• Angela’s Ashes
• Ann Arbor, Michigan
• Anthony Trollope
• Augustine of Hippo
• Autobiogeography
• Autobiography
• Babur
• Baburnama
• Benjamin Franklin
• Benvenuto Cellini
• Berkeley, California
• Binjamin Wilkomirski
• Biography
• Chagatai language
• Charles Dickens
• Charlotte Brontë
• Chicago
• Communism
• Daniel Defoe
• Diary
• Dysfunctional family
• Edmund Ludlow
• Edward Gibbon
• English Civil War
• English language
• Fake memoirs
• Family history
• Gerolamo Cardano
• Ghostwriter
• Greek language
• Henry Brooks Adams
• Historia Calamitatum
• Historical document
• Holy Land
• Italian language
• J.D. Salinger
• Jane Eyre
• John Bunyan
• John Henry Newman
• John Stuart Mill
• Libanius
• Libertine
• Lord Byron
• Margery Kempe
• Memoir
• Minneapolis
• Misery lit
• Moll Flanders
• Mughal Empire
• Nadezhda Mandelstam
• Naomi Campbell
• P. T. Barnum
• Paganism
• Persian language
• Peter Abelard
• Political repression
• Portal Biography
• Primo Levi
• Pseudonym
• Public speaking
• Renaissance
• Rhetoric
• Robert Nye
• Robert Southey
• Romanticism
• Rome
• South Asia
• Spanish language
• The Color of Water
• The Holocaust
• Totalitarianism
• William Hazlitt
• WP Autobiography
• 
  

• 
  Chicago
  Chicago (ⁱ/ʃɪˈkɑːɡoʊ/ or /ʃɪˈkɔːɡoʊ/) is the largest city in the US state of Illinois and the third most populous city in the United States after New York City and Los Angeles. The city has around 2.7 million residents. Its metropolitan area, sometimes called "Chicagoland", is the third largest in the United States, with an estimated 9.8 million people. Chicago is the county seat of Cook County, though a small portion also extends into DuPage County.
  Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837, near a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed. Today, Chicago is listed as an alpha+ global city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network, and ranks seventh in the world on the 2012 Global Cities Index. The city retains its status as an international hub for finance, industry, telecommunications and infrastructure, with O'Hare International Airport being the second busiest airport in the world in terms of traffic movements. In 2008^[update], the city hosted 45.6 million domestic and overseas visitors. Among metropolitan areas, Chicago has the 4th largest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the world, ranking just behind Tokyo, New York City, and Los Angeles. Chicago is one of the most important Worldwide Centers of Commerce and trade.
  
  wn.com/Chicago
• 
  Minneapolis
  Minneapolis (pronunciation: ⁱ/ˌmɪniːˈæpəlɪs/), nicknamed "City of Lakes" and the "Mill City", is the county seat of Hennepin County, the largest city in the state of Minnesota, and the 48th largest in the United States. Its name is attributed to the city's first schoolteacher, who combined mni, the Dakota word for water, and polis, the Greek word for city.
  As of the 2010 Census, the population of the city of Minneapolis is 382,578. Minneapolis lies on both banks of the Mississippi River, just north of the river's confluence with the Minnesota River, and adjoins Saint Paul, the state's capital. Known as the Twin Cities, Minneapolis-Saint Paul is the 16th-largest metropolitan area in the U.S., with approximately 3.3 million residents. The city is abundantly rich in water, with over twenty lakes and wetlands, the Mississippi river, creeks and waterfalls, many connected by parkways in the Chain of Lakes and the Grand Rounds National Scenic Byway. Among cities of similar densities, Minneapolis has the most dedicated parkland. It was once the world's flour milling capital and a hub for timber, and today is the primary business center between Chicago and Seattle, with Minneapolis proper containing the fifth highest concentration of Fortune 500 companies. It has cultural organizations that draw creative people and audiences to the city for theater, visual art, writing, and music. The community's diverse population has a long tradition of charitable support through progressive public social programs and VOLAGs, as well as private and corporate philanthropy.
  
  wn.com/Minneapolis
• 
  Mughal Empire
  The Mughal Empire, Shahan-e-Gurkhani, Shahan-e-Mughal, Sultanate-e-Mughliya, Daulat-e-Mughliya (Persian: شاهان گورکانی‎ Shāhān-e Gūrkānī; Urdu: مغلیہ سلطنت; self-designation: گوركانى Gūrkānī ),‎ or Mogul (also Moghul) Empire in traditional English usage, was an imperial power from the Indian Subcontinent. The Mughal emperors were direct descendants of Genghis Khan through Chagatai Khan and Timur. The Mughal Empire began in 1526; at the height of their power in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, they controlled most of the Indian Subcontinent—extending from Bengal in the east to Balochistan in the west, Kashmir in the north to the Kaveri basin in the south. According to "Babur-Nama", Kazakh tribal aristocracy along with number of other Turkic soldiers participated actively in the campaign of Babur, which made great influence over the development of Mughal Empire. Its population at that time has been estimated as between 110 and 150 million, over a territory of more than 3.2 million square kilometres (1.2 million square miles).
  
  wn.com/Mughal_Empire
• 
  Rome
  Rome (/ˈroʊm/; Italian: Roma pronounced [ˈroːma] ( listen); Latin: Rōma) is a city and special comune ("Roma Capitale") in Italy. Rome is the capital of Italy and the capital of Lazio (Latin: Latium). With 2.8 million residents in 1,285.3 km² (496.3 sq mi), it is also the country's largest and most populated comune and fourth-most populous city in the European Union by population within city limits. Between 3.2 and 3.7 million people live in the Rome metropolitan area. The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.
  Rome's history spans two and a half thousand years. It was the capital city of the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, which was the dominant power in Western Europe and the lands bordering the Mediterranean for over seven hundred years from the 1st century BC until the 7th century AD and the city is regarded as one of the birthplaces of western civilization. Since the 1st century AD Rome has been the seat of the Papacy and, after the end of Byzantine domination, in the 8th century it became the capital of the Papal States, which lasted until 1870. In 1871 Rome became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, and in 1946 that of the Italian Republic.
  
  wn.com/Rome

• 
  Anthony Trollope
  Anthony Trollope (24 April 1815 – 6 December 1882) was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works, collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire. He also wrote perceptive novels on political, social, and gender issues, and on other topical matters.
  Noted fans have included Sir Alec Guinness (who never travelled without a Trollope novel), former British Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Sir John Major, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, English judge Lord Denning, American novelists Sue Grafton and Dominick Dunne and soap opera writer Harding Lemay. Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he regained the esteem of critics by the mid-twentieth century.
  Thomas Anthony Trollope, Anthony's father, was a barrister. Though a clever and well-educated man and a Fellow of New College, Oxford, he failed at the bar due to his bad temper. In addition, his ventures into farming proved unprofitable, and he lost an expected inheritance when an elderly childless uncle re-married and had children. As a son of landed gentry he wanted his sons to be raised as gentlemen and to attend Oxford or Cambridge. Anthony Trollope suffered much misery in his boyhood owing to the disparity between his family's social background and his own comparative poverty.
  
  wn.com/Anthony_Trollope
• 
  Augustine of Hippo
  Augustine of Hippo ( /ɒˈɡʌstɨn/ or /ˈɔːɡəstɪn/;Latin: Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; November 13, 354 – August 28, 430), also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin,St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius (present-day Annaba, Algeria). He was a Latin philosopher and theologian from Roman Africa. His writings were very influential in the development of Western Christianity.
  According to his contemporary, Jerome, Augustine "established anew the ancient Faith." In his early years he was heavily influenced by Manichaeism and afterward by the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. After his conversion to Christianity and baptism in AD 387, Augustine developed his own approach to philosophy and theology, accommodating a variety of methods and different perspectives. He believed that the grace of Christ was indispensable to human freedom, and he framed the concepts of original sin and just war.
  When the Western Roman Empire was starting to disintegrate, Augustine developed the concept of the Catholic Church as a spiritual City of God (in a book of the same name), distinct from the material Earthly City. His thoughts profoundly influenced the medieval worldview. Augustine's City of God was closely identified with the Church, the community that worshipped God.
  
  wn.com/Augustine_of_Hippo
• 
  Babur
  Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur (February 14, 1483 – December 26, 1530; sometimes also spelt Baber or Babar) was a conqueror from Central Asia who, following a series of setbacks, finally succeeded in laying the basis for the Mughal dynasty in the Indian Subcontinent and became the first Mughal emperor. He was a direct descendant of Timur through his father, and a descendant also of Genghis Khan through his mother. Babur identified his lineage as Timurid and Chaghatay-Turkic. He was greatly influenced by Persian culture and this affected both his own actions and those of his successors, giving rise to a significant expansion of the Persianate ethos in the Indian subcontinent.
  Ẓahīr ad-Dīn Muḥammad (Persian: ﻇﻬﻴﺮﺍﻟﺪﻳﻦ محمد‎, also known by his royal titles as al-ṣultānu 'l-ʿazam wa 'l-ḫāqān al-mukkarram bādshāh-e ġāzī), is more commonly known by his nickname, Bābur (بابر).
  According to Stephen Frederic Dale, the name Babur is derived from the Persian word babr, meaning "tiger", a word that repeatedly appears in Firdawsī's Shāhnāma and had also been borrowed by the Turkic languages of Central Asia. This thesis is supported by the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, explaining that the Turko-Mongol name Timur underwent a similar evolution, from the Sanskrit word cimara ("iron") via a modified version *čimr to the final Turkicized version timür, with -ür replacing -r due to the Turkish vowel harmony (hence babr → babür).^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Babur
• 
  Benjamin Franklin
  Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705] – April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and the glass 'armonica'. He formed both the first public lending library in America and the first fire department in Pennsylvania.
  Franklin earned the title of "The First American" for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity; as an author and spokesman in London for several colonies, then as the first United States Ambassador to France, he exemplified the emerging American nation. Franklin was foundational in defining the American ethos as a marriage of the practical and democratic values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, "In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat." To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become."
  
  wn.com/Benjamin_Franklin
• 
  Benvenuto Cellini
  Benvenuto Cellini (Italian pronunciation: [benveˈnuto tʃelˈlini]; 3 November 1500 – 13 February 1571) was an Italian goldsmith, sculptor, painter, soldier and musician, who also wrote a famous autobiography. He was one of the most important artists of Mannerism.
  Benvenuto Cellini was born in Florence, Italy. His parents were Giovanni Cellini, and Maria Lisabetta Granacci. They were married for eighteen years before the birth of their first child. Benvenuto was the second child of the family. The son of a musician and builder of musical instruments, Cellini's first major brush with the law came as an early teenager: He was banished from his native Florence for his alleged role in a brawl. As a result, he received his early artistic training not only from the Florentine goldsmith Marcone [Antonio di Sandro], but also from Francesco Castoro, a goldsmith of Siena. After further visits to Bologna and Pisa, Cellini was allowed to return to Florence and continue his work there.
  Giovanni initially wished Benvenuto to join him in instrument making, and endeavoured to thwart his inclination for metalwork. When he was fifteen, his father reluctantly agreed to apprentice him to a goldsmith, Antonio di Sandro, nicknamed Marcone. At the age of sixteen, Benvenuto had already attracted attention in Florence by taking part in an affray with youthful companions. He escaped punishment by fleeing for six months to Siena, where he worked for a goldsmith named Fracastoro (unrelated to the Veronese polymath). From Siena he moved to Bologna, where he became a more accomplished flute player and made progress as a goldsmith. After a visit to Pisa and two periods of living in Florence (where he was visited by the sculptor Torrigiano), he moved to Rome, age nineteen.
  
  wn.com/Benvenuto_Cellini
• Binjamin Wilkomirski
  Binjamin Wilkomirski was a name which Bruno Dössekker (born Bruno Grosjean in 1941) adopted in his constructed identity as a Holocaust survivor and published author. His 1995 fictional memoirs, published in English as Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, were debunked in the late 1990s by a Swiss journalist.
  In 1995 Binjamin Wilkomirski, a professional clarinetist and instrument maker living in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, published a memoir entitled Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948 (later published in English as Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood). In the book, he described what he claimed were his experiences as a child survivor of the Holocaust. The supposed memories of World War II are presented in a fractured manner and using simple language from the point of view of the narrator, an overwhelmed, very young Jewish child. His first memory is of a man being crushed by uniformed men against the wall of a house; the narrator is seemingly too young for a more precise recollection, but the reader is led to infer that this is his father. Later on, the narrator and his brother hide out in a farmhouse in Poland before being arrested and interned in two Nazi concentration camps, where he meets his dying mother for the last time. After his liberation from the death camps, he is brought to an orphanage in Krakow and, finally, to Switzerland where he lives for decades before being able to reconstruct his fragmented past.
  
  wn.com/Binjamin_Wilkomirski
• 
  Charles Dickens
  Charles John Huffam Dickens ( /ˈtʃɑrlz ˈdɪkɪnz/; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic who is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period and the creator of some of the world's most memorable fictional characters. During his lifetime Dickens' works enjoyed unprecedented popularity and fame, but it was in the twentieth century that his literary genius was fully recognized by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to enjoy an enduring popularity among the general reading public.
  Born in Portsmouth, England, Dickens left school to work in a factory after his father was thrown into debtors' prison. Though he had little formal education, his early impoverishment drove him to succeed. He edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels and hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.
  
  wn.com/Charles_Dickens
• 
  Charlotte Brontë
  Charlotte Brontë ( /ˈbrɒnti/; 21 April 1816 – 31 March 1855) was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood, whose novels are English literature standards. She wrote Jane Eyre under the pen name Currer Bell.
  Charlotte was born in Thornton, Yorkshire in 1816, the third of six children, to Maria (née Branwell) and her husband Patrick Brontë (formerly surnamed Brunty or Prunty), an Irish Anglican clergyman. In 1820, the family moved a few miles to the village of Haworth, where Patrick had been appointed Perpetual Curate of St Michael and All Angels Church. Charlotte's mother died of cancer on 15 September 1821, leaving five daughters and a son to be taken care of by her sister Elizabeth Branwell.
  
  wn.com/Charlotte_Brontë
• 
  Daniel Defoe
  Daniel Defoe ( /ˌdænjəl dɨˈfoʊ/; ca. 1659–1661 to 24 April 1731), born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, and pamphleteer, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain and along with others such as Richardson, is among the founders of the English novel. A prolific and versatile writer, he wrote more than 500 books, pamphlets and journals on various topics (including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural). He was also a pioneer of economic journalism.
  Daniel Foe (his original name) was probably born in the parish of St. Giles Cripplegate London. Defoe later added the aristocratic-sounding "De" to his name and on occasion claimed descent from the family of De Beau Faux. The date and the place of his birth are uncertain, with sources often giving dates of 1659 to 1661. His father James Foe, though a member of the Butchers' Company, was a tallow chandler. In Defoe's early life he experienced first-hand some of the most unusual occurrences in English history: in 1665, 70,000 were killed by the Great Plague of London. The Great Fire of London (1666) hit Defoe's neighbourhood hard, leaving only his and two other homes standing. In 1667, when Defoe was probably about seven years old, a Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway via the River Thames and attacked Chatham. By the time he was about 10, Defoe's mother Annie had died.
  
  wn.com/Daniel_Defoe
• 
  Edmund Ludlow
  Edmund Ludlow (c. 1617 – 1692) was an English parliamentarian, best known for his involvement in the execution of Charles I, and for his Memoirs, which were published posthumously in a rewritten form and which have become a major source for historians of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. After service in the English Civil Wars, Ludlow was elected a Member of the Long Parliament. After the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1649 he was made second-in-command of Parliament's forces in Ireland, before breaking with Oliver Cromwell over the establishment of the Protectorate. After the Restoration Ludlow went into exile in Switzerland, where he spent much of the rest of his life. Ludlow himself spelled his name Ludlowe.
  Ludlow was born in Maiden Bradley, Wiltshire, the son of Sir Henry Ludlow of Maiden Bradley and his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Phelips of Montacute, Somerset. He matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford in September 1634 and graduated in 1636. He was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1638.
  
  wn.com/Edmund_Ludlow
• 
  Edward Gibbon
  Edward Gibbon (27 April 1737 – 16 January 1794) was an English historian and Member of Parliament. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. The Decline and Fall is known for the quality and irony of its prose, its use of primary sources, and its open criticism of organized religion.
  Edward Gibbon was born in 1737, the son of Edward and Judith Gibbon at Lime Grove, in the town of Putney, Surrey. He had six siblings: five brothers and one sister, all of whom died in infancy. His grandfather, also named Edward, had lost all of his assets as a result of the South Sea Bubble stock market collapse in 1720, but eventually regained much of his wealth, so that Gibbon's father was able to inherit a substantial estate.
  As a youth, his health was under constant threat. He described himself as "a puny child, neglected by my Mother, starved by my nurse." At age nine, Gibbon was sent to Dr. Woddeson's school at Kingston upon Thames (now Kingston Grammar School), shortly after which his mother died. He then took up residence in the Westminster School boarding house, owned by his adored "Aunt Kitty," Catherine Porten. Soon after she died in 1786, he remembered her as rescuing him from his mother's disdain, and imparting "the first rudiments of knowledge, the first exercise of reason, and a taste for books which is still the pleasure and glory of my life." By 1751, Gibbon's reading was already extensive and certainly pointed toward his future pursuits: Laurence Echard's Roman History (1713), William Howel(l)'s An Institution of General History (1680–85), and several of the 65 volumes of the acclaimed Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time (1747–1768).
  
  wn.com/Edward_Gibbon
• 
  Gerolamo Cardano
  Gerolamo (or Girolamo, or Geronimo) Cardano (French Jérôme Cardan; Latin Hieronymus Cardanus) (24 September 1501 – 21 September 1576) was an Italian Renaissance mathematician, physician, astrologer and gambler. His gambling led him to formulate elementary rules in probability, making him one of the founders of the field.
  He was born in Pavia, Lombardy, the illegitimate child of Fazio Cardano, a mathematically gifted lawyer, who was a friend of Leonardo da Vinci. In his autobiography, Cardano claimed that his mother had attempted to abort him. Shortly before his birth, his mother had to move from Milan to Pavia to escape the Plague; her three other children died from the disease.
  In 1520, he entered the University of Pavia and later in Padua studied medicine. His eccentric and confrontational style did not earn him many friends and he had a difficult time finding work after his studies ended. In 1525, Cardano repeatedly applied to the College of Physicians in Milan, but was not admitted owing to his combative reputation and illegitimate birth.
  
  wn.com/Gerolamo_Cardano
• 
  John Bunyan
  John Bunyan (28 November 1628 – 31 August 1688) was an English Christian writer and preacher, who is well-known for his book The Pilgrim's Progress. Though he was a Reformed Baptist, he is remembered in the Church of England with a Lesser Festival on August 30th, and on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (US) on August 29th.
  John Bunyan was born in 1628 to Thomas and Margaret Bunyan in Bunyan's End in the parish of Elstow, Bedfordshire, England. Bunyan's End was located approximately half way between the hamlet of Harrowden (one mile southeast of Bedford) and Elstow's High Street. He is recorded in the Elstow parish register as having been baptised John Bunyan, on 30 November 1628.
  On 23 May 1627, Thomas married his first wife, Margaret Bentley. Like Thomas, she was from Elstow and she was also born in 1603. In 1628, Margaret's sister, Rose Bentley, married Thomas' half-brother Edward Bunyan. They were ordinary villagers, with Thomas earning a living as a chapman but he may also have been a brazier - one who made and/or mended kettles and pots. Bunyan wrote of his modest origins, "My descent was of a low and inconsiderable generation, my father's house being of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families of the land".
  
  wn.com/John_Bunyan
• 
  John Henry Newman
  John Henry Newman, D.D., C.O. (21 February 1801 – 11 August 1890), also referred to as Cardinal Newman and Blessed John Henry Newman, was an important figure in the religious history of England in the 19th century. He was known nationally by the mid-1830s.
  Originally an evangelical Oxford academic and priest in the Church of England, Newman was a leader in the Oxford Movement. This influential grouping of Anglicans wished to return the Church of England to many Catholic beliefs and forms of worship traditional in the medieval times to restore ritual expression. In 1845 Newman left the Church of England and was received into the Roman Catholic Church where he was eventually granted the rank of cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. He was instrumental in the founding of the Catholic University of Ireland, which evolved into University College, Dublin, today, the largest university in Ireland.
  Newman's beatification was officially proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI on 19 September 2010 during his visit to the United Kingdom. His canonisation is dependent on the documentation of additional miracles.
  
  wn.com/John_Henry_Newman
• 
  John Stuart Mill
  John Stuart Mill, FRSE (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873) was a British philosopher, political economist and civil servant. He was an influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy. He has been called "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century". Mill's conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham. Hoping to remedy the problems found in an inductive approach to science, such as confirmation bias, he clearly set forth the premises of falsification as the key component in the scientific method. Mill was also a Member of Parliament and an important figure in liberal political philosophy.
  John Stuart Mill was born on Rodney Street in the Pentonville area of London, the eldest son of the Scottish philosopher, historian and economist James Mill, and Harriet Burrow. John Stuart was educated by his father, with the advice and assistance of Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place. He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died.
  
  wn.com/John_Stuart_Mill
• Libanius
  Libanius (Greek: Λιβάνιος, Libanios; ca. 314 – ca. 394) was a Greek-speaking teacher of rhetoric of the Sophist school. During the rise of Christian hegemony in the later Roman Empire, he remained unconverted and regarded himself as a Hellene in religious matters.
  He was born into a once-influential, deeply cultured family of Antioch that had recently lost most of its wealth and influence. When fourteen years old, Libanius fell in love with rhetoric and focused his whole life on it. He withdrew from public life and devoted himself to philosophy. He was unfamiliar with Latin literature, and deplored its influence. He also attacked the increasing imperial pressures on the traditional city-oriented culture that had been supported and dominated by the local upper classes. Libanius used his arts of rhetoric to advance various private and political causes. Despite his own religious views and his friendship with the Emperor Julian, called "the Apostate" for attempting to restore the traditional religions of the empire, Libanius cultivated long-lasting friendships with Christians, both as private individuals and as imperial officials.
  
  wn.com/Libanius
• 
  Lord Byron
  George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRS (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was a British poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential.
  He travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died at 36 years old from a fever contracted while in Missolonghi in Greece.
  Byron was celebrated in life for aristocratic excesses including huge debts, numerous love affairs, rumours of a scandalous incestuous liaison with his half-sister, and self-imposed exile. It has been speculated that he suffered from bipolar I disorder, or manic depression.
  
  wn.com/Lord_Byron
• Margery Kempe
  Margery Kempe (c. 1373 – after 1438) is known for dictating The Book of Margery Kempe, a work considered by some to be the first autobiography in the English language. This book chronicles, to some extent, her extensive pilgrimages to various holy sites in Europe and Asia, as well as her mystical conversations with God. She is honoured in the Anglican Communion.
  She was born Margery Brunham in King's Lynn (then Bishop's Lynn), Norfolk, Kingdom of England. Her father, John Brunham, was a merchant in Lynn, five-time mayor, and Member of Parliament. His mercantile fortunes may have been negatively affected by downturns in the economy, especially in the wool trades, of the 1390s. The first record of her Brunham family is the mention of her grandfather, Ralph de Brunham in 1320 in the Red Register of Lynn. By 1340 he had joined the Parliament of Lynn
  At the age of 20, Margery Brunham married a Norwich man named John Kempe. She had 14 children with him.
  
  wn.com/Margery_Kempe
• 
  Nadezhda Mandelstam
  Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam (Russian: Наде́жда Я́ковлевна Мандельшта́м, née Khazina; 30 October [O.S. 18 October] 1899 – 29 December 1980) was a Russian writer and educator, and the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in 1938 in a transit camp to the gulag of Siberia. She wrote two memoirs about their lives together and the repressive Stalinist regime: Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974), both first published in the West in English, translated by Max Hayward.
  Of these books the critic Clive James has written:
  "Hope Against Hope puts her at the centre of the liberal resistance under the Soviet Union. A masterpiece of prose as well as a model of biographical narrative and social analysis it is mainly the story of the terrible last years of persecution and torment before the poet [her husband Osip] was murdered. The sequel, Hope Abandoned, is about the author's personal fate, and is in some ways even more terrible, because, as the title implies, it is more about horror as a way of life than as an interruption to normal expectancy. [The two books] were key chapters in the new bible that the twentieth century had written for us."
  
  wn.com/Nadezhda_Mandelstam
• 
  Naomi Campbell
  Naomi Campbell (born 22 May 1970) is a British model. Scouted at the age of 15, she established herself among the top three most recognisable and in-demand models of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and she was one of six models of her generation declared "supermodels" by the fashion world. As the most famous black model of her time, Campbell has been outspoken throughout her career against the racial bias that exists in the fashion industry. Her personal life is widely reported, particularly her relationships with prominent men—including boxer Mike Tyson and actor Robert De Niro—and several highly-publicised convictions for assault.
  Campbell was born in the working-class Streatham district of South London, the daughter of Jamaican-born dancer Valerie Morris. In accordance with her mother's wishes, Campbell has never met her father, who abandoned her mother when she was four months pregnant, and who went unnamed on her birth certificate. She took on the surname Campbell from her mother's second marriage. Her half-brother, Pierre, was born in 1986. Campbell is of Afro-Jamaican descent, as well as of Chinese Jamaican ancestry through her paternal grandmother, who carried the family name Ming.
  
  wn.com/Naomi_Campbell
• 
  Peter Abelard
  é
  Peter Abelard (English pronunciation: /ˈæb.ə.lɑːrd/, French pronunciation: [a.beˈlaːʁ], Latin: Petrus Abaelardus or Abailard; French: Pierre Abélard) (1079–21 April 1142) was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician. The story of his affair with and love for Héloïse has become legendary. The Chambers Biographical Dictionary describes him as "the keenest thinker and boldest theologian of the 12th Century".
  Abelard, originally called "Pierre le Pallet", was born in Le Pallet, about 10 miles (16 km) east of Nantes, in Brittany, the eldest son of a minor noble Breton family. As a boy, he learned quickly. His father, a wealthy lord called Berengar, encouraged Pierre to study the liberal arts, wherein he excelled at the art of dialectic (a branch of philosophy), which, at that time, consisted chiefly of the logic of Aristotle transmitted through Latin channels. Instead of entering a military career, as his father had done, Abelard became an academic. During his early academic pursuits, Abelard wandered throughout France, debating and learning, so as (in his own words) "he became such an one as the Peripatetics." The nominalist Roscellinus of Compiègne was his teacher during this period.
  
  wn.com/Peter_Abelard
• 
  Primo Levi
  Primo Michele Levi (pronounced [ˈpriːmo ˈlɛːvi]; July 31, 1919 – April 11, 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table (1975) which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written.
  Levi was born in Turin at Corso Re Umberto 75 into a liberal Jewish family. His father Cesare worked for the manufacturing firm Ganz and spent much of his time working abroad in Hungary, where Ganz was based. Cesare was an avid reader and autodidact. Levi’s mother Ester, known to everyone as Rina, was well educated, having attended the Istituto Maria Letizia. She too was an avid reader, played the piano and spoke fluent French. The marriage between Rina and Cesare was arranged by Rina’s father. On their wedding day, Rina’s father, Cesare Luzzati, gave Rina the apartment at Corso Re Umberto where Primo Levi was to live for almost his entire life.
  
  wn.com/Primo_Levi
• Robert Nye
  Robert Nye FRSL (born 1939) is an English poet who has also written novels and plays as well as stories for children. His bestselling novel Falstaff published in 1976 was described by Michael Ratcliffe (writing in the Times) as 'one of the most ambitious and seductive novels of the decade,' and went on to win both The Hawthornden Prize and Guardian Prize for fiction. The novel was also included in Anthony Burgess's '99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939' (1984).
  Robert Nye was born in London in 1939. His father was a civil servant, his mother a farmer's daughter. He attended Southend High School for Boys and had published his first poem 'Kingfisher' in the London Magazine (September 1955; Volume 2, Number 9) by the age of sixteen. He left school in 1955 and did not pursue additional formal study. Nye's poetry has appeared in a number of important literary magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, Encounter and The Listener. The 1964 Fall and Winter issues of the Canadian publication The Fiddlehead contained respectively fifteen and eighteen of his poems.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Nye
• 
  Robert Southey
  Robert Southey (12 August 1774 – 21 March 1843) was an English poet of the Romantic school, one of the so-called "Lake Poets", and Poet Laureate for 30 years from 1813 to his death in 1843. Although his fame has been long eclipsed by that of his contemporaries and friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey's verse still enjoys some popularity.
  Moreover, Southey was a prolific letter writer, literary scholar, essay writer, historian and biographer. His biographies include the life and works of John Bunyan, John Wesley, William Cowper, Oliver Cromwell and Horatio Nelson. The last has rarely been out of print since its publication in 1813 and was adapted for the screen in the 1926 British film, Nelson. He was also a renowned Portuguese and Spanish scholar, translating a number of works of those two countries into English and writing both a History of Brazil (part of his planned History of Portugal which was never completed) and a History of the Peninsular War. Perhaps his most enduring contribution to literary history is the immortal children's classic, The Story of the Three Bears, the original Goldilocks story, which first saw print in 1834 in Southey's prose collection, The Doctor.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Southey
• 
  William Hazlitt
  William Hazlitt (10 April 1778 – 18 September 1830) was an English writer, remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism, and as a grammarian and philosopher. He is now considered one of the great critics and essayists of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. Yet his work is currently little read and mostly out of print. During his lifetime he befriended many people who are now part of the 19th-century literary canon, including Charles and Mary Lamb, Stendhal, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth.
  The family of Hazlitt's father were Irish Protestants who moved from the county of Antrim to Tipperary in the early 18th century. His father, also named William Hazlitt, attended the University of Glasgow (where he was taught by Adam Smith), receiving a master's degree in 1760. Not entirely content with his Presbyterian faith, he became a Unitarian minister in England. In 1764 he became pastor at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, where in 1766 he married Grace Loftus, daughter of a recently deceased ironmonger. Of their many children, only three survived infancy. The first of these, John (later known as a portrait painter) was born in 1767 at Marshfield in Gloucestershire, where the Reverend William Hazlitt had accepted a new pastorate after his marriage. In 1770, the elder Hazlitt accepted yet another position and moved with his family to Maidstone, Kent, where his first and only surviving daughter, Margaret (usually known as "Peggy"), was born that year.
  
  wn.com/William_Hazlitt

Liar's Autobiography, A (2012)

Actors

• Cameron Diaz
• Carol Cleveland
• John Cleese
• Philip Bulcock
• Graham Chapman

Director

• Benjamin Timlett
• Jeff Simpson
• Bill Jones