sibelius' Karelia Suite. Lyrical influences include the 19th century Romantics (especially Percy Shelley), and John Keats poem Endymion. Harper has also cited the Beat poets as being highly influential, particularly Jack Kerouac. As a musician, Harper is known for his distinctive fingerstyle playing and lengthy, lyrical, complex compositions, a result of his love of jazz and Keats.
  His influence has been acknowledged by many musicians including Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin (who named the song "Hats Off to (Roy) Harper" after him), Pete Townshend of The Who, Kate Bush, Pink Floyd (who invited him to sing guest lead vocals on their song "Have a Cigar"), and Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull; who stated Harper was his "...primary influence as an acoustic guitarist and songwriter."
  
  wn.com/Roy_Harper
• Show trial
  The term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial in which there is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as an impressive example and as a warning. Show trials tend to be retributive rather than correctional justice. The term was first recorded in the 1930s.
  
  
  Cadaver Trial was a posthumous trial over Catholic Pope Formosus held in 897.
  In the late 17th century, various people in Salem, Massachusetts were accused of practicing witchcraft and consorting with the Devil in the Salem witch trials. Nineteen people were executed, one was killed, and five died in prison.
  The Dreyfus affair was a show trial in France in 1894, where a Jewish captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was accused of spying for Germany.
  The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 was one in which two anarchist Italian immigrants were accused of an armed robbery in Massachusetts. Both were executed, despite international appeals.
  
  wn.com/Show_trial
• 
  Spanish Civil War
  The Spanish Civil War was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939. The war began after a pronunciamiento (declaration of opposition) by a group of generals under the leadership of José Sanjurjo against the elected government of the Second Spanish Republic, at the time under the leadership of President Manuel Azaña. The rebel coup was supported by a number of conservative groups including the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right, monarchists such as the religious conservative Carlists, and the Fascist Falange. The uprising was authoritarian and anti-separatist in inspiration; anti-Basque and anti-Catalan feeling marked the Nationalist zone.
  Following the only partially successful coup, Spain was left militarily and politically divided. From that moment onwards, general Francisco Franco began a protracted war of attrition against the established government for the control of the country. The rebel forces received the support of Nazi Germany and the Kingdom of Italy, as well as neighbouring Portugal, while the Soviet Union and Mexico intervened in support of the Republican government or loyalist side.
  
  wn.com/Spanish_Civil_War
• 
  Spike Milligan
  Terence Alan Patrick Seán "Spike" Milligan KBE (16 April 1918 – 27 February 2002) was a British comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright, soldier and actor. His early life was spent in India, where he was born, but the majority of his working life was spent in the United Kingdom. He became an Irish citizen in 1962 after the British government declared him stateless. He was the co-creator, main writer and a principal cast member of The Goon Show, performing a range of roles including the popular Eccles.
  Milligan wrote and edited many books, including Puckoon and his seven-volume autobiographical account of his time serving during the Second World War, beginning with Adolf Hitler: My part in his downfall. He is also noted as a popular writer of comical verse; much of his poetry was written for children, including Silly Verse for Kids (1959). After success with the ground-breaking British radio programme, The Goon Show, Milligan translated this success to television with Q5, a surreal sketch show which is credited as a major influence on the members of Monty Python's Flying Circus.
  
  wn.com/Spike_Milligan
• 
  Stephen Breyer
  Stephen Gerald Breyer ( /ˈbraɪər/; born August 15, 1938) is an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, and known for his pragmatic approach to constitutional law, Breyer is generally associated with the more liberal side of the Court.
  Following a clerkship with Supreme Court Associate Justice Arthur Goldberg in 1964, Breyer became well known as a law professor and lecturer at Harvard Law School, starting in 1967. There he specialized in administrative law, writing a number of influential textbooks that remain in use today. He held other prominent positions before being nominated for the Supreme Court, including special assistant to the United States Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust and assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force in 1973.
  In his 2005 book Active Liberty, Breyer made his first attempt to systematically lay out his views on legal theory, arguing that the judiciary should seek to resolve issues to encourage popular participation in governmental decisions.
  
  wn.com/Stephen_Breyer
• 
  Stevie Wonder
  Stevland Hardaway Morris (born May 13, 1950 as Stevland Hardaway Judkins), known by his stage name Stevie Wonder, is an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, a child prodigy who developed into one of the most creative musical figures of the late 20th century. Blind since shortly after birth, Wonder signed with Motown's Tamla label at the age of eleven, and continues to perform and record for Motown to this day.
  Among Wonder's best known works are singles such as "Superstition", "Sir Duke", "I Wish" and "I Just Called to Say I Love You". Well known albums also include Talking Book, Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life. He has recorded more than thirty U.S. top ten hits and received twenty-two Grammy Awards, the most ever awarded to a male solo artist. Wonder is also noted for his work as an activist for political causes, including his 1980 campaign to make Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a holiday in the United States. In 2009, Wonder was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace. In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists to celebrate the US singles chart's fiftieth anniversary, with Wonder at number five.
  
  wn.com/Stevie_Wonder
• 
  Thomas Pynchon
  Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist. He is a MacArthur Fellow noted for his dense and complex novels, and both his fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes, including (but not limited to) the fields of history, science, and mathematics. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
  Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and Mason & Dixon (1997). Pynchon is also known for being very private; very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s.
  
  wn.com/Thomas_Pynchon
• 
  Tim Minchin
  Timothy David "Tim" Minchin (born 7 October 1975 in Northampton, England) is an Australian-British comedian, actor, and musician.
  Tim Minchin is best known for his musical comedy, which has featured in six CDs, three DVDs and a number of live comedy shows which he has performed internationally. He has also appeared on television in Australia, Britain and the United States. After growing up in Perth, Western Australia, he attended the University of Western Australia and WAAPA before moving to Melbourne in 2002. His breakout show, "Dark Side", launched him into the public eye, achieving critical success at the 2005 Melbourne International Comedy Festival and the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
  Minchin has a background in theatre and has appeared in various stage productions, in addition to some small acting roles on Australian TV. A documentary film about Minchin, Rock N Roll Nerd (directed by Rhian Skirving), was released theatrically in 2008 and broadcast by ABC1 in 2009. He is the co-writer of the Olivier Award winning hit musical Matilda the Musical, based on the Roald Dahl book Matilda.
  
  wn.com/Tim_Minchin
• 
  Todd Rundgren
  Todd Harry Rundgren (born June 22, 1948) is an American multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and record producer. Hailed in the early stage of his career as a new pop-wunderkind, supported by the certified gold solo double LP Something/Anything? in 1972, Todd Rundgren's career has produced a diverse range of recordings as solo artist, and during the seventies and eighties with the band Utopia. He has also been prolific as a producer and engineer on the recorded work of other musicians.
  During the 1970s and 1980s, Rundgren engineered and/or produced many notable albums for other acts, including Straight Up by Badfinger, Stage Fright by The Band, We're an American Band by Grand Funk Railroad, Bat Out of Hell by Meat Loaf, and Skylarking by XTC. In the 1980s and 1990s his interest in video and computers led to Rundgren's "Time Heals" being the eighth video played on MTV, and "Change Myself" was animated by Rundgren on commercially available Amiga Computers.
  His best-known songs include "Hello It's Me" and "I Saw the Light" which have heavy rotation on classic rock radio stations, and "Bang the Drum All Day" featured in many sports arenas, commercials, and movie trailers. Although lesser known, "Couldn't I Just Tell You" has had a major influence on artists in the power pop musical genre.
  
  wn.com/Todd_Rundgren
• 
  William Byrd
  William Byrd (1540 or late 1539 – 4 July 1623) was an English composer of the Renaissance. He wrote in many of the forms current in England at the time, including various types of sacred and secular polyphony, keyboard (the so-called Virginalist school) and consort music.
  Knowledge of Byrd's biography expanded in the late 20th century, thanks largely to the research of John Harley (Harley, 1997). Following the discovery of a document dated 2 October 1598 in which Byrd's age is given as "58 years or there abouts," it now appears that he was born in 1540. The older dating 1542–3 is derived from Byrd's will (endorsed on 22 November 1622) which describes him as 'in the 80th year of my age'. It now becomes clear that it must have been drafted about three years earlier than the date of endorsement. Byrd was born in London, the son of a Thomas Byrd (not Thomas Byrd of the Chapel Royal) about whom little is known. Byrd had two brothers, Symon'd and John, and four sisters. It is clear from a reference in the prefatory material in the Tallis/Byrd Cantiones of 1575 that Byrd was a pupil of Thomas Tallis, then the leading composing member of the Chapel Royal Choir. Byrd also worked in collaboration with two other Chapel Royal singing-men, John Sheppard and William Mundy, on one of his earliest compositions, a contribution to a joint setting of the alternatim psalm In exitu Israel composed for the procession to the font at the Paschal Vigil. As an item for the Sarum liturgy this was presumably composed near the end of the reign of Mary Tudor (1553–1558), whose Catholic beliefs impelled her to revive Sarum liturgical practices during her brief reign. In view of these contacts it is reasonable to speculate that Byrd was a Chapel Royal choirboy, though the surviving records do not name the choristers individually.
  
  wn.com/William_Byrd
• 
  Yevgeny Zamyatin
  Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (Russian: Евге́ний Ива́нович Замя́тин, Russian pronunciation: [jɪvˈɡʲenʲɪj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ zɐˈmʲætʲɪn]) (February 20, 1884 – March 10, 1937) was a Russian author of science fiction and political satire. Despite having been a prominent Old Bolshevik, Zamyatin was deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the CPSU following the October Revolution. He is most famous for his 1921 novel We, a story set in a dystopian future police state. In 1921, We became the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board. Ultimately, Zamyatin arranged for We to be smuggled to the West for publication. The subsequent outrage this sparked within the Party and the Union of Soviet Writers led directly to Zamyatin's successful request for exile from his homeland. Due to his use of literature to criticize Soviet society, Zamyatin has been referred to as one of the first Soviet dissidents.
  Zamyatin was born in Lebedyan, 300 km south of Moscow. His father was a Russian Orthodox priest and schoolmaster, and his mother a musician. He may have had synesthesia as he gave letters and sounds qualities. For example, he saw the letter "L" as having pale, cold and light blue qualities.
  
  wn.com/Yevgeny_Zamyatin

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

Genres

• Drama
• Romance
• Sci-Fi
• Thriller

Taglines:

George Orwell's Terrifying Vision Comes To The Screen.
Big Brother is Watching...
The year of the movie. The movie of the year.

Quotes:

O'Brien: If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.

Winston Smith: [voice-over] Thoughtcrime is death. Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime IS death. I have committed even before setting pen to paper the essential crime that contains all others unto itself.

[Winston writes in his forbidden diary]::Winston Smith: [voice-over] April the 4th, 1984. To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free. From the Age of Big Brother, from the Age of the Thought Police, from a dead man... greetings.

Syme: Beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

[Winston writes in his forbidden diary]::Winston Smith: [voice-over] If there is hope, it lies in the proles. If they could become conscious of their own strength, they would have no need to conspire. History does not matter to them.

[Winston describes visiting a prostitute in the off-limit proletarian areas in his diary]::Winston Smith: [voice-over] It was three years ago, on a dark evening. Easy to slip past the patrols, and I'd gone into the proletarian areas. There was no one else on the street, and no telescreens. She said, "Two dollars," so I went with her. She had a young face, painted very thick. It was really was the paint that appealed to me: white like a mask, and bright red lips. There were no preliminaries. Standing there with the smell of dead insects and cheap perfume, I went and did it just the same.

[Winston renders a war hero an "unperson"]::Winston Smith: [into his speaker phone] Rutherford unperson. Substitute Ogilvy. Ogilvy blog details as follows: war hero, recently killed, Malabar front. Today awarded posthumous secondary order of conspicuous merit second class.::[Winston tapes over Rutherford's face, consigning him to oblivion]

Winston Smith: [reciting poem] Under the spreading chestnut tree / I sold you / You sold me.

[Charrington and Winston look at an old sketch of a church]::Charrington: Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clements...::Winston Smith: What was that?::Charrington: Something old...

Winston Smith: Look, I hate purity. Hate goodness. I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone corrupt.::Julia: Well, I ought to suit you, then. I'm corrupt to the core.::Winston Smith: Do you like doing this? I don't mean just me...::Julia: I adore it.

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