James Tait Black Memorial Prize

A. S. Byatt
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, DBE, known as A. S. Byatt (/ˈbaɪ.ət/BY-ət; born 24 August 1936, Sheffield) is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner. In 2008, The Times newspaper named her on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Byatt was born as Antonia Susan Drabble, the daughter of John Drabble, QC, and Kathleen Bloor, a scholar of Browning. Byatt was educated at two independent schools, Sheffield High School and the Quaker Mount School, and noted in an interview in 2009 "I am not a Quaker, of course, because I'm anti-Christian and the Quakers are a form of Christianity but their religion is wonderful – you simply sat in silence and listened to the nature of things." She went on to Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr in the United States, and Somerville College, Oxford. Sister to novelist Margaret Drabble and art historian Helen Langdon, Byatt lectured in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of London University (1962–71), the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and from 1972 to 1983 at University College London.

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Adam Fox
Adam Fox (1883 – 1977), Canon, was the Dean of Divinity at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was one of the first members of the "Inklings", a literary group which also included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Between 1938 and 1942 he was Professor of Poetry. Later he became Canon of Westminster Abbey and he is buried there in Poet's Corner. He was also Warden (Headmaster) of the famous Radley College.
During his time at Oxford, he wrote his long poem in four books "Old King Coel". It gets its name from King Cole, legendary British father of the Roman Empress Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine. As Professor of Poetry, Fox advocated poetry which is intelligible to readers, and gives enough pleasure to be read again. This was important to him because poetry which is not reread will not be understood properly, and will therefore be irrelevant. This advocacy can be understood as a criticism against some forms of modern poetry.
Adam Fox surely was not one of the most important Inklings, yet he is of interest. He published works concerning Christianity and Platonism. In his 1945 Plato for Pleasure, he tried to introduce the general public to Plato. Fox desired to make Plato well known among the English classics again and hoped that people would study the platonic dialogues as well as the plays of Shakespeare. His biography of William Ralph Inge, the famous theologian, philosopher and Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, is still regarded as an important text on Inge and was awarded the 1960 James Tait Black Memorial Prize soon after its publication.

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Aidan Higgins
Aidan Higgins (born 3 March 1927) is an Irish writer. He has written short stories, travel pieces, radio drama and novels. He is notable for such titles as 'Langrishe, Go Down'(1966), 'Balcony of Europe'(1972) and more recent biographical work 'Dog Days'(1998). He currently lives in Kinsale, County Cork, and is a Saoi of prominent Irish literary group Aosdána.
His upbringing in a landed Catholic family in Celbridge, County Kildare, Ireland, provided material for his first experimental novel, Langrishe, Go Down (1966). The book was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and was later adapted as a BBC television film by British playwright Harold Pinter, in association with RTÉ.
During the 1960's, Higgins traveled to South Africa with founder of the Little Angel Theatre John Wright. There he met his first wife Jill Anders, of whom he went on to have three children with. After South Africa he again joined the puppet theater travelling to Berlin. These broad cultural exchanges helped shape many of his works. After travelling with the theater he settled near Nerja in Andalusia where he stayed until the early 1970's.

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Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst FRSL (born 26 May 1954) is a British novelist, and winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty.
Hollinghurst was born on 26 May 1954 in Stroud, Gloucestershire, the only child of James Hollinghurst, a bank manager, and his wife, Elizabeth.^{[citation needed]} He attended Canford School in Dorset.
Hollinghurst read English at Magdalen College, Oxford from 1972 to 1979, graduating with a BA in 1975, and a MLitt in 1979. His thesis was on the works of Ronald Firbank, E. M. Forster and L. P. Hartley, three gay writers. While at Oxford he shared a house with Andrew Motion, and was awarded the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1974, a year before Motion.
In the late 1970s he became a lecturer at Magdalen College, and then at Somerville College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1981 he moved on to lecture at University College London, and in 1982 he joined The Times Literary Supplement, where he was the paper's deputy editor from 1985 to 1990.
Hollinghurst is gay. He lives in London.

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Albert Speer
Albert Speer (born Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer; ; pronounced [ˈʃpeːɐ̯] (

listen); March 19, 1905 – September 1, 1981) was a German architect who was, for a part of World War II, Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich. Speer was Adolf Hitler's chief architect before assuming ministerial office. As "the Nazi who said sorry", he accepted responsibility at the Nuremberg trials and in his memoirs for crimes of the Nazi regime. His level of involvement in the persecution of the Jews and his level of knowledge of the Holocaust remain matters of dispute.
Speer joined the Nazi Party in 1931, launching him on a political and governmental career which lasted fourteen years. His architectural skills made him increasingly prominent within the Party and he became a member of Hitler's inner circle. Hitler commanded him to design and construct a number of structures, including the Reich Chancellery and the Zeppelinfeld stadium in Nuremberg where Party rallies were held. Speer also made plans to reconstruct Berlin on a grand scale, with huge buildings, wide boulevards, and a reorganized transportation system.

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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.

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Alexander Neckam
Alexander (of) Neckam (8 September 1157 – 1217) was an English scholar and teacher.
The Speculum Speculationum (edited by Rodney M. Thomson, 1988) is Neckam's major surviving contribution to the science of theology. It is unfinished in its current form, but covers a fairly standard range of theological topics derived from Peter Lombard's Sentences and Augustine. Neckam is not regarded as an especially innovative or profound theologian, although he is notable for his early interest in the ideas of St. Anselm of Canterbury, which had gone out of fashion fairly quickly after Anselm's death. His outlook in the Speculum, a work written very late in his life, probably in 1215, and perhaps drawing heavily on his teaching notes from the past decades, combines an interest in the platonic writings of earlier twelfth-century thinkers such as Thierry of Chartres and William of Conches, with an early appreciation of the newly translated writings of Aristotle and Avicenna. Neckam was a firm admirer of Aristotle as an authority in natural science as well as in the logical arts, one of the first Latin thinkers since antiquity to credit this aspect of the Stagirite's output.

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Alexander the Great
Alexander III of Macedon (20/21 July 356 – 10/11 June 323 BC), commonly known as Alexander the Great (Greek: Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Μέγας, Aléxandros ho Mégas from the Greek αλέξω alexo "to defend, help" + ανήρ aner "man"), was a king of Macedon, a state in northern ancient Greece. Born in Pella in 356 BC, Alexander was tutored by Aristotle until the age of 16. By the age of thirty, he had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world, stretching from the Ionian Sea to the Himalayas. He was undefeated in battle and is considered one of history's most successful commanders.
Alexander succeeded his father, Philip II of Macedon, to the throne in 336 BC after Philip was assassinated. Upon Philip's death, Alexander inherited a strong kingdom and an experienced army. He was awarded the generalship of Greece and used this authority to launch his father's military expansion plans. In 334 BC, he invaded Persian-ruled Asia Minor and began a series of campaigns that lasted ten years. Alexander broke the power of Persia in a series of decisive battles, most notably the battles of Issus and Gaugamela. He subsequently overthrew the Persian King Darius III and conquered the entirety of the Persian Empire. At that point, his empire stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the Indus River.

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Alice Thompson
Alice Thompson (born in Edinburgh) is a Scottish novelist.
Thompson read English at Oxford and wrote her Ph.D. thesis on Henry James. In the 1980s she was a rock musician with the band The Woodentops. She now has a young son and lives in Edinburgh. Her novel Justine was the joint winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

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Andrew O'Hagan
Andrew O'Hagan, FRSL (born 1968) is a Scottish novelist and non-fiction author. He is also an Editor at Large of Esquire and is currently a creative writing fellow at King's College London. He was selected by the literary magazine Granta for inclusion in their 2003 list of the top 20 young British novelists. His novels appear translated into 15 languages. His essays, reports and stories have appeared in The London Review of Books, New York Review of Books,Granta, The Guardian, and The New Yorker.
O'Hagan was born in Glasgow, and grew up in Kilwinning, North Ayrshire. He is of Irish Catholic descent and attended St Michael's Academy in Kilwinning before studying at the University of Strathclyde.
In 1991, O'Hagan joined the staff of the London Review of Books, where he worked for four years.
In 1995, he published his first book, The Missing, to considerable critical acclaim. The book crosses genres by exploring the lives of people who have gone missing in Britain and the families left behind. The Missing was shortlisted for three literary awards.

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Angela Carter
Angela Carter (7 May 1940 – 16 February 1992) was an English novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. After attending Streatham & Clapham High School, in south London, she began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature.

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Anthony Powell
Anthony Dymoke Powell (pronounced in one syllable, as a homophone of "pole")CH, CBE (21 December 1905 – 28 March 2000) was an English novelist best known for his twelve-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975.
Powell's major work has remained in print continuously and has been the subject of TV and radio dramatisations. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Powell among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Powell was born in Westminster, England, to Philip Lionel William Powell and Maud Mary Wells-Dymoke. His father was an officer in the Welch Regiment. His mother came from a land-owning family in Lincolnshire. Because of his father's career and World War I, the family moved several times, and mother and son sometimes lived apart from Powell's father.
Powell attended Gibbs's pre-prep day-school at the Square end of Sloane Street for a brief time. He was then sent to New Beacon School near Sevenoaks, which was popular with military families. Early in 1919, Powell passed the Common Entrance Examination for Eton where he started that autumn. There he made a friend of a fellow pupil, Henry Yorke, later to become known as the novelist Henry Green.

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Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Russian: Анто́н Па́влович Че́хов, pronounced [ɐnˈton ˈpavləvʲɪtɕ ˈtɕexəf]; 29 January 1860 – 15 July 1904) was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."
Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text."

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Antonia Fraser
Dame Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser, DBE (born 27 August 1932), née Pakenham, is an Anglo-Irish author of history, novels, biographies and detective fiction, best known as Lady Antonia Fraser. She is the widow of Harold Pinter (1930–2008), the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, and, prior to her husband's death, was also known as Antonia Pinter.
Fraser is the daughter of Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford (1905–2001), and his wife, Elizabeth Pakenham, Countess of Longford, née Elizabeth Harman (1906–2002). As the daughter of an Earl, she is accorded the honorific courtesy title "Lady" and thus customarily addressed formally as "Lady Antonia".
As a teenager, she and her siblings converted to Catholicism, following the conversions of their parents. Her "maternal grandparents were Unitarians – a non-conformist faith with a strong emphasis on social reform ...". In response to criticism of her writing about Oliver Cromwell, she has said, "I have no Catholic blood". Before his own conversion in his thirties following a nervous breakdown in the Army, as she explains, "My father was Protestant Church of Ireland, and my mother was Unitarian up to the age of 20 when she abandoned it." She was educated at St Mary's School, Ascot and Dragon School, Oxford and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; the last was also her mother's alma mater.

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Arnold Bennett
Enoch Arnold Bennett (27 May 1867 – 27 March 1931) was an English writer. He is best known as a novelist, but he also worked in other fields such as journalism, propaganda and film.
Bennett was born in a modest house in Hanley in the Potteries district of Staffordshire. Hanley is one of a conurbation of six towns which joined together at the beginning of the twentieth century as Stoke-on-Trent. Enoch Bennett, his father, qualified as a solicitor in 1876, and the family were able to move to a larger house between Hanley and Burslem. Bennett was educated locally in Newcastle-under-Lyme.
Arnold was employed by his father—his duties included rent collecting. He was unhappy working for his father for little financial reward, and the theme of parental miserliness is important in his novels. In his spare time he was able to do a little journalism, but his breakthrough as a writer was to come after he had moved from the Potteries. At the age of twenty-one, he left his father's practice and went to London as a solicitor's clerk.

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Arthur Waley
Arthur David Waley CH, CBE (Chinese: 衛利; pinyin: Wèilì, 19 August 1889 – 27 June 1966) was an English orientalist and sinologist.
Waley was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, as Arthur David Schloss, son of the economist David Frederick Schloss. Of Jewish heritage, he changed his surname to his paternal grandmother's maiden name, Waley, in 1914, as one of many English men and women who changed German surnames to more English-sounding names during WWI. Educated at Rugby School, he entered King's College, at the University of Cambridge in 1907, where he studied Classics, and was awarded a bachelor's degree in 1910.
Waley was appointed Assistant Keeper of Oriental Prints and Manuscripts at the British Museum in 1913. During this time he taught himself Chinese and Japanese, partly to help catalogue the paintings in the Museum's collection. He quit in 1929 to devote himself fully to his literary and cultural interests, though he continued to lecture in the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. In 1918, he met Beryl de Zoete, a dance critic and writer; they lived together until her death in 1962. In 1966, Arthur Waley married Alison Robinson, whom he had first met in 1929. They lived in Highgate in London, and she became a familiar figure in later years, living beyond the age of 100.

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AS Byatt
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, DBE, known as A. S. Byatt (/ˈbaɪ.ət/BY-ət; born 24 August 1936, Sheffield) is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner. In 2008, The Times newspaper named her on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Byatt was born as Antonia Susan Drabble, the daughter of John Drabble, QC, and Kathleen Bloor, a scholar of Browning. Byatt was educated at two independent schools, Sheffield High School and the Quaker Mount School, and noted in an interview in 2009 "I am not a Quaker, of course, because I'm anti-Christian and the Quakers are a form of Christianity but their religion is wonderful – you simply sat in silence and listened to the nature of things." She went on to Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr in the United States, and Somerville College, Oxford. Sister to novelist Margaret Drabble and art historian Helen Langdon, Byatt lectured in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of London University (1962–71), the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and from 1972 to 1983 at University College London.

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Beryl Bainbridge
Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge DBE (21 November 1932 – 2 July 2010) was an English author from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her sparsely-written psychological novels, often set amongst the English working classes. Bainbridge won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996; she was nominated five times for the Booker Prize. She was described in 2007 as "a national treasure". In 2008, The Times newspaper named Bainbridge among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Beryl Bainbridge was born in Liverpool and raised in nearby Formby. Her parents were Richard Bainbridge and Winifred Baines. Although she gave her date of birth in Who's Who and elsewhere as 21 November 1934, she was born in 1932 and her birth was registered in the first quarter of 1933. When German former prisoner of war Harry Arno Franz wrote to her in November 1947, he mentioned her 15th birthday.
She enjoyed writing, and by the age of 10 she was keeping a diary. She had elocution lessons and, when she was 11, appeared on the Northern Children's Hour radio show, alongside Billie Whitelaw and Judith Chalmers. Bainbridge was expelled from Merchant Taylors' Girls' School (Crosby) because she was caught with a "dirty rhyme" (as she later described it), written by someone else, in her gymslip pocket. She then went on to study at Cone-Ripman School, Tring, Hertfordshire (now:Tring Park School for the Performing Arts [1], where she found she was good at history, English and art. The summer she left school, she fell in love with a former German POW who was waiting to be repatriated. For the next six years, the couple corresponded and tried to get permission for the German man to return to Britain so that they could be married. But permission was denied and the relationship ended in 1953.

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Bruce Chatwin
Charles Bruce Chatwin (13 May 1940 – 18 January 1989) was an English novelist and travel writer. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel On the Black Hill (1982). Married and bisexual, he was one of the first prominent men in Britain known to have contracted HIV and died of AIDS, although he hid the facts of his illness.
Bruce Chatwin was born in 1940 in the Shearwood Road nursing home in Sheffield, England, and his first home was his grandparents' house in Dronfield, near Sheffield. His mother, Margharita (née Turnell), had moved back to her parents' home when Chatwin's father, Charles Chatwin, went away to serve with the Royal Naval Reserve. They had been living at Barnt Green, Worcestershire.
Chatwin spent his early childhood living with his parents in West Heath in Birmingham (then in Warwickshire), where his father had a law practice. He was educated at Marlborough College, in Wiltshire.
After leaving Marlborough in 1958, Chatwin reluctantly moved to London to work as a porter in the Works of Art department at the auction house Sotheby's. Thanks to his sharp visual acuity, he quickly became Sotheby's expert on Impressionist art. He later became a director of the company.

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C. P. Snow
Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow of the City of Leicester CBE (15 October 1905 – 1 July 1980) was an English physicist and novelist who also served in several important positions in the British Civil Service and briefly in the UK government. He is best known for his series of novels known collectively as Strangers and Brothers, and for "The Two Cultures", a 1959 lecture in which he laments the gulf between scientists and "literary intellectuals".
Born in Leicester to Ada and William Snow (a church organist and choirmaster), Charles was the second of four boys (his brothers being Harold, Eric and Philip Snow). Snow was educated at the Leicestershire and Rutland College, now the University of Leicester, and the University of Cambridge, where he became a Fellow of Christ's College in 1930.
He served in several senior civil service positions: as technical director of the Ministry of Labour from 1940 to 1944, and as civil service commissioner from 1945 to 1960. As a politician he was parliamentary secretary in the House of Lords to the Minister of Technology from 1964 to 1966 in the Labour administration of Harold Wilson. He was knighted in 1957 and made a life peer, as Baron Snow of the City of Leicester, in 1964.

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C. S. Forester
Cecil Scott "C.S." Forester was the pen name of Cecil Louis Troughton Smith (27 August 1899 — 2 April 1966), an English novelist who rose to fame with tales of naval warfare. His most notable works were the 12-book Horatio Hornblower series, depicting a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic era, and The African Queen (1935; filmed in 1951 by John Huston). His novels A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours were jointly awarded the 1938 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
Forester was born in Cairo and educated at Alleyn's School, Dulwich College, and Guy's Hospital, but did not complete his studies at the last named.
He married Kathleen Belcher in 1926, had two sons (John & George) and divorced in 1945. His elder son, John Forester wrote a biography of his father.
During World War II, Forester moved to the United States where he wrote propaganda to encourage that country to join the Allies. He eventually settled in Berkeley, California. While living in Washington, D.C., he met a young British intelligence officer named Roald Dahl, whose experiences in the RAF he had heard of, and encouraged him to write about them. In 1947, he secretly married a woman named Dorothy Foster.

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C. V. Wedgwood
Dame (Cicely) Veronica Wedgwood OM DBE (20 July 1910 – 9 March 1997) was an English historian who generally published under the name C. V. Wedgwood.
She specialized in European history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including her still-authoritative study The Thirty Years' War (1938 and many later reprintings) and biographies of Oliver Cromwell, William the Silent, and Cardinal Richelieu, as well as the authoritative Caroline trilogy,The Great Rebellion, which included The King’s Peace (1955), The King’s War (1958), and The Trial of Charles I (1964), reprinted as A Coffin for King Charles.
Thirty years after she published her much-praised biography of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, she returned to the subject and published a much-revised version that was considerably more critical of her subject. Historians often cite Wedgwood's two lives of Strafford as an illustration of scholarly integrity and open-mindedness.
Born in Northumberland, she was educated at Norland Place School and read Modern History at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and became a specialist in the English Civil War and early 17th century history. Well regarded in academic circles, her books are widely read, and she was also successful as a lecturer and broadcaster. In 1946 she translated Elias Canetti's Die Blendung, as Auto-da-Fé, under Canetti's supervision.

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Caryl Phillips
Caryl Phillips (born 13 March 1958) is a British writer with a Caribbean background, best known as a novelist. He is now professor at Yale University and a visiting professor at Barnard College of Columbia University.
He was born on St. Kitts. At four months old, his family moved to England and was brought up in Leeds, Yorkshire. He read English at Queen's College, Oxford. He mainly began writing drama scripts.
He has tackled themes on the African slave trade from many angles. His work has been recognised by numerous awards including Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1993 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Crossing the River and the 2004 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book award for A Distant Shore. Beside being an accomplished writer, Caryl Phillips is also a noted professor. He has taught at numerous universities in countries including: Barbados, Ghana, India, Singapore, Sweden, and the United States of America.

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Chapman Mortimer
Chapman Mortimer was the pen name of William Charles ("W. C.") Chapman Mortimer (born 15 May 1907 died 1988), a Scottish novelist. He won the James Tait Black Award for fiction in 1951 for his novel Father Goose.

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Charles Burney
Charles Burney FRS (7 April 1726 – 12 April 1814) was an English music historian and father of authors Frances Burney and Sarah Burney.
Charles Burney was born at Shrewsbury, and educated at Shrewsbury School. He was later sent to The King's School in Chester, where his first music master was a Mr Baker, organist of the cathedral, and a pupil of Dr John Blow. Returning to Shrewsbury at the age of fifteen, Burney continued his musical studies for three years under his half-brother, James Burney, organist of St Mary's church, and was then sent to London as a pupil of Dr Thomas Arne for three years.
Burney wrote some music for Thomson's Alfred, which was produced at Drury Lane theatre on 30 March 1745. In 1749 he was appointed organist of St Dionis-Backchurch, Fenchurch Street, with a salary of £30 a year; and he was also engaged to take the harpsichord in the "New Concerts" then recently established at the King's Arms, Cornhill. In that year he married Esther Sleepe, who died in 1761; in 1769 he married Mrs Stephen Allen of Lynn. It was for his health that he went in 1751 to Lynn Regis in Norfolk, where he was elected organist, with an annual salary of £100, and lived for nine years. During that time he began to entertain the idea of writing a general history of music. His Ode for St Cecilia's Day was performed at Ranelagh Gardens in 1759; and in 1760 he returned to London in good health and with a young family; the eldest child, a girl of eight, surprised the public by her attainments as a harpsichord player. The concertos for harpsichord which Burney published soon after his return to London were much admired. In 1766 he produced, at Drury Lane, a translation and adaptation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's opera Le Devin du village, under the title of The Cunning Man.

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Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin, FRS (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.
Darwin published his theory with compelling evidence for evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, overcoming scientific rejection of earlier concepts of transmutation of species. By the 1870s the scientific community and much of the general public had accepted evolution as a fact. However, many favoured competing explanations and it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed in which natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. In modified form, Darwin's scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life.
Darwin's early interest in nature led him to neglect his medical education at the University of Edinburgh; instead, he helped to investigate marine invertebrates. Studies at the University of Cambridge encouraged his passion for natural science. His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell's uniformitarian ideas, and publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author.

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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.

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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.

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Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe (baptised 26 February 1564; died 30 May 1593) was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe was the foremost Elizabethan tragedian until his mysterious early death. Marlowe greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was born in the same year as Marlowe and who rose to become the eminent Elizabethan playwright after Marlowe's death. Marlowe's plays are known for the use of blank verse, and their overreaching protagonists.
A warrant was issued for Marlowe's arrest on 18 May 1593. No reason for it was given, though it was thought to be connected to allegations of blasphemy—a manuscript believed to have been written by Marlowe was said to contain "vile heretical conceipts". On 20 May he was brought to the court to attend upon the Privy Council for questioning. There is no record of their having met that day, however, and he was commanded to attend upon them each day thereafter until "licensed to the contrary." Ten days later, he was stabbed to death by Ingram Frizer. Whether the stabbing was connected to his arrest has never been resolved.

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Claire Tomalin
Claire Tomalin (nėe Delavenay, 20 June 1933) is an English biographer and journalist. She was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge.
She was literary editor of the New Statesman and of the Sunday Times, and has written several noted biographies. Her work has been recognised with the award of the 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1991 Hawthornden Prize for The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. Her biography of Samuel Pepys won the Whitbread Book Award in 2002, the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2003, the Latham Prize of the Samuel Pepys Club in 2003, and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2003.
Claire Tomalin is Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English PEN (International PEN).
Tomalin's first husband Nicholas Tomalin, a prominent journalist, was killed in the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War in 1973; she is now married to the novelist and playwright Michael Frayn.
She made a number of tongue-in-cheek criticisms against the Samuel Pepys Wikipedia article in The Guardian on 24 October 2005, awarding the page a score of 6/10. On 4 April 2009, Tomalin wrote to The Guardian and expressed facts on Thomas Hardy's life. The letter was titled "A Poet to the End".

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Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy (born Charles McCarthy; July 20, 1933) is an American novelist and playwright. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and Post-apocalyptic genres. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road (2006). His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. For All the Pretty Horses (1992) he won both the U.S. National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. All the Pretty Horses and The Road were also adapted as motion pictures.
Blood Meridian (1985) was among Time magazine's list of 100 best English-language books published between 1923 and 2005 and placed joint runner-up in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, alongside Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth, and called Blood Meridian "the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying". In 2010 The Times ranked The Road first on its list of the 100 best fiction and non-fiction books of the past 10 years. McCarthy has been increasingly mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, and instinct.
Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile which he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as, "The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. Lawrence is now valued by many as a visionary thinker and significant representative of modernism in English literature.

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D. S. MacColl
Dugald Sutherland MacColl (10 March 1859 – 2 December 1948) was a Scottish watercolour painter, art critic, lecturer and writer. He was keeper of the Tate gallery for five years.
MacColl was born in Glasgow and educated at the University of London and the University of Oxford between 1876 and 1884. He also studied at the Westminster School of Art and the Slade School under Alphonse Legros between 1884 and 1892. Although an accomplished watercolourist, he is best remembered as a writer and lecturer on art. From 1890 to 1895 he was art critic for The Spectator, and for Saturday Review from 1896 to 1906. MacColl became a member of the New English Art Club in 1896, and edited the Architectural Review from 1901 to 1905.
He published the authoritative book, Nineteenth Century Art, in 1902[1] and his biography Philip Wilson Steer was awarded the 1945 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In his journalism and books he was a major advocate of the French Impressionists, and was influential in spreading their ideas and shaping public attitudes in Britain towards favouring Impressionism. From 1906 to 1911 he was keeper of the Tate Gallery and, after the retirement of Sir Claude Phillips, the Wallace Collection from 1911 to 1924.

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David C. Douglas
David Charles Douglas (1898–1982) was a historian of the Norman period at the University of Cambridge and University of Oxford. He joined Oxford University in 1963 as Ford's Lecturer in English History, and was the 1939 winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

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David Garnett
David Garnett (9 March 1892 – 17 February 1981) was a British writer and publisher. As a child, he had a cloak made of rabbit skin and thus received the nickname "Bunny", by which he was known to friends and intimates all his life.
Garnett was born in Brighton as the only child of Edward Garnett and translator of Russian Constance Garnett. As a conscientious objector in the First World War, he worked on fruit farms in Suffolk and Sussex with his lover, Duncan Grant.
A prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group, Garnett received literary recognition when his novel Lady into Fox, an allegorical fantasy, was awarded the 1922 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. He ran a bookshop near the British Museum with Francis Birrell during the 1920s. He also founded (with Francis Meynell) the Nonesuch Press. He wrote the novel Aspects of Love (1955), on which the later Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical was based.
His first wife was illustrator Rachel "Ray" Marshall (1891–1940), sister of translator and diarist Frances Partridge. He and Ray, whose woodcuts appear in some of his books, had two sons, but she died relatively young of breast cancer.

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David Hume
David Hume (7 May [O.S. 26 April] 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and scepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist.
Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In stark opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour, saying: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." A prominent figure in the sceptical philosophical tradition and a strong empiricist, he argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding instead that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. Thus he divides perceptions between strong and lively "impressions" or direct sensations and fainter "ideas", which are copied from impressions. He developed the position that mental behaviour is governed by "custom"; our use of induction, for example, is justified only by our idea of the "constant conjunction" of causes and effects. Without direct impressions of a metaphysical "self", he concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self.

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David Peace
David Peace (born 1967) is an English author. Known for his novels GB84, The Damned Utd, and Red Riding Quartet, Peace was named one of the Best of Young British Novelists by Granta in their 2003 list. Peace, however, attracted unwanted attention for The Damned Utd when one of the protagonists from the book, Johnny Giles, successfully sued him for libel in the High Court in 2008.
David Peace grew up in Ossett, West Yorkshire. He was educated at Batley Grammar School and Manchester Polytechnic, which he left in 1991 to go to Istanbul to teach English. He moved to Tokyo in 1994 and returned to the UK in 2009.
The Red-Riding Quartet comprises the novels Nineteen Seventy-Four (1999), Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2000), Nineteen Eighty (2001) and Nineteen Eighty-Three (2002). The books deal with police corruption, and are set against a backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper murders between 1975 and 1980. They feature several recurring characters. Red Riding, a three-part TV adaptation of the series, aired on Channel 4 in the UK in 2009.

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Dean Inge
William Ralph Inge (

/ˈɪŋ/; 6 June 1860 – 26 February 1954) was an English author, Anglican priest, professor of divinity at Cambridge, and Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, which provided the appellation by which he was widely known, "Dean Inge."
He was born at Crayke, Yorkshire, England. His father was William Inge (a provost at Worcester College, Oxford) and his mother Susanna (Churton) Inge. His maternal grandfather was the archdeacon of Cleveland. Inge was educated at Eton College, where he was a King's Scholar and Newcastle Scholar, and at King's College, Cambridge, where he won a number of prizes as well as taking firsts in both parts of the classical tripos. He was a tutor at Hertford College, Oxford starting in 1888, which was the year he was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England.
In 1907, he became a professor of divinity at Jesus College, Cambridge, holding the Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity chair. In 1911, was chosen by Prime Minister Asquith to be the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. He served as president of the Aristotelian Society at Cambridge from 1920 to 1921. Inge then became a columnist for the Evening Standard, a position he would hold until 1946—a period of 25 years. Inge was also a trustee of London's National Portrait Gallery from 1921 until 1951. He had retired from the Church in 1934.

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Doris Lessing
Doris May Lessing CH (née Tayler; born 22 October 1919) is a Zimbabwean-British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing, The Golden Notebook, The Good Terrorist, and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos.
Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In doing so the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest ever person to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Lessing was born in Iran, then known as Persia, on 22 October 1919, to Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler (née McVeagh), who were both English and of British nationality. Her father, who had lost a leg during his service in World War I, met his future wife, a nurse, at the Royal Free Hospital where he was recovering from his amputation. Alfred Tayler and his wife moved to Kermanshah, Iran, in order to take up a job as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia and it was here that Doris was born in 1919. The family then moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1925 to farm maize, among other plants, when her father purchased around one thousand acres of bush. Lessing's mother attempted to lead an Edwardian lifestyle amidst the rough environment, which would have been easy had the family been wealthy; in reality, such a lifestyle was not feasible. The farm failed to deliver any monetary value in return .

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Dr Johnson
Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 [O.S. 7 September] – 13 December 1784), often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson was a devout Anglican and committed Tory, and has been described as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". He is also the subject of "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature": James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson.
Johnson was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, and attended Pembroke College, Oxford for just over a year, before his lack of funds forced him to leave. After working as a teacher he moved to London, where he began to write miscellaneous pieces for The Gentleman's Magazine. His early works include the biography The Life of Richard Savage, the poems "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes", and the play Irene.
After nine years of work, Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755; it had a far-reaching effect on Modern English and has been described as "one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship." This work brought Johnson popularity and success. Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 150 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent British dictionary. His later works included essays, an influential annotated edition of William Shakespeare's plays, and the widely read tale Rasselas. In 1763, he befriended James Boswell, with whom he later travelled to Scotland; Johnson described their travels in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Towards the end of his life, he produced the massive and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, a collection of biographies and evaluations of 17th- and 18th-century poets.

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E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect."
Forster was born into an Anglo-Irish and Welsh middle-class family at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London NW1, in a building that no longer exists. He was the only child of Alice Clara "Lily" (née Whichelo) and Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster, an architect. His name was officially registered as Henry Morgan Forster, but at his baptism he was accidentally named Edward Morgan Forster. To distinguish him from his father, he was always called Morgan. His father died of tuberculosis on 30 October 1880, before Morgan's second birthday. Among Forster's ancestors were members of the religious Clapham Sect.

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Edith Sitwell
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell DBE (7 September 1887 – 9 December 1964) was a British poet and critic, eldest of the three literary Sitwells.
Like her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell, Edith reacted badly to her eccentric, unloving parents, and lived for much of her life with her governess. Never married, she became passionately attached to the gay Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, and her home was always open to London's poetic circle, to whom she was unfailingly generous and helpful.
Edith published poetry continuously from 1913, some of it abstract and set to music. With her dramatic style and exotic costumes, she was sometimes labelled a poseur, but her work was also praised for its solid technique and painstaking craftsmanship.
Edith Sitwell was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, the oldest child and only daughter of Sir George Sitwell, 4th Baronet, of Renishaw Hall; he was an expert on genealogy and landscaping. Her mother was the former Lady Ida Emily Augusta Denison, a daughter of the Earl of Londesborough and a granddaughter of Henry Somerset, 7th Duke of Beaufort. She claimed a descent through female lines from the Plantagenets.

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Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch (Norwegian pronunciation: [ˈmʉŋk], 12 December 1863 – 23 January 1944) was a Norwegian painter and printmaker whose intensely evocative treatment of psychological themes built upon some of the main tenets of late 19th-century Symbolism and greatly influenced German Expressionism in the early 20th century. One of his most well-known works is The Scream of 1893.
Edvard Munch was born in a rustic farmhouse in the village of Ådalsbruk in Løten, to Christian Munch, the son of a priest. Christian was a doctor and medical officer who married Laura Catherine Bjølstad, a woman half his age, in 1861. Edvard had an elder sister, Johanne Sophie (born 1862), and three younger siblings: Peter Andreas (born 1865), Laura Catherine (born 1867), and Inger Marie (born 1868). Both Sophie and Edvard appear to have inherited their artistic talent from their mother. Edvard Munch was related to painter Jacob Munch (1776–1839) and historian Peter Andreas Munch (1810–1863).
The family moved to Christiania (now Oslo) in 1864 when Christian Munch was appointed medical officer at Akershus Fortress. Edvard's mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, as did Munch's favorite sister Johanne Sophie in 1877. After their mother's death, the Munch siblings were raised by their father and by their aunt Karen. Often ill for much of the winters and kept out of school, Edvard would draw to keep himself occupied, and received tutoring from his school mates and his aunt. Christian Munch also instructed his son in history and literature, and entertained the children with vivid ghost-stories and tales of Edgar Allan Poe.

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Elias Ashmole
Elias Ashmole (23 May 1617 – 18 May 1692) was a celebrated English antiquary, politician, officer of arms, astrologer and student of alchemy. Ashmole supported the royalist side during the English Civil War, and at the restoration of Charles II he was rewarded with several lucrative offices.
Ashmole was an antiquary with a strong Baconian bent for the study of nature. His library reflected his intellectual outlook, including works on English history, law, numismatics, chorography, alchemy, astrology, astronomy, and botany. Although he was one of the founding members of the Royal Society, a key institution in the development of experimental science, his interests were antiquarian and mystical as well as scientific. He was an early Freemason, although the extent of his involvement and commitment is unclear. Throughout his life he was an avid collector of curiosities and other artifacts. Many of these he acquired from the traveller, botanist, and collector John Tradescant the Younger. Ashmole donated most of his collection, his antiquarian library and priceless manuscripts to the University of Oxford to create the Ashmolean Museum.

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Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, CBE (7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) was an Irish novelist and short story writer.
Elizabeth Bowen was born on 7 June 1899 at 15 Herbert Place in Dublin, Ireland and was baptized in the nearby St Stephen's Church on Upper Mount Street. Her parents Henry Charles Cole Bowen and Florence Colley Bowen later brought her to Bowen's Court at Farahy, near Kildorrery, County Cork where she spent her summers. When her father became mentally ill in 1907, she and her mother moved to England, eventually settling in Hythe. After her mother died in 1912, Bowen was brought up by her aunts. She was educated at Downe House School, under the headship of Olive Willis. After some time at art school in London she decided that her talent lay in writing. She mixed with the Bloomsbury Group, becoming good friends with Rose Macaulay, who helped her find a publisher for her first book, a collection of short stories entitled Encounters (1923).
In 1923 she married Alan Cameron, an educational administrator who subsequently worked for the BBC. The marriage has been described as "a sexless but contented union". She had various extra-marital relationships, including one with Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat seven years her junior, which lasted over thirty years. She also had an affair with the Irish writer Seán Ó Faoláin and a relationship with the American poet May Sarton. Bowen and her husband first lived near Oxford, where they socialized with Maurice Bowra, John Buchan and Susan Buchan, and where she wrote her early novels, including The Last September (1929). Following the publication of To the North (1932) they moved to 2 Clarence Terrace, Regent's Park, London where Bowen would go on to write The House in Paris (1935) and The Death of the Heart (1938). In 1937 she was made a member of the Irish Academy of Letters.

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Ellen Ternan
Ellen Lawless Ternan (3 March 1839 – 25 April 1914), also known as Nelly Ternan or Nelly Robinson, was an English actress who is mainly known as the woman for whom Charles Dickens separated from his wife Catherine.
Ellen Lawless Ternan was born in Rochester, Kent. She was the third of four children, including a brother who died in infancy and a sister called Frances (later the second wife of Thomas Adolphus Trollope, the brother of Anthony Trollope). Her parents, Thomas Lawless Ternan and Frances Eleanor Ternan (née Jarman), were both actors of some distinction. Ternan made her stage debut in Sheffield at the age of three, and she and her two sisters were presented as "infant phenomena". Ternan was considered the least theatrically gifted of the three sisters, but she worked extensively in the provinces, particularly after her father died in 1846. In 1857, she was spotted by Dickens performing at London's Haymarket Theatre. He cast her, along with her mother and one of her sisters, in a performance of The Frozen Deep in Manchester.

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Emma Smith (author)

Emma Smith (1923 - ) is an English novelist who rose to literary fame in the 1940s.
Emma Smith was born as Elspeth Hallsmith in Cornwall in 1923. She was educated privately up to the age of 16, when she decided to take up a job at the War Office. During the Second World War, she volunteered to work on the canals as a boatwoman. Later on, her experiences as a trainee boatwoman on the Grand Union Canal would become the basis for her debut novel (Maidens' Trip).
In September 1946, Smith, still only 23, went off to India with a team of documentary filmmakers that included the poet Laurie Lee, who was serving as scriptwriter on the team. Cider with Rosie, Lee's classic account of growing up in rural Gloucestershire, was in its embryonic stages during this trip; Emma Smith was one of those who would later encourage Lee to complete the book which went on to become one of the most beloved of children's books in English literature.
After nine months in India, Smith returned to England in 1947 and set down to write her first book. Maidens' Trip (1948) proved to be both a critical and a commercial success and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. With the proceeds from the book, Smith moved to Paris where she took a room in the Hotel de Tournon and, drawing on her memories of India, typed up her second novel.

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Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh /ˈwɔː/ (28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966), known as Evelyn Waugh, was an English writer of novels, travel books and biographies. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer. His best-known works include his early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), his novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) and his trilogy of Second World War novels collectively known as Sword of Honour (1952–61). Waugh is widely recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the 20th century.
The son of a publisher, Waugh was educated at Lancing and Hertford College, Oxford, and worked briefly as a schoolmaster before becoming a full-time writer. As a young man, he acquired many fashionable and aristocratic friends, and developed a taste for country house society that never left him. In the 1930s he travelled extensively, often as a special newspaper correspondent; he was reporting from Abyssinia at the time of the 1935 Italian invasion. He served in the British armed forces throughout the Second World War, first in the Royal Marines and later in the Royal Horse Guards. All these experiences, and the wide range of people he encountered, were used in Waugh's fiction, generally to humorous effect; even his own mental breakdown in the early 1950s, brought about by misuse of drugs, was fictionalised.

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Fanny Burney
Frances Burney (13 June 1752 – 6 January 1840), also known as Fanny Burney and, after her marriage, as Madame d’Arblay, was an English novelist, diarist and playwright. She was born in Lynn Regis, now King’s Lynn, England, on 13 June 1752, to musical historian Dr Charles Burney (1726–1814) and Mrs Esther Sleepe Burney (1725–62). The third of six children, she was self-educated and began writing what she called her “scribblings” at the age of ten. In 1793, aged forty-two, she married a French exile, General Alexandre D'Arblay. Their only son, Alexander, was born in 1794. After a lengthy writing career, and travels that took her to France for more than ten years, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840.
Frances Burney was a novelist, diarist and playwright. In total, she wrote four novels, eight plays, one biography and twenty volumes of journals and letters. In addition to the critical respect she receives for her own writing, she is recognised as a literary precursor to prominent authors who came after her, including Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray. She published her first novel, Evelina, anonymously in 1778. When the book's authorship was revealed, it brought her almost immediate fame due to its unique narrative and comic strengths. She followed with Cecilia in 1782, Camilla in 1796 and The Wanderer in 1814. All of Burney’s novels explore the lives of English aristocrats, and satirise their social pretensions and personal foibles, with an eye to larger questions such as the politics of female identity. With one exception, Burney never succeeded in having her plays performed, largely due to objections from her father, who thought that publicity from such an effort would be damaging to her reputation. The exception was Edwy and Elgiva, which unfortunately was not well received by the public and closed after the first night’s performance.

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Felicitas Corrigan
Dame Felicitas Corrigan OSB (6 March 1908 - 7 October 2003) was an English Benedictine nun, author and humanitarian.
She was born Kathleen Corrigan into a large Liverpool family, and developed a talent as an organist. In 1933, she entered Stanbrook Abbey in Worcestershire as a nun, and eventually became director of its choir. One of her projects was to develop an English language version of the office of Compline for the abbey. In the course of her career, Dame Felicitas befriended and/or corresponded with several famous figures who converted to Catholicism, including poet Siegfried Sassoon, actor Alec Guinness; and novelist Rumer Godden.
Dame Felicitas' biography of Helen Waddell was awarded the 1986 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her book, The Nun, the Infidel, and the Superman, inspired by the life of Laurentia McLachlan, was turned into a play by Hugh Whitemore and later became a film for television starring Wendy Hiller. She also wrote about other figures in whom she was interested, including Hildegard of Bingen and the poet Coventry Patmore. She also edited publications for the Stanbrook Abbey Press. Other works include:

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Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale OM, RRC (

/ˈflɒrəns ˈnaɪtɨŋɡeɪl/; 12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910) was a celebrated English nurse, writer and statistician. She came to prominence for her pioneering work in nursing during the Crimean War, where she tended to wounded soldiers. She was dubbed "The Lady with the Lamp" after her habit of making rounds at night. An Anglican, Nightingale believed that God had called her to be a nurse.
Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment, in 1860, of her nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London, the first secular nursing school in the world, now part of King's College London. The Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses was named in her honour, and the annual International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on her birthday.
Florence Nightingale was born into a rich, upper-class, well-connected British family at the Villa Colombaia, near the Porta Romana at Bellosguardo in Florence, Italy, and was named after the city of her birth. Florence's older sister Frances Parthenope had similarly been named after her place of birth, Parthenopolis, a Greek settlement now part of the city of Naples.

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Forrest Reid
Forrest Reid (b. 24 June 1875, Belfast, Northern Ireland; d. 4 January 1947, Warrenpoint, County Down) was an Irish novelist, literary critic and translator. He was, along with Hugh Walpole and J.M. Barrie, a leading pre-war British novelist of boyhood. He is still acclaimed as the greatest of Ulster novelists and was recognised with the award of the 1944 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Young Tom.
Born in Belfast, he was the youngest son of a Protestant family of twelve, six of whom survived. His mother, his father's second wife, came from an aristocratic Shropshire family. Although proud of this ancestry, he found the strict Protestant ethics of his immediate family constricting. Reid was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, after which he was initially apprenticed into the Belfast tea-trade before going to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he read medieval and modern languages, and was influenced by the novelist E. M. Forster. Despite this he described his Cambridge experience as 'a rather blank interlude' in life. Graduating in 1908, he returned to Belfast to pursue a writing career; his first book, The Kingdom of Twilight, had been published in 1904. After graduation Forster continued to visit Reid, who was then settled back in Belfast. In 1952 Forster travelled to Belfast to unveil a plaque commemorating Forrest Reid's life (at 13 Ormiston Crescent).

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Francis Yeats-Brown
Major Francis Charles Claypon Yeats-Brown, DFC (15 August 1886 – 19 December 1944) was an officer in the British Indian army and the author of the celebrated memoir The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, for which he was awarded the 1930 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Yeats-Brown was born in Genoa, the son of a British diplomat. He studied at Harrow and Sandhurst. When he was 20, he went to India where he was attached to the King's Royal Rifle Corps at Bareilly in present-day Uttar Pradesh. He was then transferred to the cavalry and sent to the perennially turbulent North West Frontier region. His time there engendered in him a sympathy for the Muslim point of view, and in later years he would support the creation of an independent Pakistan.
During World War I, Yeats-Brown saw action in France and in Mesopotamia, where he was a member of the Royal Flying Corps. His acts of bravery gained him the DFC. In 1915, his plane was damaged on landing on a sabotage mission outside Baghdad, and he spent the following two years as a prisoner of war. This provided the material for his first book Caught by the Turks (1919).

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Frank Tuohy
John Francis ("Frank") Tuohy, (2 May 1925 – 11 April 1999) was an English writer and academic. Born in London, he attended Stowe School and went on to read Moral Sciences and English at King's College, Cambridge. On completion of his studies, he worked in numerous academic posts under the auspices of the British Council. This included postings in Finland, Brazil and Poland. The last of these provided his inspiration for his 1965 novel The Ice Saints. The book received considerable critical acclaim and was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Tuohy died in Shepton Mallet, Somerset in 1999 at a time when he was working on the uncompleted manuscript for a new novel following many years of writer's block.

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Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt (German: [fʁant͡s lɪst]); Hungarian: Liszt Ferencz, in modern use Liszt Ferenc) (October 22, 1811 – July 31, 1886) was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.
Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age. In the 1840s he was considered by some to be perhaps the greatest pianist of all time. He was also a well-known composer, piano teacher, and conductor. He was a benefactor to other composers, including Richard Wagner, Hector Berlioz, Camille Saint-Saëns, Edvard Grieg and Alexander Borodin.
As a composer, Liszt was one of the most prominent representatives of the "Neudeutsche Schule" ("New German School"). He left behind an extensive and diverse body of work in which he influenced his forward-looking contemporaries and anticipated some 20th-century ideas and trends. Some of his most notable contributions were the invention of the symphonic poem, developing the concept of thematic transformation as part of his experiments in musical form and making radical departures in harmony. He also played an important role in popularizing a wide array of music by transcribing it for piano.

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G. G. Coulton
George Gordon Coulton FBA (15 October 1858 – 4 March 1947) was a British historian, known for numerous works on medieval history. He was known also as a keen controversialist.
He was born in King's Lynn. He was educated at Lynn Grammar School, and Felsted School, and St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
He taught for a short period, and was ordained in 1883. He did not however pursue that course in the Church of England, in the absence of a vocation. He took further teaching jobs, and began as an independent scholar to study the history of the Middle Ages. A fierce anti-Catholic, he was often, especially during the 1930s, embroiled in embittered journalistic controversy with Hilaire Belloc, who detested him.
In 1911 Coulton found a lecturing position at the University of Cambridge. He became a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge in 1919, a Fellow of the British Academy in 1929.

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G. M. Trevelyan
George Macaulay Trevelyan, OM, CBE, FRS, FBA (16 February 1876 – 21 July 1962), was a British historian. Trevelyan was the third son of Sir George Otto Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet, and great-nephew of Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose staunch liberal Whig principles he espoused in accessible works of literate narrative avoiding a consciously dispassionate analysis, that became old-fashioned during his long and productive career. The noted historian E. H. Carr considered Trevelyan to be one of the last historians of the Whig tradition.
Many of his writings promoted the Whig Party, an important aspect of British politics from the 17th century to the mid-19th century, and its successor, the Liberal Party. Whigs and Liberals believed the common people had a more positive effect on history than did royalty and that democratic government would bring about steady social progress.
Trevelyan's history is engaged and partisan. Of his Garibaldi trilogy, "reeking with bias", he remarked in his essay "Bias in History", "Without bias, I should never have written them at all. For I was moved to write them by a poetical sympathy with the passions of the Italian patriots of the period, which I retrospectively shared."

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G. M. Young
George Malcolm Young (1882, Greenhithe, Kent – 1959) was an English historian, most famous for his long essay on Victorian times in England, Portrait of an Age (1936).
Young was educated at St Paul's School and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1905 he was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. From 1908 to 1920 he was employed as a civil servant, initially with the Board of Education and from 1917 with the Ministry of Reconstruction. For many years he was a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum.
Portrait of an Age was an expanded version of the 89-page conclusion to Early Victorian England, a two-volume collection which Young had edited in 1934.Simon Schama has described it as "An immortal classic, the greatest long essay ever written."^{[citation needed]}

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Geoffrey Keynes
Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes (25 March 1887 in Cambridge – 5 July 1982, in Cambridge) was an English biographer, surgeon, physician, scholar and bibliophile. He was the younger brother of the economist John Maynard Keynes.
Geoffrey Keynes was the son of John Neville Keynes (pronounced "Canes"), an economics lecturer at the University of Cambridge and Florence Ada Brown, a successful author and a social reformer. His older brother was the economist John Maynard Keynes and his sister Margaret married the Nobel-prize winning physiologist Archibald Hill.
He was educated at Rugby School, where he became friends with Rupert Brooke and was appointed literary executor for the estate of Brooke's death in 1915.
On 12 May 1917 he married Margaret Elizabeth Darwin, the daughter of Sir George Howard Darwin and granddaughter of Charles Darwin. They had four sons:
He graduated from Pembroke College, Cambridge, and then qualified as a surgeon with the Royal College of Surgeons in London. He served as a Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I and then worked as a consultant surgeon, becoming an expert in blood transfusion. His work to create a portable blood transfusion device was recognized as saving thousands of lives during World War I. His pioneering work on blood transfusion was the primary reason for his eventual knighthood.

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George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays. Nearly all his writings address prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy which makes their stark themes more palatable. Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege.
He was most angered by what he perceived as the exploitation of the working class. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society. He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles. For a short time he was active in local politics, serving on the London County Council.

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George Eliot
Mary Anne (alternatively Mary Ann or Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and well known for their realism and psychological insight.
She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years.
Her 1872 work, Middlemarch, has been described as the greatest novel in the English language by Martin Amis and by Julian Barnes.

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George Painter
George Duncan Painter, OBE (5 June 1914 – 8 December 2005), known as George D. Painter, was an English author most famous as a biographer of Marcel Proust.
Painter was born in Birmingham. His father was a schoolmaster, and his mother was an artist. He studied classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and later lectured in Latin at the University of Liverpool for one year. From 1938 until World War II and again after the war, he worked at the British Museum in the printed books section.
His two-volume biography of Proust was published in 1959 and 1965. According to Miron Grindea, this was "rightly greeted as one of the great achievements in literary history", and it is still widely considered to be one of the finest literary biographies in the English language. Its second volume won the Duff Cooper Prize. His later work Chateaubriand: Volume 1 – The Longed-For Tempests was awarded the 1977 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

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Georgina Battiscombe
Georgina Battiscombe (21 November 1905 – 26 February 2006) was a British biographer, specialising mainly in lives from the Victorian era.
She was born Esther Georgina Harwood, the elder daughter of George Harwood, a former clergyman, Liberal Member of Parliament for his home town of Bolton, Lancashire, master cotton spinner, and an author and barrister. Her family was steeped in politics: her maternal grandfather, Sir Alfred Hopkinson, KC (the first Vice-Chancellor of Manchester University), three uncles, and her stepfather, John Murray (Principal of the University College of the South West of England, Exeter), all became MPs.
She was educated at St Michael's School, Oxford, and at Lady Margaret Hall, and once considered a political career herself. In 1932 she married Christopher Battiscombe (d.1964), a lieutenant-colonel in the Grenadier Guards. For a time they lived in Zanzibar, where Colonel Battiscombe was Secretary to the Sultan. They then lived at Durham before moving to the Henry III Tower at Windsor Castle as Colonel Battiscombe became honorary secretary of the Society of the Friends of St George's from 1958 to 1960.

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Gitta Sereny
Gitta Sereny (born 13 March 1921) is an Austrian-born biographer, historian and investigative journalist whose writing focuses mainly on the Holocaust and child abuse. She is the stepdaughter of the economist Ludwig von Mises.
She married Don Honeyman in 1948 and moved to London where they raised their two children. Don Honeyman (who died 1st June 2011) was a photographer, who worked for, among others, Vogue, the Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times. The poster of Che Guevara on a red background (1968) is one of his most famous creations.
Sereny was born in Vienna, Austria in 1921. Her father was a Hungarian Protestant aristocrat, Ferdinand Serény, and her mother was a former actress from Hamburg, Margit Herzfeld, of German origin.
When she was thirteen, her train journey to a boarding school in the United Kingdom was delayed in Nuremberg where she attended one of the annual Nuremberg rallies. After writing about the rally for a class assignment she was given Mein Kampf to read by her teacher so she might be able to understand what she saw there. After the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938, she moved to France where she worked with refugee children during the German occupation until she was warned of her imminent arrest. She then fled to the United States.

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Gordon Haight
Gordon Sherman Haight (born 6 Feb 1901 in Muskegon, Michigan– died 28 Dec 1985 in Woodbridge, CT) was an American professor of English at Yale University from 1950 to 1968. He was the author of George Eliot: A Biography; editor of The George Eliot Letters.
"[Haight] was completely absorbed in the life and work of George Eliot and had the distinction, before he died, of being asked to speak at the dedication of her memorial in Westminster Abbey, an extraordinary recognition for an American, as I am sure you are aware!" (personal email from George F. Farr, Jr. Director, Division of Preservation and Access, National Endowment for the Humanities dated Mon, 27 Mar 1995)

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Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore ambivalent modern world moral and political issues. Greene was notable for his ability to combine serious literary acclaim with widespread popularity.
Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a Roman Catholic novelist rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic, Catholic religious themes are at the root of much of his writing, especially the four major Catholic novels: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair. Several works such as The Confidential Agent, The Third Man, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor also show an avid interest in the workings of international politics and espionage.
Greene suffered from bipolar disorder, which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life. In a letter to his wife Vivien, he told her that he had "a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life", and that "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material".William Golding described Greene as "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety." Greene never received the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he finished runner-up to Ivo Andrić in 1961.

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Graham Swift
Graham Colin Swift FRSL (born May 4, 1949) is a British author. He was born in London, England and educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York. He was a friend of Ted Hughes
Some of his works have been made into films, including Last Orders, which starred Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins and Waterland which starred Jeremy Irons. Last Orders was a joint winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a mildly controversial winner of the Booker Prize in 1996, owing to the superficial similarities in plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Waterland was set in The Fens; it is a novel of landscape, history and family, and is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English Literature syllabus in British schools.

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Helen Waddell
Helen Jane Waddell (31 May 1889 – 5 March 1965) was an Irish poet, translator and playwright.
She was born in Tokyo, the tenth and youngest child of Hugh Waddell, a Presbyterian minister and missionary who was lecturing in the Imperial University. She spent the first eleven years of her life in Japan before her family returned to Belfast. Her mother died shortly afterwards, and her father re-married. Hugh Waddell himself died and left his younger children in the care of their stepmother. Following the marriage of her elder sister Meg, Helen was left at home to care for Mrs Waddell, whose health was deteriorating.
Helen was educated at Victoria College for Girls and Queen's University Belfast, where she studied under Professor Gregory Smith, graduating in 1911. She followed her BA with first class honours in English with a master’s degree, and in 1919 enrolled in Somerville College, Oxford, to study for her doctorate. A travelling scholarship from Lady Margaret Hall in 1923 allowed her to conduct research in Paris.

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Henry Festing Jones
Henry Festing Jones (1851–1928) was the friend and posthumous biographer of Samuel Butler. His biography of Butler, entitled Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (1835–1902) — A Memoir, won the inaugural James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography in 1919.^{[citation needed]}

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Henry Ponsonby
Sir Henry Frederick Ponsonby GCB (10 December 1825 – 21 November 1895) was a British soldier and royal court official who served as Queen Victoria's Private Secretary.
He was the son of the British Army general, Sir Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby.
Ponsonby rose to the rank of Colonel in the Grenadier Guards and fought in the Crimean War. On 30 April 1861, he married Hon. Mary Elizabeth Bulteel, a daughter of John Crocker Bulteel MP and they had five children:
Ponsonby embellished letters to his children at Eton with a series of illustrations in which he concealed the school's address. It was a family quirk continued by his son, Arthur Ponsonby, and recently revived by descendant Harriet Russell. His letters bore addresses appearing as doodled signposts in snowstorms or as huge envelopes shouldered by tiny people.
He served as Keeper of the Privy Purse and Private Secretary to Queen Victoria.
His son Arthur wrote a biography of him which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1942: Henry Ponsonby, Queen Victoria's Private Secretary: His Life and Letters.

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Hilary Spurling
Hilary Spurling, CBE, FRSL (born 25 December 25 1940) is a British writer, known as a journalist and biographer. She won the Whitbread Prize for the second volume of her biography of Henri Matisse in January 2006. Burying The Bones: Pearl Buck in China was published in March 2010.
She is married to playwright John Spurling, and has three children (Amy, Nathaniel and Gilbert) and six grandchildren.
Spurling was educated at Clifton High School, an independent school in Bristol in South West England, followed by the University of Oxford.

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Hilda F. M. Prescott
Hilda Frances Margaret Prescott, more usually known as H. F. M. Prescott (22 February 1896 – 1972), was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, author, academic, and historian.
She was born in Cheshire, the daughter of Rev James Mulleneux Prescott and his wife Margaret (née Warburton). She was educated at Wallasey High School. She read Modern History at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, where she received her first M.A.. Subsequently she was awarded a second M.A. at Manchester University, where she did research under the direction of Thomas Frederick Tout, professor of Medieval and Modern History. She was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the University of Durham. In 1958 she was elected Jubilee Research Fellow at Royal Holloway College in the University of London, where she worked on Thomas Wolsey.
H F M Prescott is best known however for her historical novel The Man on a Donkey. Written in the form of a chronicle, the book tells the story of the Pilgrimage of Grace, a popular rising in protest at the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII. Her biography of Mary I of England, Mary Tudor (originally titled Spanish Tudor), which won the James Tait Black Prize in 1941 remains one of the leading works on Mary I's troubled life and reign and is named by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as the best biography of the monarch.^{[citation needed]}

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Hugh Walpole
Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, CBE (13 March 1884 – 1 June 1941) was an English novelist. A prolific writer, he published thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, two plays and three volumes of memoirs. His skill at scene-setting, his vivid plots, his high profile as a lecturer and his driving ambition brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. A best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s, his works have been neglected since his death.
Walpole was born in Auckland, New Zealand, the eldest of three children of the Rev George Henry Somerset Walpole (1854–1929), Canon of St Mary's Cathedral, Auckland (later Bishop of Edinburgh from 1910 to 1929) and his wife, Mildred Helen née Barham (1854–1925). Walpole was educated at a series of boarding schools in England, principally at Truro School for two years, the King's School, Canterbury for two years and as a day boy for four years at Durham School, when his father was principal of Bede College at the university. Walpole's popular character Jeremy lived in the cathedral town of Polchester in Glebeshire, an amalgam of Truro and Durham, which featured in many of his later books. The dust-jacket of The Inquisitor (1935) depicted a street map of this imaginary town. Walpole's brief experience of teaching is reflected in his third novel Mr Perrin and Mr Traill.

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Humfrey Wanley
Humfrey Wanley (1672–1726) was a librarian, palaeographer and scholar of Old English, employed by manuscript collectors such as Robert and Edward Harley. He was the first keeper of the Harlein Library, now the Harleian Collection.
He was the son of Nathaniel Wanley, born on 21 March 1672 at the Vicarage House adjoining Jesus Hall, Coventry. Starting out as a draper in his home town, he soon tired of this and moved to Oxford University to study in 1695 thanks to his patron William Lloyd, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. There he worked as an assistant at the Bodleian Library until 1700, when he moved to London, where he gained temporary jobs as secretary to the SPCK and assistant to Hans Sloane (Sloane was secretary to the Royal Society, and Wanley was elected a Fellow of it in 1706), before landing a settled job with the Harleys which he held to the end of his life.
Wanley, together with John Bagford and John Talman, was one of three 'founder members' of the reconstituted Society of Antiquaries, which first met at the Bear Tavern on the Strand on 5 December 1707.

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Ian Gibson (author)
Ian Gibson (born 21 April 1939 in Dublin) is an Irish author and Hispanist known for his biographies of Antonio Machado, Salvador Dalí, Henry Spencer Ashbee, and particularly his work on Federico García Lorca, for which he won several awards, including the 1989 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography. His work, La represión nacionalista de Granada en 1936 y la muerte de Federico García Lorca (The nationalistic repression of Granada in 1936 and the death of Federico García Lorca) was banned in Spain under Franco.
Born into a Methodist Dublin family, he was educated at Newtown School in Waterford and graduated from Trinity College, Dublin. He became a professor of Spanish literature at Belfast and London universities before moving to Spain. His first novel, Viento del Sur (Wind of the South, 2001), written in Spanish, examines class, religion, family life, and public schools in British society through the fictitious autobiography of a character named John Hill, an English linguist and academic. It won favorable reviews in Spain.

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Ian McEwan
Ian Russell McEwanCBE, FRSA, FRSL (born 21 June 1948) is a British novelist and screenwriter, and one of Britain's most highly regarded writers. In 2008, The Times named him among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
McEwan began his career writing sparse, Gothic short stories. The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) were his first two novels, and earned him the nickname "Ian Macabre". These were followed by three novels of some success in the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1997, he published Enduring Love, which was made into a film. He won the Man Booker Prize with Amsterdam (1998). In 2001, he published Atonement, which was made into an Oscar-winning film. This was followed by Saturday (2005), On Chesil Beach (2007) and Solar (2010). In 2011, he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize.
McEwan was born in Aldershot, Hampshire, on 21 June 1948, the son of David McEwan and Rose Lilian Violet (née Moore). He spent much of his childhood in East Asia (including Singapore), Germany and North Africa (including Libya), where his father, a Scottish army officer, was posted. His family returned to England when he was twelve. He was educated at Woolverstone Hall School; the University of Sussex, receiving his degree in English literature in 1970; and the University of East Anglia, where he was one of the first graduates of Malcolm Bradbury's pioneering creative writing course.

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Ian Rankin
Ian Rankin, OBE, DL (born 28 April 1960 in Cardenden, Fife), is a Scottish crime writer. His best known books are the Inspector Rebus novels. He has also written several pieces of literary criticism.
He attended Beath High School, Cowdenbeath. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh, he moved to Tottenham, London for four years and then rural France for six while he developed his career as a novelist. He was a Literature tutor at the University of Edinburgh, where he retains an involvement with the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
The 'standard biography' of Rankin, a Scot, states that before becoming a full-time novelist he worked as a grape-picker, swineherd, taxman, alcohol researcher, hi-fi journalist, college secretary and punk musician.
He lives in Edinburgh with his wife Miranda and their two sons Jack and Kit.
Rankin did not set out to be a crime writer. He thought his first novels Knots and Crosses and Hide and Seek were mainstream books, more in keeping with the Scottish traditions of Robert Louis Stevenson and even Muriel Spark (the subject of Rankin's uncompleted Ph.D. thesis). He was disconcerted by their classification as genre fiction. Scottish novelist Allan Massie, who tutored Rankin while Massie was writer-in-residence at the University of Edinburgh, reassured him by saying, who would want to be a dry academic writer when "they could be John Buchan?"^{[citation needed]}

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Iris Murdoch
Dame Iris Murdoch DBE (15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Irish-born British author and philosopher, best known for her novels about political and social questions of good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 2001 by the editorial board as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 2008, The Times named Murdoch among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Jean Iris Murdoch was born in Phibsborough, Dublin, Ireland, on 15 July 1919. Her father, Wills John Hughes Murdoch, came from a mainly Presbyterian sheep farming family from Hillhall, County Down, and her mother, Irene Alice Richardson, who had trained as a singer until Iris was born, was from a middle class, Church of Ireland (Anglican) family from Dublin. When Iris was very young, her parents moved to London, where her father worked in the Civil Service.

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Ivy Compton-Burnett
Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, DBE (5 June 1884 – 27 August 1969) was an English novelist, published (in the original hardback editions) as I. Compton-Burnett. She was awarded the 1955 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her novel Mother and Son.
Ivy Compton-Burnett was born in Pinner, Middlesex, on 5 June 1884, as the seventh of twelve children of the well-known homeopathic physician Dr James Compton-Burnett (pronounced 'Cumpton-Burnit'), by his second wife, Katharine (1855–1911), daughter of Rowland Rees, civil engineer. She grew up in Hove and London. She was educated at home with two brothers until the age of 14. She attended Addiscombe College, Hove, in 1898–1901, then boarded for two terms in 1901–2 at Howard College, Bedford, before embarking on a university degree in Classics. After graduating she in turn tutored four younger sisters at home.
Ivy's mother sent all her stepchildren away to boarding school as soon as possible. According to the scholar Patrick Lyons, "In widowhood Compton-Burnett's mother provided her with an early model for the line of outrageous domestic bullies that appear in her novels, anticipating the grief-stricken and over-demanding Sophia Stace (Brothers and Sisters, 1929) and the more shamelessly lucid Harriet Haslem (Men and Wives, 1931), who declares candidly: 'I see my children's faces, and am urged by the hurt in them to go further, and driven on to the worse.' Four of Ivy's sisters rebelled against home life in 1915 and moved up to London to live in a flat with the pianist Myra Hess. Ivy successfully managed the considerable family fortune after her mother's death.

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J. B. Priestley
John Boynton Priestley, OM (13 September 1894 – 14 August 1984), known as J. B. Priestley, was an English novelist, playwright and broadcaster. He published 26 novels, notably The Good Companions (1929), as well as numerous dramas such as An Inspector Calls. His output included literary and social criticism.
Priestley was born at 34 Mannheim Road, Manningham, which he described as an "ultra-respectable" suburb of Bradford. His father was a headmaster. His mother died when he was just two years old and his father remarried four years later. Priestley was educated at Belle Vue Grammar School, which he left at sixteen to work as a junior clerk at Helm & Co., a wool firm in the Swan Arcade. During his years at Helm & Co. (1910–1914), he started writing at night and had articles published in local and London newspapers. He was to draw on memories of Bradford in many of the works he wrote after he had moved south, including Bright Day and When We Are Married. As an old man he deplored the destruction by developers of Victorian buildings in Bradford such as the Swan Arcade, where he had his first job.

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J. G. Ballard
James Graham "J. G." Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and prominent member of the New Wave movement in science fiction. His best-known books are Crash (1973), adapted into a film by David Cronenberg, and the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984), made into a film by Steven Spielberg, based on Ballard's boyhood in the Shanghai International Settlement and internment by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War.
The literary distinctiveness of his work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments."
Ballard was diagnosed with prostate cancer in June 2006, from which he died in London in April 2009.
In 2008, The Times included Ballard on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

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J. M. Coetzee
John Maxwell "J. M." Coetzee (/kʊtˈsiːə/ kuut-SEE-ə; born 9 February 1940) is a novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. Of South African origin, he is now an Australian citizen and lives in Adelaide, South Australia. Prior to receiving the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, Coetzee twice won the Booker Prize.
Coetzee was born in Cape Town, Cape Province, Union of South Africa, on 9 February 1940 to parents of Afrikaner descent. His father was an occasional lawyer, government employee and sheep farmer, and his mother a schoolteacher. The family spoke English at home, but Coetzee spoke Afrikaans with other relatives. Coetzee is descended from early Dutch immigrants dating to the 17th century, and also has Polish ancestry from his maternal great-grandfather, Baltazar Dubiel.
Coetzee spent most of his early life in Cape Town and in Worcester in Cape Province (modern-day Western Cape) as recounted in his fictionalized memoir, Boyhood (1997). The family moved to Worcester when Coetzee was eight after his father lost his government job due to disagreements over the state's apartheid policy. Coetzee attended St. Joseph's College, a Catholic school in the Cape Town suburb of Rondebosch, and later studied mathematics and English at the University of Cape Town, receiving his Bachelor of Arts with Honours in English in 1960 and his Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Mathematics in 1961.

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James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominently the stream of consciousness technique he perfected. Other major works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His complete oeuvre includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters.
Joyce was born to a middle class family in Dublin, where he excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, then at University College Dublin. In his early twenties he emigrated permanently to continental Europe, living in Trieste, Paris and Zurich. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce's fictional universe does not extend beyond Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there; Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."

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Jasper Ridley
Jasper Godwin Ridley (born 25 May 1920 at West Hoathly, Sussex, England–died 1 July 2004) was a British writer, known for historical biographies. He received the 1970 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his biography Lord Palmerston.
He was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford and the Sorbonne. He trained and practiced as a barrister, before starting to write. During World War II, he was a conscientious objector and was, by his own account, violently abused while in a detention camp. He served on St Pancras Borough Council from 1945–49, and stood, unsuccessfully, as Labour Party candidate for Winchester in 1955.

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Jennifer Dawson
Jennifer Dawson, (24 January 1929 – 14 October 2000) was an English novelist. Her works explored the theme of mental illness and society's attitudes to those suffering from such conditions. Born in London, she attended school in Camberwell and went on to read Modern History at St Anne's College, Oxford. During her time at Oxford she suffered a breakdown and spent several months in Warneford Hospital, Oxford.
Following the completion of her studies, she worked as a teacher at a convent in Laval in France and later at Oxford University Press where she made editorial contributions to a number of reference works. In addition to these roles, she also worked as social worker in a psychiatric hospital in Worcester and it was her experiences here and, as a patient of such an institution, that formed the basis for her debut novel The Ha-Ha. The novel, which explores schizophrenia, received considerable critical acclaim, being awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, being adapted for the stage by Richard Eyre and was later broadcast by the BBC on both radio and television.

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Jenny Joseph
Jenny Joseph (born 7 May 1932) is an English poet.
<poem> When I am an old woman I shall wear purple With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me. And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter. I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells And run my stick along the public railings And make up for the sobriety of my youth. </poem>

She was born in Birmingham, and with a scholarship, studied English literature at St Hilda's College, Oxford (195). Her poems were first published when she was at university in the early 1950s. She became a journalist and worked for the Bedfordshire Times, the Oxford Mail and Drum Publications (Johannesburg, South Africa).
Joseph's best known poem, "Warning", was written in 1961 and is included in her 1974 collection Rose In the Afternoon and The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. "Warning" was identified as the UK's "most popular post-war poem" in a 1996 poll by the BBC. The second line was the inspiration for the Red Hat Society. Her first book of poems, The Unlooked-for Season won a Gregory Award in 1960 and she won a Cholmondeley Award for her second collection, Rose in the Afternoon in 1974.

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Jenny Uglow
Jennifer Sheila Uglow OBE (née Crowther) is a British biographer, critic and publisher. The editorial director of Chatto & Windus, she has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick and the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled a women's biographical dictionary.
She won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future 1730–1810, and her works have twice been shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize.
Uglow was brought up in Cumbria and later Dorset. She attended Cheltenham Ladies' College (1958–64) and St Anne's College, University of Oxford. After gaining a first in English, she took a B.Litt. In 1971, she married Steve Uglow, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Kent; the couple have three sons and a daughter. As of 2008, Uglow lives at Canterbury in Kent.
Uglow has worked in publishing since leaving university; as of 2008, she is the editorial director of the publishing company Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Random House.

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John Banville
William John Banville (born 8 December 1945), who writes as John Banville who sometimes writes as Benjamin Black, is an Irish novelist, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter. He is recognised for his precise, cold, forensic prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators. His stated ambition is to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has".
Banville's career has seen him presented with numerous awards. His novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award in 1989. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in 2005. He was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011 and is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
William John Banville was born to Agnes (née Doran) and Martin Banville, a garage clerk, in Wexford, Ireland. He is the youngest of three siblings; his older brother Vincent is also a novelist and has written under the name Vincent Lawrence as well as his own. His sister Anne Veronica "Vonnie" Banville-Evans has written both a children's novel and a reminiscence of growing up in Wexford.

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John Berger
John Peter Berger (born 5 November 1926) is an English art critic, novelist, painter, poet and author. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text.
Born in Hackney,London, England, Berger was educated at St Edward's School, an independent school for boys in Oxford. His father, S.J.D. Berger, O.B.E., M.C., had been an infantry officer on the western front during the First World War. Berger served in the British Army from 1944 to 1946; he then enrolled in the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Art in London.
Berger began his career as a painter and exhibited work at a number of London galleries in the late 1940s. His art has been exhibited at the Wildenstein, Redfern and Leicester galleries in London. Berger has continued to paint throughout his career.
While teaching drawing (from 1948 to 1955), Berger became an art critic, publishing many essays and reviews in the New Statesman. His Marxist humanism and his strongly stated opinions on modern art made him a controversial figure early in his career. He titled an early collection of essays Permanent Red, in part as a statement of political commitment, and later wrote that before the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity with the United States he had felt constrained not to criticize the former's policies; afterwards his attitude toward the Soviet state became considerably more critical.

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John Buchan
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir PC GCMG GCVO CH (26 August 1875 – 11 February 1940) was a Scottish novelist, historian and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation.
After a brief career in law, Buchan simultaneously began writing and his political and diplomatic career, serving as a private secretary to the colonial administrator of various colonies in Southern Africa, and eventually wrote propaganda for the British war effort in First World War. Once back in civilian life, Buchan was elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities, but spent most of his time on his writing career. He wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps and other adventure fiction. He was in 1935 appointed as governor general by George V, king of Canada, on the recommendation of Prime Minister of Canada R. B. Bennett, to replace the Earl of Bessborough as viceroy, and occupied that post until his death in 1940. Buchan proved to be enthusiastic about literacy, as well as the evolution of Canadian culture, and he received a state funeral in Canada before his ashes were returned to the United Kingdom.

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John Carey (critic)
John Carey (born 5 April 1934) is a British literary critic, and emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He was born in Barnes, London, and educated at Richmond and East Sheen Boys’ Grammar School, winning an Open Scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. He served in the East Surrey Regiment, 1952-4, and was commissioned. After posts in a number of Oxford colleges, he became Merton Professor in 1975, retiring in 2001.
He is known, amongst other things, for his anti-elitist tone and iconoclastic views on high culture, as expressed for example in his recent book What Good Are the Arts? (2005).
He has twice chaired the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2004, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. He is chief book reviewer for the London Sunday Times and appears in radio and TV programmes such as Saturday Review and Newsnight Review.

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John Clare
John Clare (13 July 1793 – 20 May 1864) was an English poet, the son of a farm labourer, who came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation of its disruption. His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late 20th century and he is often now considered to be among the most important 19th-century poets. His biographer Jonathan Bate states that Clare was "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self".
Clare was born in Helpston, six miles to the north of the city of Peterborough. In his life time, the village was in the Soke of Peterborough in Northamptonshire and his memorial calls him "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet". Helpston now lies in the Peterborough unitary authority of Cambridgeshire.
He became an agricultural labourer while still a child; however, he attended school in Glinton church until he was twelve. In his early adult years, Clare became a pot-boy in the Blue Bell public house and fell in love with Mary Joyce; but her father, a prosperous farmer, forbade her to meet him. Subsequently he was a gardener at Burghley House. He enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with Gypsies, and worked in Pickworth as a lime burner in 1817. In the following year he was obliged to accept parish relief. Malnutrition stemming from childhood may be the main culprit behind his 5-foot stature and may have contributed to his poor physical health in later life.^{[citation needed]}

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John Connell
John Connell (born 1940 in Atlanta, Georgia; died September 27, 2009 in Mariaville, Maine) was a contemporary American artist. His works included sculpture, painting, drawing, and writing.
Connell attended Brown University, in Providence, RI (1958–1960), the Art Students League, NY (1960–1961) and New York University (1962) where he studied Chinese print making. His first show was in New York in 1962.
In the mid-60s, he moved to California, where he worked as the set designer for the San Francisco Mime Troupe. In the 70s, 80s and 90s, he worked primarily in the Southwestern United States, where he painted large murals and was visible in New Mexico's most respected art galleries, being part of the Santa Fe artist group Nerve and gaining a reputation for his large installations. He is particularly well known for his drawings, some of which are done in charcoal and spray paint and can be as large as twenty feet high and thirty feet wide.
Connell used plaster-of-Paris in the 80s, and later turned to tar, paper and wax, in large figurative sculptures. He also used bronze, cement, wood, and chicken wire. His works on paper sometimes include elements of collage. In the early 80s, he mostly gave up using commercial paints and began making his own out of iron oxide and pigments. In later paintings, he used ashes, mud and earth. His work has also included elements of writing and occasionally audio tape.

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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.

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John Knox
John Knox (c. 1514 – 24 November 1572) was a Scottish clergyman and a leader of the Protestant Reformation who brought reformation to the church in Scotland. He was educated at the University of St Andrews or possibly the University of Glasgow and was ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1536. Influenced by early church reformers such as George Wishart, he joined the movement to reform the Scottish church. He was caught up in the ecclesiastical and political events that involved the murder of Cardinal Beaton in 1546 and the intervention of the regent of Scotland, Mary of Guise. He was taken prisoner by French forces the following year and exiled to England on his release in 1549.
While in exile, The Rev. John Knox was licensed to work in the Church of England, where he quickly rose in the ranks to serve King Edward VI of England as a royal chaplain. In this position, he exerted a reforming influence on the text of the Book of Common Prayer. In England he met and married his first wife, Marjorie. When Mary Tudor ascended the throne and re-established Roman Catholicism, Knox was forced to resign his position and leave the country.

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John Locke
John Locke FRS (

/ˈlɒk/; 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704), widely known as the Father of Classical Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work had a great impact upon the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.
Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau and Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to pre-existing Cartesian philosophy, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception.

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John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes,CB FBA (

/ˈkeɪnz/ KAYNZ; 5 June 1883–21 April 1946) was a British economist whose ideas have profoundly affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, as well as the economic policies of governments. He greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and advocated the use of fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, as well as its various offshoots.
In the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, overturning the older ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. Keynes instead argued that aggregate demand determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. Following the outbreak of World War II, Keynes's ideas concerning economic policy were adopted by leading Western economies. During the 1950s and 1960s, the success of Keynesian economics resulted in almost all capitalist governments adopting its policy recommendations.

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John Ray
John Ray (29 November 1627 – 17 January 1705) was an English naturalist, sometimes referred to as the father of English natural history. Until 1670, he wrote his name as John Wray. From then on, he used 'Ray', after "having ascertained that such had been the practice of his family before him".
He published important works on botany, zoology, and natural theology. His classification of plants in his Historia Plantarum, was an important step towards modern taxonomy. Ray rejected the system of dichotomous division by which species were classified according to a pre-conceived, either/or type system, and instead classified plants according to similarities and differences that emerged from observation. Thus he advanced scientific empiricism against the deductive rationalism of the scholastics. He was the first to give a biological definition of the term species.

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John Wain
John Barrington Wain (14 March 1925 – 24 May 1994) was an English poet, novelist, and critic, associated with the literary group "The Movement". For most of his life, Wain worked as a freelance journalist and author, writing and reviewing for newspapers and the radio. He seems to have married in 1947, since C. S. Lewis wrote a poem for his wedding in June of that year.
Wain was born and grew up in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, and attended St. John's College, Oxford, gaining a B.A. in 1946 and M.A. in 1950. He was a Fereday Fellow of St John's between 1946 and 1949.
He wrote his first novel Hurry on Down in 1953, a comic picaresque story about an unsettled university graduate who rejects the standards of conventional society. Other notable novels include Strike the Father Dead (1962), a tale of a jazzman's rebellion against his conventional father, and Young shoulders (1982), winner of the Whitbread Prize, the tale of a young boy dealing with the death of loved ones. Wain's use of lower-case letters in the titles of his novels indicate his non-conventional manner.

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John Wyclif
John Wycliffe (

/ˈwɪklɪf/; also spelled Wyclif, Wycliff, Wiclef, Wicliffe, or Wickliffe) (c. 1328 – December 31, 1384) was an English Scholastic philosopher, theologian, lay preacher,translator, reformer and university teacher at Oxford in England, who was known as an early dissident in the Roman Catholic Church during the 14th century. His followers were known as Lollards, a somewhat rebellious movement, which preached anticlerical and biblically-centered reforms. The Lollard movement was a precursor to the Protestant Reformation (for this reason, Wycliffe is sometimes called "The Morning Star of the Reformation"). He was one of the earliest opponents of papal authority influencing secular power.
Wycliffe was also an early advocate for translation of the Bible into the common language. He completed his translation directly from the Vulgate into vernacular English in the year 1382, now known as Wycliffe's Bible. It is probable that he personally translated the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; and it is possible he translated the entire New Testament, while his associates translated the Old Testament.Wycliffe's Bible appears to have been completed by 1384, with additional updated versions being done by Wycliffe's assistant John Purvey and others in 1388 and 1395.

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Jonathan Bate
Jonathan Bate CBE FBA FRSL (born 26 June 1958) is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar of Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is also Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, having succeeded Richard Smethurst who was Provost from 1991 to 2011.
He was educated at Sevenoaks School, the University of Cambridge and Harvard University, where he held a Harkness Fellowship. He was a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge and then King Alfred Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University before becoming Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at University of Warwick. He was created a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) on 17 June 2006. He is also a Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and an Honorary Fellow of his undergraduate college, St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
He is married to the author and biographer Paula Byrne, with whom he has three children.
He is a Governor and Board member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and from 2007-2011 sat on the Council of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In 2010 he was commissioned by Faber and Faber to write a literary life of Ted Hughes. He sits on the European Advisory Board of the Princeton University Press.

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Jonathan Keates
Jonathan Basil Keates, (born 7 November 1946 in Paris, France) is an English writer, biographer and novelist. He was educated at Bryanston School and went on to read for his undergraduate degree at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Keates has written a number of acclaimed biographies and travel books, but his works of fiction have also received critical acclaim, most notably Allegro Postillions, for which he was awarded both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is very interested in Venice, and can not only speak English and Italian, but also French and Spanish. He also writes reviews in some prominent magazines.
His favourite poet is Alfred Lord Tennyson.
In addition, Keates is a successful English teacher employed by the City of London School and a judge of some writing competitions. According to his students, he is both "a genius" and "madly excellent".
Keates is identified as a Gay author. He is a Christian.

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Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.
He is remembered for works such as Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, Drapier's Letters, The Battle of the Books, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and A Tale of a Tub. Swift is probably the foremost prose satirist in the English language, and is less well known for his poetry. Swift originally published all of his works under pseudonyms—such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M.B. Drapier—or anonymously. He is also known for being a master of two styles of satire: the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.
Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland. He was the second child and only son of Jonathan Swift (1640-1667) and his wife Abigail Erick (or Herrick), of Frisby-on-the-Wreake. His father, a native of Goodrich, Herefordshire, accompanied his brothers to Ireland to seek their fortunes in law after their Royalist father's estate was brought to ruin during the English Civil War. Swift's father died at Dublin before he was born, and his mother returned to England. He was left in the care of his influential uncle, Godwin, a close friend and confidante of Sir John Temple, whose son later employed Swift as his secretary.

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Joseph Ashby
Joseph Ashby (1859 – 1919) was an agricultural trade unionist born in Tysoe, Warwickshire, England. “His life was remarkable, encapsulating in many aspects the ideal of the self-improving working man, and embracing most of the institutions—the nonconformist chapel, trades unionism, and working-class Liberalism—that so clearly represented social and political betterment in the later years of the nineteenth century.” (Quotation from Alun Howkins, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). His biography was written by his daughter, Kathleen Ashby.
Joseph was born 13 June 1859, an illegitimate son of Elizabeth Ashby, an unmarried servant. Kathleen Ashby describes Joseph’s father as from “A family of very high rank, great landowners of in Warwickshire and neighbouring counties ... with some, though not great, achievement in science and letters". (Her notes deposited at the Warwickshire CRO suggest the family was the Comptons, Marquesses of Northampton, whom indeed Joseph had contacts with throughout his life.)

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Joyce Cary
Joyce Cary (born Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary, December 7, 1888 – March 29, 1957) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and artist.
Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary was born in a hospital in Derry, Ireland, on December 7, 1888. His family had been landlords in Inishowen in County Donegal since Elizabethan times, but lost their property after passage of the Irish Land Act in 1882. Cary's grandfather died soon after and his grandmother moved into a cottage near Cary Castle, one of the lost family properties.
The family dispersed and Cary had uncles who served in the frontier US Cavalry and the Canadian North-West Mounted Police. Most of the Carys wound up in England. Arthur Cary, his father, trained as an engineer and married Charlotte Joyce, the well-to-do daughter of a Belfast banker. After his son was born in 1888, Arthur moved his family to London.
Throughout his childhood, Joyce Cary spent many summers at his grandmother's house in Ireland and at Cromwell House in England, home of his great-uncle, which served as a base for all the Cary clan. Some of this upbringing is described in the fictionalized memoir A House of Children (1941) and the novel Castle Corner (1938)—i.e., Cary Castle. Although he always remembered his Irish childhood with affection and wrote about it with great feeling, Cary was based in England the rest of his life. The feeling of displacement and the idea that life's tranquility may be disturbed at any moment marked Cary and informs much of his writing.

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Joyce Hemlow
Joyce Hemlow M.A., Ph.D, FRSC (July 31, 1906 – September 3, 2001) was a Canadian professor and accomplished writer.
She was born to William and Rosalinda (Redmond) Hemlow and was educated at Queen's University, received a B.A in 1941 and her MA in 1942, becoming a travelling fellow of the university until 1943, when she became a fellow of the Canadian Federation of University Women. She then attended Radcliffe College in the United States, gaining an AM in 1944 and a Ph.D in 1948. In 1951, she became the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, and later the Nuffeld Fellow in the summer of 1954.
She was the Greenshields Professor of English Language and Literature at McGill University for most of her early teaching career. She also served from 1957 to 1961 as a member of the Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her literary output mainly concerned the Burney's, best profiled in her award-winning book The History of Fanny Burney, which received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Governor General's Award for Academic Non-Fiction in 1958 and the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize.

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Karl Miller
Karl Fergus Connor Miller FRSL (born 2 August 1931) is a British literary editor, critic and writer.
He was educated at the Royal High School of Edinburgh and Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied English. He became literary editor of The Spectator and the New Statesman. Miller resigned from the latter over a disagreement with the magazine's then editor Paul Johnson, over the extent to which the literary pages treated difficult subjects and also Johnson's disapproval of The Beatles and their fans (Berry 214).
He was then editor of The Listener (1967–73) and subsequently the London Review of Books, which he founded, from 1979 to 1992. He was also Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature and head of the English Department at University College, London until 1992.

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Kathryn Hughes
Kathryn Hughes is a British historian, biographer and journalist. Educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University and the University of East Anglia; her doctorate in Victorian History was developed into her first book, The Victorian Governess. Professor of Life Writing at the University of East Anglia, she has been a Visiting Professor in the same field at Kingston University, and is currently there as a visiting writer.
Kathryn Hughes, a contributing editor to Prospect magazine, has reviewed and written for The Guardian, The Economist and The Times Literary Supplement. An occasional presenter of Open Book on BBC Radio 4, she also contributes to the same network's Saturday Review. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Literature.

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L. A. G. Strong
Leonard Alfred George Strong (1896 – 17 August 1958) was an English writer, known as a novelist, journalist, poet and director of the publishers Methuen Ltd.
He was born in Plymouth, of a half-Irish father and Irish mother, and was educated at Brighton College (where in later life he was a governor) and at Wadham College, Oxford (Open Classical Scholar). There he came under the influence of W. B. Yeats.
He worked as an Assistant Master at Summer Fields, Oxford, between 1917–19 and 1920–30, and as a Visiting Tutor at the Central School of Speech and Drama. He was a director of the publishers Methuen Ltd. from 1938 until his death. For many years he was a governor of his old school, Brighton College.
He was a versatile writer of more than 20 novels, as well as plays, children's books, poems, biography, criticism, and film scripts. Some of his poems were set to music by Arthur Bliss. His novel The Brothers was filmed in 1947 by the Scottish director David MacDonald. Selected Poems appeared in 1931, and The Body's Imperfections: Collected Poems in 1957. He also collaborated with Cecil Day-Lewis in compiling anthologies.

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L. H. Myers
Leo (Leopold) Hamilton Myers (6 September 1881 – 7 April 1944) was a British novelist.
He was born in Leckhampton House, Cambridge into a cultured family; his father was the writer Frederic William Henry Myers (1843-1901) and his mother the photographer Eveleen Tennant (1856-1937). He was named after his godfather, Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany. He was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. His trilogy/tetralogy The Root and the Flower, set in India at the time of Akbar, is his major work and was recognised by the award of the 1935 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
He did not visit India, and his writings about it have been seen by some critics as reflecting his own intellectual milieu and its concerns. He was independently wealthy from his mid-20s, travelled and began to write. In 1908 he married the American Elsie Palmer (1873–1955), daughter of General William Palmer, and a friend of John Singer Sargent, who painted her. He made many friends of different kinds, and late in life broke with most of them. In the 1930s he wrote in sympathy with Marxist thought, and became increasingly pessimistic in his outlook.^{[clarification needed]} He committed suicide on 7 April 1944 by taking an overdose of Veronal.

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L. P. Hartley
Leslie Poles Hartley CBE (30 December 1895 – 13 December 1972), known as L. P. Hartley, was a British novelist and short story writer. His best-known novels are the Eustace and Hilda trilogy (1947) and The Go-Between (1953). The latter was made into a 1970 film, directed by Joseph Losey with a star cast, in an adaptation by Harold Pinter. Its opening sentence, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there", has become almost proverbial.
Leslie Poles Hartley was born on 30 December 1895 in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, where he lived with his parents, Bessie and Harry Hartley, and his two sisters, Enid and Annie Norah. He then moved to an estate near Peterborough with his family. He was educated in Cliftonville, Thanet, then briefly at Clifton College, where he first met Clifford Henry Benn Kitchin, and at Harrow School. In 1915 he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, to read modern history. There he befriended Aldous Huxley.
In 1916 he joined the British Army. He was commissioned as an officer, but for health reasons never left the United Kingdom. Invalided out, he returned to Oxford University in 1919, where he gathered a number of literary friends, including David Cecil.

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Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence George Durrell (February 27, 1912—November 7, 1990), was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer, though he resisted affiliation with Britain and preferred to be considered cosmopolitan. It has been posthumously suggested that Durrell never had British citizenship, though more accurately, he became defined as a non-patrial in 1968, due to the amendment to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962. Hence, he was denied the right to enter or settle in Britain under new laws and had to apply for a visa for each entry. His most famous work is the tetralogy the Alexandria Quartet.
Durrell was born in Jallandhar, British India, the eldest son of Indian-born British colonials Louisa and Lawrence Samuel Durrell. His first school was St. Joseph's College, North Point, Darjeeling. At the age of eleven, he was sent to England where he briefly attended St. Olave's Grammar School before being sent to St. Edmund's School, Canterbury. His formal education was unsuccessful and he failed his university entrance examinations, but he began seriously writing poetry at the age of fifteen and his first collection of poetry, Quaint Fragment, was published in 1931.

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Leslie Stephen
Sir Leslie Stephen, KCB (28 November 1832 – 22 February 1904) was an English author, critic and mountaineer, and the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.
Stephen was born at Kensington Gore in London, the brother of James Fitzjames Stephen and son of Sir James Stephen. His family had belonged to the Clapham Sect, the early 19th century group of mainly evangelical Christian social reformers. At his father's house he saw a good deal of the Macaulays, James Spedding, Sir Henry Taylor and Nassau Senior. After studying at Eton College, King's College London and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. (20th wrangler) in 1854 and M.A. in 1857, Stephen remained for several years a fellow and tutor of his college. He recounted some of his experiences in a chapter in his Life of Fawcett as well as in some less formal Sketches from Cambridge: By a Don (1865). These sketches were reprinted from the Pall Mall Gazette, to the proprietor of which, George Smith, he had been introduced by his brother. It was at Smith's house at Hampstead that Stephen met his first wife, Harriet Marian (1840–1875), daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, with whom he had a daughter, Laura Makepeace Stephen (1870–1945); after her death he married Julia Prinsep Jackson (1846–1895), widow of Herbert Duckworth. With her he had four children:

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Lewis Namier
Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier (27 June 1888 – 19 August 1960) was an English historian. He was born Ludwik Niemirowski in Wola Okrzejska in what was then part of the Russian Empire and is today in Poland.
Namier's family were secular-minded Jewish gentry. His father, with whom young Lewis often quarreled, idolized Austro-Hungarian Empire. By contrast, Namier throughout his life detested the Dual Monarchy. He was educated at the University of Lviv in Austrian Galicia (now in Ukraine), the University of Lausanne, and the London School of Economics. At Lausanne, Namier heard Vilfredo Pareto lecture, and Pareto's ideas about elites would have a great influence on his thinking.
Namier emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1906 and became a British subject in 1913. During the First World War, he fought as a private with the 20th Royal Fusiliers in 1914–15 but was discharged owing to poor eyesight. He then held positions with the Propaganda Department (1915–17), the Department of Information (1917–18) and finally with the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office (1918–20). At the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919, Namier served as part of the British delegation. His area of responsibility was Poland, and his relations with the chief Polish delegate, Roman Dmowski, were antagonistic owing to Dmowski's anti-Semitism. Namier was seen as one of the biggest enemies of the newly independent Polish state in the British political environment. He changed the earlier proposed Curzon line by detaching the city of Lwów from Poland with a version called Curzon Line "A". It was sent to Soviet diplomatic representatives for acceptance. The earlier compromised version of Curzon line which was debated at the Spa Conference was renamed Curzon Line "B".

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Liam O'Flaherty
Liam O'Flaherty (aka Liam Ó Flaithearta) was a significant Irish novelist and short story writer and a major figure in the Irish literary renaissance, born 28 August 1896, died 7 September 1984.
O'Flaherty was born in the remote village of Gort na gCapall, on Inishmore (one of the Aran Islands), county Galway. His family, descendants of the Ó Flaithbertaigh family of Connemara, were not well off. The Irish language was widely spoken in the area, and in the O'Flaherty household both English and Irish were used.
O'Flaherty was the son of Maidhc Ó Flaithearta and Maggie Ganley of Gort na gCapall. In 1908, at the age of twelve, he went to Rockwell College. This was followed by enrollments at Holy Cross and University College, Dublin. According to The Sunday Times, he also attended Belvedere College and Blackrock College. He did not attend the first two schools for long due to explusion for posession of pornographic materials. He had intended joining the priesthood, but in 1917 he left school and joined the Irish Guards under the name 'Bill Ganly'. He served on the Western Front, where he was injured, and it is possible that the shell shock he suffered may have been responsible for the mental illness which became apparent in 1933.

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Lord David Cecil
Edward Christian David Gascoyne-Cecil, CH (9 April 1902 – 1 January 1986), was a British biographer, historian and academic. He held the style of 'Lord' by courtesy, as a younger son of a marquess.
David Cecil was the youngest of the four children of James Gascoyne-Cecil, 4th Marquess of Salisbury and Lady Cicely (born Gore, second daughter of Arthur Gore, 5th Earl of Arran). His siblings were Beatrice Edith Mildred Cecil (afterwards Baroness Harlech), Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 5th Marquess of Salisbury (1893-1972) and Mary Alice Cecil (afterwards Mary Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire). Cecil was a delicate child, suffering from a tubercular gland in his neck at the age of 8 years, and after an operation he spent a great deal of time in bed, where he developed his love of reading.
Because of his delicate health his parents sent him to Eton College later than other boys, and he survived the experience by spending one day a week in bed. After school he went on to Christ Church, Oxford, as an undergraduate.

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Lyndall Gordon
Lyndall Gordon is a British-based writer and academic, known for her literary biographies. She is a Senior Research Fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford.
Born in Cape Town, she was an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town, then a doctoral student at Columbia University in New York City. She married the pathologist Siamon Gordon; they have two daughters.
Gordon is the author of Eliot's Early Years (1977), which won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize ; Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life (1984), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (1994), winner of the Cheltenham Prize for Literature; and Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, shortlisted for the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize. Her most recent publication is Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family's Feuds (2010), which has overturned the established assumptions about the poet's life.

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Lytton Strachey
Giles Lytton Strachey (

/ˈdʒaɪlz ˈlɪtən ˈstreɪtʃɪ/; 1 March 1880 – 21 January 1932) was a British writer and critic.
A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of Eminent Victorians, he is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. His 1921 biography Queen Victoria was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Strachey was born on 1 March 1880, at Stowey House, Clapham Common, London, the fifth son and the eleventh child of Lieutenant General Sir Richard Strachey, an officer in the colonial British armed forces, and his second wife, the former Jane Grant, who became a leading supporter of the women's suffrage movement. He was named "Giles Lytton" after an early sixteenth-century Gyles Strachey and the first Earl of Lytton, who had been a friend of Richard Strachey's when he was Viceroy of India in the late 1870s. The Earl of Lytton was also Lytton Strachey's godfather. The Stracheys had thirteen children in total, ten of whom survived to adulthood, including Lytton's sister Dorothy Strachey.

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M. K. Ashby
Mabel Kathleen Ashby (1892 – 1975) (wrote as M. K. Ashby) was an educationalist, writer and historian born in Tysoe, Warwickshire, England.
She was one of the daughters of Joseph Ashby and his wife Hannah Ashby (Ashby also being her maiden name). Her brother Arthur Ashby was a pioneer of agricultural economics.
In 1907 Mabel won a scholarship to Warwick High School, where she became a weekly boarder. From there, she won a King’s scholarship to Birmingham University. This was a government grant conditional on undertaking to train as a teacher. She took a B.A. degree in her first three years, and stayed on to take an M.A. in philosophy. While she was at the training college, she successfully organised in her second year a women’s club for providing student amenities such as provision of common rooms and proper meals.
On leaving college she was appointed to a post as instructress of Rural Pupil Teachers in Staffordshire. This meant working in remote villages, travelling by train, bicycle or pony-and-trap, talking to teachers and giving lessons to small groups of receptive boys and girls.

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Margaret Kennedy
Margaret Kennedy (23 April 1896 – 31 July 1967) was an English novelist and playwright.
Margaret Kennedy was born in Hyde Park Gate, London, the eldest of the four children of Charles Moore Kennedy (1857-1934), a barrister, and his wife Ellinor Edith Marwood (1861–1928). The novelist Joyce Cary was a cousin on her father's side.
She attended Cheltenham Ladies' College, where she began writing, and then went up to Somerville College, Oxford in 1915 to read history. Her first publication was a history book, A Century of Revolution (1922). Margaret Kennedy was married on 20 June 1925 to the barrister David Davies (1889–1964), who later became a county court judge and a national insurance commissioner. He was knighted in 1952. They had a son and two daughters, one of whom was the novelist Julia Birley. The novelist Serena Mackesy is her grand-daughter. Margaret Kennedy died at a friend's house at Adderbury, Oxfordshire on 31 July 1967.
Margaret Kennedy is best appreciated today for her second novel, The Constant Nymph, which she adapted into a highly successful West End play that opened at the New Theatre, with Noël Coward and Edna Best in September 1926. Coward was replaced by John Gielgud during the run. It was also successfully filmed in 1928 by Adrian Brunel and Alma Reville, directed by Brunel and Basil Dean, and starring Ivor Novello, Mabel Poulton and Benita Hume, and again in 1933, 1938 (for television), and 1943.

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Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amis (25 August 1949) is a British novelist, the author of several of Britain's best-known novels, including Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He was the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011.The Times named him in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what The New York Times called "the new unpleasantness." Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. The Guardian writes that his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis called a "terrible compulsive vividness in his style ... that constant demonstrating of his command of English," and that the "Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."

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Mary I of England
Mary I (18 February 1516 – 17 November 1558) was the Queen of England and Ireland from July 1553 until her death. Her Protestant political opponents gave her the sobriquet of "Bloody Mary".
She was the only surviving child born of the ill-fated marriage of Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon. Her younger half-brother, Edward VI, succeeded Henry in 1547. By 1553, Edward was mortally ill and because of religious differences between them, he attempted to remove Mary from the line of succession. On his death, their cousin Lady Jane Grey was at first proclaimed queen. Mary assembled a force in East Anglia, and successfully deposed Jane, who was ultimately beheaded. In 1554, Mary married Philip of Spain, and as a result became queen consort of Habsburg Spain on his accession in 1556.
As the fourth crowned monarch of the Tudor dynasty, Mary is remembered for her restoration of Roman Catholicism after the short-lived Protestant reign of her half-brother. During her five year reign, she had over 280 religious dissenters burned at the stake in the Marian Persecutions. Her re-establishment of Roman Catholicism was reversed after her death in 1558 by her successor and younger half-sister, Elizabeth I.

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Mary Kingsley
Mary Henrietta Kingsley (13 October 1862 – 3 June 1900) was an English ethnographic and scientific writer and explorer whose travels throughout West Africa and resulting work helped shape European perceptions of African cultures and British imperialism.
Kingsley was born in Islington, London on 13 October 1862, the daughter and oldest child of doctor, traveller, and writer George Kingsley and Mary Bailey. Notably, she comes from a family of writers, as she was also the niece of novelists Charles Kingsley and Henry Kingsley. The family moved to Highgate less than a year after her birth, the same home where her brother Charles George R. ("Charley") Kingsley was born in 1866, and by 1881 were living in Southwood House, Bexley in Kent.
Her father was a doctor and worked for George Herbert, 13th Earl of Pembroke and other aristocrats, so he was regularly away from home on his excursions. During these voyages he was able to collect information for his studies. Dr. Kingsley and Lord Dunraven ventured to North America between 1870 and 1875, during which Kingsley was offered the opportunity to join American General Custer and his men into Native American lands. Later reports describing the massacre of Custer's party left the Kingsley family at home in England terrified, but they were relieved to discover later that bad weather had kept Dr. Kingsley from joining the Custer party. It is possible that her father's views on injustices faced by the Native Americans helped shape Mary's later opinions on British cultural imperialism in West Africa.

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Mary Moorman
Mary Ann Moorman (born August 5, 1932) was a witness to the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. She is best known for her photograph capturing the presidential limousine a fraction of a second after the fatal shot.
Mary Moorman was born Mary Ann Boshart. She married Donald G. Moorman in 1952 and divorced him in 1973. She later married Gary Krahmer in 1980.
On November 22, 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
Moorman was standing on grass about 2 feet (61 cm) south of the south curb of Elm Street in Dealey Plaza, directly across from the grassy knoll and the North Pergola concrete structure that Abraham Zapruder and his assistant Marilyn Sitzman were standing on, during the assassination. Moorman stated that she stepped off from the grass onto the street to take her Polaroid photo. Zapruder is seen standing on the pergola in the Moorman photograph, with the presidential limousine already having passed through the line of sight between Zapruder and Moorman.

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Mary, Queen of Scots
Mary, Queen of Scots (8 December 1542 – 8 February 1587), also known as Mary Stuart or Mary I of Scotland, was queen regnant of Scotland from 14 December 1542 to 24 July 1567 and queen consort of France from 10 July 1559 to 5 December 1560.
Mary was the only surviving legitimate child of King James V of Scotland. She was 6 days old when her father died and she was crowned nine months later. In 1558, she married Francis, Dauphin of France. He ascended the French throne as King Francis II in 1559, and Mary became queen consort of France until she was widowed on 5 December 1560. Mary then returned to Scotland, arriving in Leith on 19 August 1561. Four years later, she married her first cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, but their union was unhappy. In February 1567, his residence was destroyed by an explosion, and Darnley was found murdered in the garden.
James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, was generally believed to have orchestrated Darnley's death, but he was acquitted of the charge in April 1567, and the following month he married Mary. Following an uprising against the couple, Mary was imprisoned in Loch Leven Castle. On 24 July 1567, she was forced to abdicate in favour of her one-year-old son, James. After an unsuccessful attempt to regain the throne, she fled southwards seeking the protection of her first cousin once removed, Queen Elizabeth I of England. Mary had previously claimed Elizabeth's throne as her own and was considered the legitimate sovereign of England by many English Catholics, including participants in a rebellion known as the Rising of the North. Perceiving her as a threat, Elizabeth had her confined in a number of castles and manor houses in the interior of England. After 18 years and 9 months in custody, Mary was tried and executed for her involvement in plots to assassinate Elizabeth.

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Maurice Gee
Maurice Gee (born 22 August 1931 in Whakatane, Bay of Plenty Region) is a New Zealand novelist.
Gee was awarded the 1978 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Plumb. He is an Honorary Associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists.
Gee was brought up in Henderson, a suburb of Auckland, a location that frequently features in his writing. He completed BA and MA degrees at the University of Auckland, which subsequently recognised him with a Distinguished Alumni Award in 1998, and an honorary Doctor of Literature in 2004. He is currently married and has three children, one of whom is also a writer, Emily Gee.

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Meriol Trevor
Meriol Trevor (15 April 1919 – 12 January 2000) was one of the most prolific Roman Catholic women writers of the twentieth century. She was educated at Perse Girls' School, Cambridge, and St Hugh's College, Oxford, taking her degree in 1942. During World War II she worked in a day nursery and later as the steerer of a cargo barge on the Grand Union Canal. In 1946 she went to Italy as a relief worker with UNRRA and lived for nearly a year in the Abruzzi. In Italy Trevor was exposed to Catholic culture. Previously an agnostic humanist, she was received into the Roman Catholic Church at Oxford in 1950. Her two-volume biography of John Henry Newman was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography in 1962. She also wrote biographies of Pope John XXIII, Philip Neri, and James II, as well as many historical novels and children's stories and a book of poetry. In 1967 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. An annual lecture series in her honour was begun in 2000 in her home town of Bath.

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Michael Holroyd
Sir Michael De Courcy Fraser Holroyd, FRHistS, FRSL (born 27 August 1935) is an English biographer.
Holroyd was born in London and educated at Eton College, though he has often claimed Maidenhead Public Library as his alma mater.
In 1964 he published his first book, a biography of writer Hugh Kingsmill, but his reputation was consolidated in 1967-68 with the publication of his life of Lytton Strachey (which playwright Christopher Hampton later used extensively when writing the screenplay for the 1995 film Carrington). Holroyd has also written biographies of Augustus John and, in four volumes, of George Bernard Shaw.
Holroyd acted as Chairman of the Society of Authors, 1973–83, and from 1985 to 1988 was president of the English branch of PEN. His awards include the 2001 Heywood Hill Literary Prize and the 2005 David Cohen Prize for literature. He was also President of the Royal Society of Literature from 2003 to 2008 and was knighted in the 2007 New Years' Honours List. His latest book, A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers (2010), focuses on the Villa Cimbrone on the Gulf of Salerno and the Edwardian literary and society figures who lived there.

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Morris West
Morris Langlo West AO (26 April 1916 – 9 October 1999) was an Australian novelist and playwright, best known for his novels The Devil's Advocate (1959), The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963), and The Clowns of God (1981). His books were published in 27 languages and sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. Each new book he wrote after he became an established writer sold more than 1 million copies.
His works often were focused on international politics and the role of the Roman Catholic Church in international affairs. One of his most famous works, The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963), described the election and career of a Slavic Pope, 15 years before the historic election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II.
He was born in St Kilda, Victoria and attended Christian Brothers College, St Kilda. He graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1937, and worked as a teacher in New South Wales and Tasmania. He spent 12 years in a monastery of the Christian Brothers, taking annual vows, but left in 1941 without taking final vows. That same year, he married (this first marriage did not survive), and enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force. He was seconded from the RAAF to work for Billy Hughes, former Australian Prime Minister, for a time. After becoming well known for producing radio serials, he left Australia in 1955 to write, and lived in Austria, Italy, England and the United States, finally returning to Australia in 1980. During this time he had a stint as the Vatican correspondent for the Daily Mail. His son, C. Chris O’Hanlon, said that he spent his first 12 birthdays in 12 different countries.

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Muriel Spark
Dame Muriel Spark, DBE (1 February 1918 – 13 April 2006) was an award-winning Scottish novelist. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
She was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh, the daughter of Sarah Elizabeth Maud (née Uezzell) and Bernard Camberg, an engineer. Her father was Jewish and her mother had been raised a Presbyterian, as was Spark. She was educated at James Gillespie's High School for Girls (1923 – 1935). The family lived in the Bruntsfield area of Edinburgh. In 1934–35 she took a course in "Commercial correspondence and précis writing" at Heriot-Watt College. She taught English for a brief time and then worked as a secretary in a department store.
On 3 September 1937 she married Sidney Oswald Spark, and soon followed him to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Their son Robin was born in July 1938. Within months she discovered that her husband was manic depressive and prone to violent outbursts. In 1940 Muriel left Sidney and Robin. She returned to the United Kingdom in early 1944, taking residence at the Helena Club in London; years later the club would be her inspiration for the fictional May of Teck Club in The Girls of Slender Means. She worked in Intelligence for the remainder of World War II. She provided money at regular intervals to support her son as he toiled unsuccessfully over the years. Spark maintained it was her intention for her family to set up home in England, but Robin returned to Britain with his father later to be brought up by his maternal grandparents in Scotland.

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Noel Annan
Noel Gilroy Annan, Baron Annan, OBE (25 December 1916 – 21 February 2000) was a British military intelligence officer, author, and academic. During his military career, he rose to the rank of Colonel and was appointed OBE. He was Provost of King's College, Cambridge, Provost of University College, London, Vice-Chancellor of the University of London, and a member of the House of Lords.
Annan's publications include Leslie Stephen (1951 - awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), Roxburgh of Stowe (1965), Our Age (1990), described by Professor John Gray in the New Statesman as a "marvellous compendium of the higher gossip,"[1] Changing Enemies (1995), and The Dons (1999). His best-known essay is "The Intellectual Aristocracy," which illustrates, according to Robert Fulford in the National Post, the "web of kinship that united British intellectuals (the Darwins, Huxleys, Macaulays, etc.) in the 19th and early 20th centuries."[2]
He was born in Gloucester Terrace, London, attending St. Winnifred's School, Seaford, and Stowe, Buckinghamshire, a well-known fee-paying school. At Stowe, he was head of Temple House, and editor of the school newspaper The Stoic.

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Oliver Onions
George Oliver Onions (13 November 1873 – 9 April 1961) was a significant English novelist who published over forty novels and story collections. Originally trained as a commercial artist, he worked as a designer of posters and books, and as a magazine illustrator, before starting his career in writing. The first editions of his novels were published with dust jackets bearing full-colour illustrations painted by Onions himself. He married the writer Berta Ruck in 1909 and they had two sons, Arthur (born 1912) and William (born 1913). Onions legally changed his name to George Oliver in 1918, but continued to publish under the name Oliver Onions.
Besides detective fiction, historical fiction and a science fiction novel, New Moon (1918), Onions wrote several collections of ghost stories, of which the best known is Widdershins (1911). It includes the novella The Beckoning Fair One, widely regarded as one of the best in the genre of horror fiction, especially psychological horror. On the surface, this is a conventional haunted house story: an unsuccessful writer moves into rooms in an otherwise empty house, in the hope that isolation will help his failing creativity. His sensitivity and imagination are enhanced by his seclusion, but his art, his only friend and his sanity are all destroyed in the process. The story can be read as narrating the gradual possession of the protagonist by a mysterious and possessive feminine spirit, or as a realistic description of a psychotic outbreak culminating in catatonia and murder, told from the sufferer's point of view. The precise description of the slow disintegration of the protagonist's mind is terrifying in either case. Another theme, shared with others of Onions' stories, is a connection between creativity and insanity; in this view, the artist is in danger of withdrawing from the world altogether and losing himself in his creation.

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Percy A. Scholes
Percy Alfred Scholes (24 July 1877 – 31 July 1958) was an English musician, journalist and prolific writer, whose best-known achievement was his compilation of the first edition of The Oxford Companion to Music. His 1948 biography The Great Dr Burney was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
He was born in Leeds in 1877 and was educated privately, owing to his poor health as a child. He became an organist, schoolteacher, music journalist and lecturer. At various times he was music critic for the Evening Standard, The Observer (1920-1927) and the Radio Times (1923-1929).
He wrote over 30 books, mainly concerning music appreciation, but his best-known work is The Oxford Companion to Music, which was first published in 1938. This work took him six years to produce and consisted of over a million words (surpassing the length of the Bible). Scholes was assisted by various clerical assistants, but wrote virtually all the text himself. The only exceptions were the article on tonic sol-fa (for which he was dissatisfied with his own article) and the synopses of the plots of operas (which he regarded as too boring). Although the Oxford Companion to Music was (and is) regarded as authoritative, the text of the first edition is enlivened by Scholes' own anecdotal and sometimes quirky style.

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Percy Lubbock
Percy Lubbock, CBE (4 June 1879 – 1 August 1965) was an English man of letters, known as an essayist, critic and biographer.
Percy Lubbock was the son of the merchant banker Frederic Lubbock and his wife Catherine, daughter of John Gurney of Earlham Hall, Norfolk. Earlham, his memoir of childhood summer holidays spent at his maternal grandfather's home was to win him the James Tait Black Memorial Prizein 1922. He was brought up at Emmetts near Ide Hill in Kent. He was educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge.
He lived at Gli Scafari, a villa on the Gulf of Spezia designed by Cecil Pinsent. Towards the end of his life he went blind. Well-placed socially, his intellectual connections included his Cambridge contemporary E. M. Forster, Edith Wharton ( he was a member of her Inner Circle from about 1906), Howard Sturgis and Bernard Berenson. Other Cambridge friends included the singer Clive Carey.
He reviewed, anonymously in the columns of the Times Literary Supplement, significant modern novels including Forster's Howards End. His 1921 book The Craft of Fiction ('the official textbook of the Modernist aesthetics of indirection') became a straw man for writers including Forster, Virginia Woolf and Graham Greene, who disagreed with his rather formalist view of the novel. Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction considers that Lubbock's take on the craft of Henry James was in fact schematizing and formal, if systematic, with a flattening effect.

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Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd CBE (born 5 October 1949, East Acton in west London) is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003.
Ackroyd grew up on a council estate and was raised in a "strict" Roman Catholic household. He first knew that he was gay when he was seven. He was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English literature. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University.
The result of his Yale fellowship was Notes for a New Culture, written when Ackroyd was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, an echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for exploring and re-examining the works of other London-based writers.

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Philip Wilson Steer
Philip Wilson Steer OM (28 Dec 1860 – 18 March 1942) was a British painter of landscape and occasional portraits and figure studies. He was a leading figure in the Impressionist movement in Britain.
Philip Wilson Steer was born on 28 December 1860 in Birkenhead, in Merseyside, near Liverpool. He was the son of the portrait-painter, Philip Steer (1810-1871).
After finding the examinations of the British Civil Service too demanding, he became an artist in 1878. He studied at the Gloucester School of Art and then from 1880 to 1881 at the South Kensington Drawing Schools. He was rejected by the Royal Academy of Art, and so studied in Paris between 1882 and 1884, firstly at the Académie Julian, and then in the École des Beaux Arts under Cabanel, where he became a follower of the Impressionist school.
Between 1883 and 1885 he exhibited at the Royal Academy. In 1886 he became a founder of the New English Art Club, with whom he continued to exhibit regularly. In 1887 Steer spent some time at the Etaples art colony. His misty Impressionist style is striking in such paintings as "The Beach" and "Fisher Children". Another work for which he certainly made a preliminary study while there, "The Bridge", is now considered to have been painted in Walberswick, the English estuary town to which he next moved.

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Piers Paul Read
Piers Paul Read, FRSL (born 7 March 1941) is a British novelist and non-fiction writer.
Piers Paul Read was born in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. He is the third son of Sir Herbert Read, a poet, art critic and theorist of anarchism, and Margaret (née Ludwig) Read, a professional musician. His mother was a convert to Roman Catholicism and he was raised in that religion.
When Read was eight, his family moved to North Yorkshire. He was educated by Benedictine monks at Gilling Castle and Ampleforth College. His years at Ampleforth would later provide much of the material for the first part of his third novel Monk Dawson (1969) and rural Ryedale was the setting of his fifth novel, The Upstart (1973). In 1959 he went to St John's College, Cambridge, where he read history. He received his B.A. in 1961 and M.A. in 1962. In 1963–64, he spent a year in West Berlin on a Ford Foundation Fellowship. There he made friends with two other beneficiaries of the Ford Foundation, Tom Stoppard and Derek Marlowe, and worked on his first novel Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx (1966).

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Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901) was the monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death. From 1 May 1876, she used the additional title of Empress of India.
Victoria was the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, the fourth son of King George III. Both the Duke of Kent and the King died in 1820, and Victoria was raised under close supervision by her German-born mother Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. She inherited the throne at the age of 18, after her father's three elder brothers had all died without surviving legitimate issue. The United Kingdom was already an established constitutional monarchy, in which the Sovereign held relatively few direct political powers. Privately, she attempted to influence government policy and ministerial appointments. Publicly, she became a national icon, and was identified with strict standards of personal morality.
She married her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, in 1840. Their nine children and 26 of their 34 grandchildren who survived childhood married into royal and noble families across the continent, tying them together and earning her the nickname "the grandmother of Europe". After Albert's death in 1861, Victoria plunged into deep mourning and avoided public appearances. As a result of her seclusion, republicanism temporarily gained strength, but in the latter half of her reign, her popularity recovered. Her Golden and Diamond Jubilees were times of public celebration.

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Quentin Bell
Quentin Claudian Stephen Bell (19 August 1910 in London – 16 December 1996 in Sussex) was an English art historian and author.
Bell was the son of Clive Bell and Vanessa Bell (née Stephen), and the nephew of Virginia Woolf (née Stephen). He was educated in London and at the Quaker Leighton Park School.
Principally an artist, as a potter, he was drawn to academia. Bell's biography of his famous aunt, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, 2 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1972), won not only the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, but also the Duff Cooper Prize and the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award. He also wrote several books on the Bloomsbury Group and Charleston Farmhouse.
He later became a lecturer in Art History at the Department of Fine Art, King's College, University of Durham from 1952 to 1959, then professor at Leeds University. In 1964 he was appointed Slade professor of fine art at Oxford University and, in 1965, Ferens professor of fine art at Hull University. He was a professor of art history and theory at the University of Sussex from 1967 to 1975.

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R. S. Thomas
Ronald Stuart Thomas (29 March 1913 – 25 September 2000) (published as R. S. Thomas) was a Welsh poet and Anglican clergyman, noted for his nationalism, spirituality and deep dislike of the anglicisation of Wales. In 1955, John Betjeman, in his introduction to the first collection of Thomas’s poetry to be produced by a major publisher, Song at the Year's Turning, predicted that Thomas would be remembered long after Betjeman himself was forgotten. Professor M. Wynn Thomas said: "He was the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of Wales because he was such a troubler of the Welsh conscience. He was one of the major English language and European poets of the 20th century."
R. S. Thomas was born in Cardiff, the only child of Thomas Hubert and Margaret (née Davis). The family moved to Holyhead in 1918 because of his father's work in the merchant navy. He was awarded a bursary in 1932 to study at Bangor University , where he read Classics. In 1936, having completed his theological training at St. Michael's College, Llandaff, he was ordained as a priest in the Church in Wales. From 1936 to 1940 he was the curate of Chirk, Denbighshire, where he met his future wife, Mildred (Elsi) Eldridge, an English artist. He subsequently became curate at Tallarn Green, Flintshire.

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Radclyffe Hall
Radclyffe Hall (born Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall on 12 August 1880 – 7 October 1943) was an English poet and author, best known for the lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness.
Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born at 'Sunny Lawn', Durley Road, in Bournemouth, Hampshire (now Dorset) in 1880, to a wealthy philandering father and quarrelsome mother. Lonely while growing up (her parents separated when she was a baby and she was virtually ignored by her mother and stepfather), she was educated at King's College London, and then in Germany.
Hall was a lesbian and described herself as a "congenital invert", a term taken from the writings of Havelock Ellis and other turn-of-the-century sexologists. Having reached adulthood without a vocation, she spent much of her twenties pursuing women she eventually lost to marriage.
In 1907 at the Homburg spa in Germany, Hall met Mabel Batten, a well-known amateur singer of lieder. Batten (nicknamed "Ladye") was 51 to Hall's 27, and was married with an adult daughter and grandchildren. They fell in love, and after Batten's husband died they set up residence together. Batten gave Hall the nickname John, which she used the rest of her life.

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Rex Warner
Rex Warner (9 March 1905 – 24 June 1986) was an English classicist, writer and translator. He is now probably best remembered for The Aerodrome (1941), an allegorical novel whose young hero is faced with the disintegration of his certainties about his loved ones and with a choice between the earthy, animalistic life of his home village and the pure, efficient, emotionally detached life of an airman.
He was born Reginald Ernest Warner in Birmingham, England and brought up mainly in Gloucestershire, where his father was a clergyman. He was educated at St. George’s School in Harpenden, and at Wadham College, Oxford, where he associated with W. H. Auden and Cecil Day Lewis, and published in Oxford Poetry. After graduating in 1928, he spent time teaching, some of it in Egypt.
His first collection, Poems, appeared in 1937. He was a contributor to Left Review, and his first novel, The Wild Goose Chase, is in part a dystopian fantasy of a tyrannical government which is overthrown in a heroic revolution. His second novel, The Professor, published around the time of the Nazi Anschluss, is the story of a liberal academic whose compromises with a repressive government lead eventually to his arrest, imprisonment and execution "while attempting to escape"; contemporary reviewers saw parallels with the Austrian leaders Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg. After Why Was I Killed? (1943), Warner abandoned contemporary allegory in favour of historical novels about Ancient Greece and Rome, including Imperial Caesar for which he was awarded the 1960 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

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Richard Aldington
Richard Aldington (8 July 1892 – 27 July 1962), born Edward Godfree Aldington, was an English writer and poet.
Aldington was best known for his World War I poetry, the 1929 novel, Death of a Hero, and the controversy arising from his 1955 Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry. His 1946 biography, Wellington, was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Aldington was born in Portsmouth, the son of a solicitor, and educated at Dover College, and for a year at the University of London. He was unable to complete his degree because of the financial circumstances of his family. He met the poet H.D. in 1911 and they married two years later.
His poetry was associated with the Imagist group, and his poetry, (then unrimed free verse,beautifully cadenced, whereas in later verse the cadences are long and voluptuous, the Imagery weighted with ornament ) forms almost one third of the Imagists' inaugural anthology Des Imagistes (1914). Ezra Pound had in fact coined the term imagistes for H.D. and Aldington, in 1912.

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Richard Ellmann
Richard David Ellmann (March 15, 1918 – May 13, 1987) was a prominent American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959), which is one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century; its 1982 revised edition was similarly recognised with the award of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. A liberal humanist, Ellmann's academic work generally focused on the major modernist writers of the twentieth century.
Ellmann was born at Highland Park, Michigan, the second of the three sons (there were no daughters) of James Isaac Ellmann, lawyer, a Jewish Romanian immigrant, and his wife, Jeanette Barsook, an immigrant from Kiev. He served in the United States Navy during World War II. He studied at Yale University, receiving his B.A. (1939), his M.A. (1941) and his PhD. (1947) for which he won the John Addison Porter Prize. In 1947 he was awarded a B.Litt degree (an earlier form of the M.Litt) from the University of Dublin (Trinity College), where he was resident while researching his biography of Yeats.

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Robert Edric
Robert Edric (born 1956) is the pseudonym of Gary Edric Armitage, a British novelist born in Sheffield.
His trilogy of detective novels, Cradle Song, Siren Song, and Swan Song, also known as the "Song Cycle," are set in the city of Hull.

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Robert Gittings
Robert William Victor Gittings CBE (1 February 1911 – 18 February 1992), was an English writer, biographer, BBC Radio producer, playwright and minor poet. In 1978, he was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Older Hardy.
Born at Southsea, the son of Surgeon-Captain Fred Claude Bromley Gittings and his wife Dora Mary, née Brayshaw, the young Gittings was educated at St Edward's School, Oxford, where he was taught by George Mallaby, and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he arrived in 1930 with a scholarship, gaining a First in 1933. He later wrote the article on George Mallaby in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
While still at school he published poems and thus encountered Christopher Fry, a lifelong friend. At the University of Cambridge, he was encouraged by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, editor of the Oxford Book of English Verse, whose rooms in college were near his, and in 1931 he was awarded the Chancellor's gold medal for English verse.
In 1933, Gittings was elected a research fellow of Jesus College and became a history supervisor in 1938.

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Robert Graves
Robert von Ranke Graves (also known as Robert Ranke Graves and most commonly Robert Graves) 24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985 was an English poet, scholar/translator/writer of antiquity specializing in Classical Greece and Rome, and novelist. During his long life he produced more than 140 works. Graves's poems—together with his translations and innovative analysis and interpretations of the Greek myths, his memoir of his early life, including his role in the First World War, Goodbye to All That, and his pseudo-historical study of poetic inspiration, The White Goddess—have never been out of print.
He earned his living from writing, particularly popular historical novels such as I, Claudius, King Jesus, The Golden Fleece, and Count Belisarius. He also was a prominent translator of Classical Latin and Ancient Greek texts; his versions of The Twelve Caesars and The Golden Ass remain popular today for their clarity and entertaining style. Graves was awarded the 1934 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for both I, Claudius and Claudius the God.

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Robert Henriques
Robert David Quixano Henriques (11 December 1905 - 22 January 1967) was a British writer, broadcaster and farmer. He gained modest renown for two award-winning novels and two biographies of Jewish business tycoons, published during the middle part of the 20th century.
Robert Henriques was born in 1905 to one of the oldest Jewish families in Britain. He was educated at Lockers Park School, Rugby, and New College, Oxford. He joined the Royal Artillery in 1926, and served as a gunner officer in Egypt and the Sudan. A riding accident put him in hospital and caused him to take retirement in 1933.
His book No Arms, No Armour (1939) came out to considerable critical praise. Much of the novel was autobiographical.
When World War II broke out, Henriques was an officer in the Territorial Army. He was immediately called up, and he served with distinction through the war, first in the Royal Artillery, then with the newly-formed Commandos, and finally at the headquarters of Combined Operations. During the course of the war, Henriques rose to the rank of Colonel.

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Robert Skidelsky
Robert Jacob Alexander, Baron Skidelsky FBA (born 25 April 1939 in Harbin, China), is a British economic historian of Russian origin and the author of an award-winning major three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes. He read history at Jesus College, Oxford. He is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick, England.
Skidelsky's parents, Boris Skidelsky and Galia Sapelkin, were British subjects of Russian ancestry, Jewish on his father's side and Christian on his mother's. His father worked for the family firm, L. S. Skidelsky, which leased the Mulin coalmine from the Chinese government. When war broke out between Britain and Japan in December 1941, he and his parents were interned first in Manchuria then Japan, and finally released in exchange for Japanese internees in England. Then he went back to China with his parents in 1947, living for a little over a year in Tientsin (now Tianjin). They left for Hong Kong just before the Communists took the city.
From 1953 to 1958, he was a boarder at Brighton College. He went on to read history at Jesus College, Oxford. From 1961 to 1969, he was successively research student, senior student, and research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. In 1967, he published his first book, Politicians and the Slump, based on his D.Phil dissertation. The book explores the ways in which British politicians handled the Great Depression.

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Robin Lane Fox
Robin James Lane Fox FRSL (born 5 October 1946) is an English historian of classical antiquity, described by Paul Cartledge as "one of our most original, daring and arguably life-enhancing". He is Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at New College, Oxford (of which he is also Garden Fellow and Tutor in Oriental Studies) and Reader in Ancient History, University of Oxford. He is Lecturer in Ancient History at Exeter College, Oxford. He has also taught Greek and Latin literature and early Islamic history, a subject in which he held an Oxford Research Fellowship.
His major publications, for which he has won literary prizes including the James Tait Black Award, the Duff Cooper Prize, the W. H. Heinemann Award and the Runciman Award, include studies of Alexander the Great and Ancient Macedon, Late Antiquity (e.g. on Christianity and Paganism), the Bible and history, and the Greek Dark Ages (e.g. on the relation between Greek Mythology and the myths of the Ancient Near East).
Lane Fox was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, of which he was a Fellow 1970-73. Like his fellow historians Paul Cartledge and Alan Cameron, and philosophers Terence Irwin and John McDowell, he was an undergraduate student of G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, whom he succeeded at New College in 1977 after a lectureship and Fellowship at Worcester College, Oxford. Other important influences on his unusually wide-ranging contributions to the study of ancient history include Louis Robert,Peter Brown,E.R. Dodds,Timothy Barnes, E. J. Bickerman,Martin Litchfield West,Walter Burkert, and his long-standing New College colleague W. G. (George) Forrest.

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Rosalind Belben
Rosalind Belben is an English novelist. She was born in 1941 in Dorset where she now lives. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her novel Our Horses in Egypt won the James Tait Black Award in 2007. Among her other books are Bogies, Reuben Little Hero, The Limit, Dreaming of Dead People, and Hound Music.

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Rose Tremain
Rose Tremain CBE (born August 2, 1943) is an English author.
Rose Tremain was born Rosemary Jane Thomson on August 2, 1943 in London and attended Francis Holland School then Crofton Grange School from 1954 to 1961; the Sorbonne from 1961–1962; and graduated from the University of East Anglia in 1965, where she taught creative writing from 1988 to 1995.
She married Jon Tremain in 1971 and they had one daughter, Eleanor, born in 1972, who became an actress. The marriage lasted about five years. Her second marriage, to theatre director Jonathan Dudley, in 1982, lasted about nine years; and she has been with Richard Holmes since 1992. She lives in Norfolk.
Her influences include William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 1967 novel, 100 Years of Solitude and the magical realism style.
Her novel Music and Silence won the best novel in the 1999 Whitbread Awards, building on the recognition she received in the award of the 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year for her novel Restoration, and the 1992 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Sacred Country. Tremain also won the Prix Femina Étranger in 1994 for Sacred Country. She is an historical novelist who approaches her subjects "from unexpected angles, concentrating her attention on unglamorous outsiders."

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Rosemary Hill
Rosemary Hill is an English writer and historian.
She has published widely on 19th and 20th century cultural history, but she is best known for God's Architect, her multi-award-winning biography of Augustus Pugin. Published in 2007, it won the Wolfson History Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, the Elizabeth Longford Prize, and the Marsh Biography Award. Hill is a trustee of the Victorian Society, sits on the editorial board of the London Review of Books and is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
She is the widow of the poet Christopher Logue, whom she married in 1985.

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Ruth Dudley Edwards
Ruth Dudley Edwards (born 24 May 1944, in Dublin, Ireland) is an Irish historian, crime novelist, journalist and broadcaster. She is a columnist with the Sunday Independent.
Dudley Edwards was born and brought up in Dublin and educated at University College Dublin, Girton College, Cambridge and Wolfson College, Cambridge. Her father was the distinguished Irish historian Professor Robert Dudley Edwards. Her brother Owen Dudley Edwards is a historian at Edinburgh University. She married a fellow UCD graduate, the journalist Patrick Cosgrave in 1965 but they later divorced.
Although she has stated that she is "not in principle against Irish unification", Ms Dudley Edwards has generally been supportive of Unionists in Northern Ireland.Tom Hayden described her as "pro-Loyalist"
Her non-fiction books include An Atlas of Irish History, James Connolly, Victor Gollancz: A Biography (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist 1843-1993, The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions (shortlisted for Channel 4/The House Politico’s Book of the Year) and Newspapermen: Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil King and the glory days of Fleet Street. Her Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (winner of the National University of Ireland Prize for Historical Research), first published in 1977, was reissued in 2006 by Irish Academic Press. In 2009 she published Aftermath: The Omagh Bombings and the Families' Pursuit of Justice a book about the civil case that was won on 8 June 2009 against the Omagh bombers.

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Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (Hindi: अहमद सलमान रुशदी (Devanagari), احمد سلمان رشدی (Nastaʿlīq);

/sælˈmɑːn ˈrʊʃdi/; born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is said to combine magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions and migrations between East and West.
His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the centre of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries, some violent. Death threats were made against him, including a fatwā issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989.
Rushdie was appointed Commandeur dans Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II dubbed him Knight Bachelor for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him thirteenth on its list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.

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Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 [O.S. 7 September] – 13 December 1784), often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson was a devout Anglican and committed Tory, and has been described as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". He is also the subject of "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature": James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson.
Johnson was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, and attended Pembroke College, Oxford for just over a year, before his lack of funds forced him to leave. After working as a teacher he moved to London, where he began to write miscellaneous pieces for The Gentleman's Magazine. His early works include the biography The Life of Richard Savage, the poems "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes", and the play Irene.
After nine years of work, Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755; it had a far-reaching effect on Modern English and has been described as "one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship." This work brought Johnson popularity and success. Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 150 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent British dictionary. His later works included essays, an influential annotated edition of William Shakespeare's plays, and the widely read tale Rasselas. In 1763, he befriended James Boswell, with whom he later travelled to Scotland; Johnson described their travels in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Towards the end of his life, he produced the massive and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, a collection of biographies and evaluations of 17th- and 18th-century poets.

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Sebastian Barry
Sebastian Barry (born 5 July 1955) is an Irish playwright, novelist and poet. He is noted for his dense literary writing style and is considered one of Ireland's finest writers.
Barry's literary career began in poetry before he began writing plays and novels. In recent years his fiction writing has surpassed his work in the theatre in terms of success, having once been considered a playwright who wrote occasional novels.
He has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his novels A Long Long Way (2005) and The Secret Scripture (2008), the latter of which won the 2008 Costa Book of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His 2011 novel On Canaan's Side was longlisted for the Booker.
Barry was born in Dublin. He is the son of the late Irish actress Joan O'Hara. He attended Catholic University School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus.
His academic posts have included Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa (1984), Villanova University (2006) and Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin (1995–1996). Barry started his literary career with the novel Macker's Garden in 1982. This was followed by several books of poetry and a further novel The Engine of Owl-Light in 1987 before his career as a playwright began with his first play produced in the Abbey theater, Boss Grady's Boys in 1988.

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Sid Smith (writer)
Sid Smith (born c. 1949) is an award-winning English novelist and journalist.
Smith was born in Preston, Lancashire, the son of a lorry driver.^{[citation needed]} For seven years he worked in labouring jobs, including dustman, gravedigger and construction worker. Since then he has hitch-hiked 9,000 miles around the US, lived in Italy and Greece, acquired a pilot's licence for paragliders, and been married with full Shinto rites at a shrine in Southern Japan.
Smith came late to literary prominence. He had been a journalist for 17 years, including two years as a sub-editor on The Times, and was already in his 50s when his debut novel Something Like A House was published in 2001. The tale of a British deserter in China at the time of the Cultural Revolution, Something Like A House won critical praise and went on to win both the James Tait Black Award and the Whitbread First Novel Award. What was remarkable about the book was its meticulous evocation of time and place, especially since Smith had never been to China and had written the book entirely from his own research, conducted among other places in the British Library. Smith says that his only previous contact with China had been a "one-hour stopover at Hong Kong airport". He claims that "the only ticket you need is a library ticket". However, his novels portray the gritty details of manual labour, about which he may claim to be knowledgeable.

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Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE MC (8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967) was an English poet, author and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a vainglorious war. He later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the "Sherston Trilogy".
Siegfried Sassoon was born and grew up in the neo-gothic mansion named "Weirleigh" (after its builder, Harrison Weir), in Matfield, Kent, to a Jewish father and an Anglo-Catholic mother. His father, Alfred Ezra Sassoon (1861–1895), son of Sassoon David Sassoon, was a member of the wealthy Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon merchant family. For marrying outside the faith he was disinherited. His mother, Theresa, belonged to the Thornycroft family, sculptors responsible for many of the best-known statues in London—her brother was Sir Hamo Thornycroft. There was no German ancestry in Siegfried's family; his mother named him Siegfried because of her love of Wagner's operas. His middle name, Loraine, was the surname of a clergyman with whom she was friendly.

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Sir Ronald Ross
Sir Ronald Ross KCB FRS (13 May 1857 – 16 September 1932) was a British doctor who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for his work on malaria. His discovery of the malarial parasite in the gastrointestinal tract of the Anopheles mosquito led to the realization that malaria was transmitted by Anopheles, and laid the foundation for combating the disease.
Ross was born in India, the eldest son of General Sir Campbell Claye Grant Ross of the British Indian Army and Matilda Charlotte Elderton. His grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Ross, had malaria, and the boy resolved to find a cure for the disease. At the age of eight, he was sent to England for his education.
He commenced the study of medicine in London in 1875. He passed his final examination in 1880 and joined the Indian Medical Service in 1881. His first posting was in Madras. He commenced the study of malaria in 1892.
Ross studied malaria between 1882 and 1899. He worked on malaria at the Presidency General Hospital, Calcutta. Ross built a bungalow with a laboratory at Mahanad village, where he used to stay from time to time collecting mosquitoes in Mahanad and adjoining villages and conducting research. In 1883, Ross was posted as the Acting Garrison Surgeon at Bangalore during which time he noticed the possibility of controlling mosquitoes by controlling their access to water.

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St John Greer Ervine
St. John Greer Ervine (1883 - January 24, 1971 in London) was an Irish author, writer, critic and dramatist. He wrote the plays Anthony and Anna in 1926 and The First Mrs. Fraser in 1929. He was born in Belfast, Ireland but moved to London while in his teens. His 1956 biography George Bernard Shaw was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
A recent production of his tragedy Mixed Marriage played at the Finborough Theatre from 4-29 October 2011, to critical acclaim.

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Stanley Baldwin
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, KG, PC, FRS (3 August 1867 – 14 December 1947) was a British Conservative politician, who dominated the government in his country between the two world wars. Three times Prime Minister, he is the only one to serve under three different monarchs (George V, Edward VIII and George VI).
Baldwin first entered the House of Commons in 1908 as the Member of Parliament for Bewdley, and held government office in the coalition ministry of David Lloyd George. In 1922 Baldwin was one of the prime movers in the withdrawal of Conservative support from Lloyd George and became Chancellor of the Exchequer in Bonar Law's Conservative ministry. Upon Bonar Law's resignation in May 1923, Baldwin became Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader. He called an Election on the issue of tariffs and lost the Conservatives' majority, after which Ramsay MacDonald formed a minority Labour government.
After winning the 1924 General Election Baldwin formed his second government, which saw important tenures of office by Sir Austen Chamberlain (Foreign Secretary), Winston Churchill (at the Exchequer) and Neville Chamberlain (Health). That government also saw the General Strike in 1926 and the 1927 Trades Disputes Act to curb the powers of trade unions, although Baldwin was supportive of Labour politicians at Westminster forming minority governments. Baldwin lost the 1929 General Election and his continued leadership was subject to criticism by the press barons Rothermere and Beaverbrook.

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Sue Prideaux
Sue Prideaux is an English novelist and biographer. She has strong links to Norway and her godmother was painted by Edvard Munch, whose biography she later wrote under the title Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream. Prior to taking up writing she trained as an art historian in Florence, Paris and London.

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Tatjana Soli
Tatjana Soli (born Salzburg, Austria) is an American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, The Lotus Eaters (2010), won the James Tait Black Award. Her second novel, The Forgetting Tree, is forthcoming in September, 2012.
She graduated from Stanford University, and the Warren Wilson College with an MFA. She received scholarships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is married and lives in Orange County, California. She teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop.
Her work has appeared in The Sun,StoryQuarterly,Confrontation,Gulf Coast, Other Voices, Inkwell Journal,Nimrod,Third Coast, Carolina Quarterly, Sonora Review,North Dakota Quarterly,Washington Square Review, and Web del Sol.
The Forgetting Tree. New York: St. Martin's Press. 2012. ISBN 978-1-250-00104-7.

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Thomas Cranmer
Thomas Cranmer (2 July 1489 – 21 March 1556) was a leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and, for a short time, Mary I. He helped build a favourable case for Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon which resulted in the separation of the English Church from union with the Holy See. Along with Thomas Cromwell, he supported the principle of Royal Supremacy, in which the king was considered sovereign over the Church within his realm.
During Cranmer's tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury, he was responsible for establishing the first doctrinal and liturgical structures of the reformed Church of England. Under Henry's rule, Cranmer did not make many radical changes in the Church, due to power struggles between religious conservatives and reformers. However, he succeeded in publishing the first officially authorised vernacular service, the Exhortation and Litany.
When Edward came to the throne, Cranmer was able to promote major reforms. He wrote and compiled the first two editions of the Book of Common Prayer, a complete liturgy for the English Church. With the assistance of several Continental reformers to whom he gave refuge, he developed new doctrinal standards in areas such as the Eucharist, clerical celibacy, the role of images in places of worship, and the veneration of saints. Cranmer promulgated the new doctrines through the Prayer Book, the Homilies and other publications.

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Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray (26 December 1716 – 30 July 1771) was a poet, letter-writer, classical scholar and professor at Cambridge University.
Thomas Gray was born in Cornhill, London, the son of an exchange broker and a milliner. He was the fifth of 12 children and the only child of Philip and Dorothy Gray to survive infancy. He lived with his mother after she left his abusive father. He was educated at Eton College where his uncle was one of the masters. He recalled his schooldays as a time of great happiness, as is evident in his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. Gray was a delicate and scholarly boy who spent his time reading and avoiding athletics. It was probably fortunate for the sensitive Gray that he was able to live in his uncle’s household rather than at college. He made three close friends at Eton: Horace Walpole, son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, Thomas Ashton, and Richard West. The four prided themselves on their sense of style, their sense of humour, and their appreciation of beauty.

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Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. While he regarded himself primarily as a poet who composed novels mainly for financial gain, he became and continues to be widely regarded for his novels, such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd. The bulk of his fictional works, initially published as serials in magazines, were set in the semi-fictional county of Wessex (based on the Dorchester region where he grew up) and explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances.
Hardy's poetry, first published in his fifties, has come to be as well regarded as his novels and has had a significant influence over modern English poetry, especially after The Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s cited Hardy as a major figure.

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Thomas Hearne
Thomas Hearne or Hearn (July 1678 – 10 June 1735), English antiquary, was born at Littlefield Green in the parish of White Waltham, Berkshire.
Having received his early education from his father, George Hearn, the parish clerk, he showed such taste for study that a wealthy neighbour, Francis Cherry of Shottesbrooke (c. 1665-1713), a celebrated non-juror, interested himself in the boy, and sent him to the school at Bray "on purpose to learn the Latin tongue." Soon Cherry took him into his own house, and his education was continued at Bray until Easter 1696, when he matriculated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
At the university he attracted the attention of Dr John Mill (1645–1707), the principal of St Edmund Hall, who employed him to compare manuscripts and in other ways. Having taken the degree of B.A. in 1699 he was made assistant keeper of the Bodleian Library, where he worked on the catalogue of books, and in 1712 he was appointed second keeper. In 1715 Hearne was elected Architypographus and Esquire Bedell in civil law in the university, but objection having been made to his holding this office together with that of second librarian, he resigned it in the same year.

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Thomas Madox
Thomas Madox (1666 – 13 January 1727) was a legal antiquary and historian, known for his publication and discussion of medieval records and charters; and in particular for his History of the Exchequer, tracing the administration and records of that branch of the state from the Norman Conquest to the time of Edward II. It became a standard work for the study of English medieval history.
Born in 1666, Madox applied himself at an early age to the study of the common law, and was admitted to the Middle Temple, though he was never called to the bar. He became a sworn clerk in the Lord Treasurer's remembrance office (i.e. official archives), and afterwards joint clerk in the Augmentation Office, which administered the crown estates; first with Charles Batteley, who died in May 1722, and afterwards with John Batteley.
There he pursued his historical researches under the patronage of Lord Somers. He made his first appearance as an author with the publication of Formulare Anglicanum in 1702, concerning ancient charters, which Madox introduced with a learned dissertation on the subject. The principal materials for this work were obtained from the archives of the court of augmentations. It is justly (according to the Dictionary of National Biography) described by Bishop William Nicolson as 'of unspeakable service to our students in law and antiquities'. On the motion of Peter Le Neve, Madox was elected a member of the Society of Antiquaries in January 1707-8 (O.S./N.S.).

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Thomas More
Sir Thomas More (

/ˈmɔr/; 7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535), known by Catholics as Saint Thomas More since 1935, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He was an important councillor to Henry VIII of England and was Lord Chancellor from October 1529 to 16 May 1532. He is commemorated by the Church of England as a "Reformation martyr". He was an opponent of the Protestant Reformation and in particular of Martin Luther and William Tyndale.
More coined the word "utopia" – a name he gave to the ideal and imaginary island nation, the political system of which he described in Utopia published in 1516. He opposed the King's separation from the Catholic Church and refused to accept the King as Supreme Head of the Church of England, a title which had been given by parliament through the Act of Supremacy of 1534. He was imprisoned in 1534 for his refusal to take the oath required by the First Succession Act, because the act disparaged papal power and Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. In 1535, he was tried for treason, convicted on perjured testimony and beheaded.

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Timothy Mo
Timothy Peter Mo (毛翔青) (born 30 December 1950,Hong Kong) is an Anglo-Chinese novelist. Born to a Welsh-Yorkshire mother and a Hong Kong Chinese father, Mo lived in Hong Kong until the age of 10 before he moved to Britain, later studying at St John's College, Oxford.
He self-publishes his books under the label "Paddleless Press".

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Victor Gollancz
Sir Victor Gollancz (9 April 1893 – 8 February 1967) was a British publisher, communist, and supporter of the Soviet Union.
Born in Maida Vale, London, he was the son of a wholesale jeweller and nephew of Rabbi Professor Sir Hermann Gollancz and Professor Sir Israel Gollancz; after being educated at St Paul's School, London and taking a degree in classics at New College, Oxford, he became a schoolteacher. Gollancz was commissioned into the Northumberland Fusiliers in October 1915, although he did not see active service. In March 1916 he transferred to Repton School Junior Officers' Training Corps. Gollancz proved to be an innovative and inspirational teacher, he introduced the first civics class to be taught at an English public school and many of his students went on to become teachers themselves, including James Harford and James Darling. In 1917 he became involved in the Reconstruction Committee, an organisation that was making plans for post-war Britain. There he met Ernest Benn, who hired him to work in the publishing business. Starting with magazines, Gollancz then brought out a series of art books, after which he started signing novelists.

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Victoria Glendinning
The Hon. Victoria Glendinning, CBE (23 April 1937), is a British biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist; she is an Honorary Vice-President of English PEN, a winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was awarded a CBE in 1998 and is Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature.
She was born in Sheffield to a Quaker family. Her father was the banker Frederic Seebohm (created a life peer as The Rt. Hon. The Baron Seebohm in April 1972), while her great-grandfather was the great economic historian, also called Frederic Seebohm. Glendinning grew up near York and after attending Millfield School in Somerset, went up to Oxford to study modern languages. In the second year of her degree, she married one of her Spanish lecturers, Professor Nigel Glendinning in 1958. They divorced in 1981. Her second husband Terence de Vere White died of Parkinson's disease in 1994 and in 1996 she married Kevin O'Sullivan. She had four sons (before she was 28), including Matthew Glendinning, with whom she coauthored the book Sons and Mothers, and the mathematician Paul Glendinning. Another son, Simon Glendinning, lectures in European Philosophy at the London School of Economics having previously taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury.

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Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf (/ˈwʊlf/; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882 to Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson).
Virginia's father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer. He was the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, a work that would influence Woolf's later experimental biographies.
Virginia's mother Julia Stephen (1846–1895) was a renowned beauty, born in India to Dr. John and Maria Pattle Jackson. She was also the niece of Julia Margaret Cameron née Pattle, the famous photographer. Julia moved to England with her mother, where she served as a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones.

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W. E. Henley
William Ernest Henley (23 August 1849 – 11 July 1903) was an English poet, critic and editor, best remembered for his 1875 poem "Invictus".
Henley was born in Gloucester and was the eldest of a family of six children, five sons and a daughter. His father, William, was a bookseller and stationer who died in 1868 and was survived by his young children and creditors. His mother, Mary Morgan, was descended from the poet and critic, Joseph Warton. From 1861–67 Henley was a pupil at the Crypt Grammar School (founded 1539).
A Commission had attempted recently to revive the school by securing the brilliant and academically distinguished T. E. Brown (1830–1897) as headmaster. Brown's appointment was relatively brief (c.1857–63) but was a "revelation" for Henley because it introduced him to a poet and "man of genius—the first I'd ever seen". This was the start of a lifelong friendship and Henley wrote an admiring obituary to Brown in the New Review (December 1897): "He was singularly kind to me at a moment when I needed kindness even more than I needed encouragement".

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Walter de la Mare
Walter John de la Mare OM, CH (/ˈdɛləˌmɛər/; 25 April 1873 – 22 June 1956) was an English poet, short story writer and novelist, probably best remembered for his works for children and the poem "The Listeners".
He was born in Kent (at 83 Maryon Road, Charlton, now part of the Royal Borough of Greenwich), descended from a family of French Huguenots, and was educated at St Paul's Cathedral School.
His first book, Songs of Childhood, was published under the name Walter Ramal. He worked in the statistics department of the London office of Standard Oil for eighteen years while struggling to bring up a family, but nevertheless found enough time to write, and, in 1908, through the efforts of Sir Henry Newbolt he received a Civil List pension which enabled him to concentrate on writing.
De la Mare also wrote some subtle psychological horror stories; "Seaton's Aunt" and "Out of the Deep" are noteworthy examples. His 1921 novel Memoirs of a Midget won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

wn.com/Walter_de_la_Mare

William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats (

/ˈjeɪts/ YAYTS; 13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honoured for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). Yeats was a very good friend of Indian Bengali poet Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

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William Dugdale
Sir William Dugdale (12 September 1605 – 10 February 1686) was an English antiquary and herald. As a scholar he was influential in the development of medieval history as an academic subject.
He was born at Shustoke, near Coleshill, Warwickshire, where his father was steward to the local landowner, and he was educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry. In 1623 he married Margaret Huntbach (1607-1681), with whom he had nineteen children. In 1625, the year after his father's death, he purchased the manor of Blyth, near Shustoke. During an enclosure dispute with a neighbour a few years later he met the Leicestershire antiquary William Burton, who acted as arbitrator. He became involved in transcribing documents and collecting church notes and met other Midlands antiquaries such as Sir Symon Archer (1581–1662) and Thomas Habington. He began working with Archer on the history of Warwickshire and their research led them to the archives of public records in London. There he met Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Henry Spelman, Sir Simonds d'Ewes and Sir Edward Dering. Hatton provided him with hospitality and became his principal patron.

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William Golding
Sir William Gerald Golding (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) was a British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, best known for his novel Lord of the Flies. He was also awarded the Booker Prize for literature in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book of the trilogy To the Ends of the Earth.
In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
William Golding was born in his grandmother's house, 47 Mountwise, Newquay, Cornwall and he spent many childhood holidays there. He grew up at his family home in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father (Alec Golding) was a science master at Marlborough Grammar School (1905 to retirement). Alec Golding was a socialist with a strong commitment to scientific rationalism, and the young Golding and his elder brother Joseph attended the school where his father taught. His mother, Mildred (Curnroe), kept house at 29, The Green, Marlborough, and supported the moderate campaigners for female suffrage. In 1930 Golding went to Oxford University as an undergraduate at Brasenose College, where he read Natural Sciences for two years before transferring to English Literature.

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William Harvey
William Harvey (1 April 1578 – 3 June 1657) was an English physician who was the first person to describe completely and in detail the systemic circulation and properties of blood being pumped to the body by the heart, although blood circulation was described by Ibn al-Nafis earlier in his Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna's Canon (1242). After his death the William Harvey Hospital was constructed in the town of Ashford, several miles from his birthplace of Folkestone.
Harvey's father: Tom Harvey, was a jurat of Folkestone where he served the office of mayor in 1600. Records and personal descriptions delineate him as an overall calm, diligent and intelligent man whose "sons... revered, consulted and implicitly trusted in him... (they) made their father the treasurer of their wealth when they acquired great estates...(He) kept, employed and improved their gainings to their great advantage." Thomas Harvey's portrait can still be seen in the central panel of a wall of the dining-room at Rolls Park, Chigwell, in Essex.

wn.com/William_Harvey

William the Silent
William I, Prince of Orange (24 April 1533 – 10 July 1584), also widely known as William the Silent (Dutch: Willem de Zwijger), or simply William of Orange (Dutch: Willem van Oranje), was the main leader of the Dutch revolt against the Spanish that set off the Eighty Years' War and resulted in the formal independence of the United Provinces in 1648. He was born in the House of Nassau as Count of Nassau-Dillenburg. He became Prince of Orange in 1544 and is thereby the founder of the branch House of Orange-Nassau.
A wealthy nobleman, William originally served the Habsburgs as a member of the court of Margaret of Parma, governor of the Spanish Netherlands. Unhappy with the centralisation of political power away from the local estates and with the Spanish persecution of Dutch Protestants, William joined the Dutch uprising and turned against his former masters. The most influential and politically capable of the rebels, he led the Dutch to several successes in the fight against the Spanish. Declared an outlaw by the Spanish king in 1580, he was assassinated by Balthasar Gérard (also written as 'Gerardts') in Delft four years later.

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William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.
Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years which he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.
The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland—part of the scenic region in northwest England, the Lake District. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the eldest, who became a lawyer; John, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805 when the ship of which he was Master, the Earl of Abergavenny, was wrecked off the south coast of England; and Christopher, the youngest, who entered the Church and rose to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Their father was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the small town. Wordsworth, as with his siblings, had little involvement with their father, and they would be distant from him until his death in 1783.

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Winifred Gérin
Winifred Eveleen Gérin, OBE (7 October 1901 – 28 June 1981) was an English biographer born in Hamburg. She is best known as a biographer of the Brontë sisters and their brother Branwell, whose lives she researched extensively. Charlotte Brontë: the Evolution of Genius (1967) is regarded as her seminal work and received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize and the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann prize.

wn.com/Winifred_Gérin

Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947. In his lifetime, he published just one book review, one article, a children's dictionary, and the 75-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). In 1999, his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953) was ranked as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy, standing out as "...the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations".Bertrand Russell described him as "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating".
Born in Vienna into one of Europe's wealthiest families, he gave away his entire inheritance. Three of his brothers committed suicide, with Ludwig contemplating it too. He left academia several times: serving as an officer on the frontline during World War I, where he was decorated a number of times for his courage; teaching in schools in remote Austrian villages, where he encountered controversy for hitting children when they made mistakes in mathematics; and working during World War II as a hospital porter in London, where he told patients not to take the drugs they were prescribed, and where no-one knew he was one of the world's most famous philosophers. He described philosophy, however, as "the only work that gives me real satisfaction."

wn.com/Wittgenstein

Wu Cheng'en
Wu Cheng'en (simplified Chinese: 吴承恩; traditional Chinese: 吳承恩; pinyin: Wú Chéng'ēn; Wade–Giles: Wu Ch'êng-ên, ca. 1500–1582 or 1505–1580), courtesy name Ruzhong (汝忠), pen name "Sheyang Hermit," was a Chinese novelist and poet of the Ming Dynasty, best known for being the attributed author of one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, Journey to the West.
Wu was born in Lianshui, in Jiangsu province, and later moved to nearby Huaian. Wu's father, Wu Rui, had had a good primary education and "shown an aptitude for study," but ultimately spent his life as an artisan because of his family's financial difficulties. Nevertheless, Wu Rui continued to "devote himself to literary pursuits," and as a child Wu acquired the same enthusiasm for literature—including classical literature, popular stories, and anecdotes.
He took the imperial examinations several times in attempt to become a mandarin, or imperial official, but never passed, and did not gain entry into the imperial university in Nanjing until middle age; after that he did become an official and had postings in both Beijing and Changxing County, but he did not enjoy his work, and eventually resigned, probably spending the rest of his life writing stories and poems in his hometown. During this time he became an accomplished writer, producing both poetry and prose, and became friends with several prominent contemporary writers. Wu remained poor throughout his life, however, and did not have any children; dissatisfied with the political climate of the time and with the corruption of the world, he spent much of his life as a hermit.

wn.com/Wu_Cheng'en

Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith (born on 25 October 1975) is a British novelist. To date she has written three novels. In 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors. She joined New York University's Creative Writing Program as a tenured professor on September 1, 2010.
Zadie Smith was born as Sadie Smith in the northwest London borough of Brent – a largely working-class area – to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and a British father, Harvey Smith. Her mother had grown up in Jamaica and emigrated to Britain in 1969. Their marriage was her father's second. Zadie has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers, one of whom is the rapper and stand-up comedian Doc Brown and the other is rapper Luc Skyz. As a child she was fond of tap dancing; as a teenager she considered a career as an actress in musical theatre; and as a university student she earned money as a jazz singer and wanted to become a journalist.
Her parents divorced when she was a teenager. When she was 14, she changed her name to "Zadie". Despite earlier ambitions, literature emerged as her principal interest and would provide a model for her future career.

wn.com/Zadie_Smith

Cormac McCarthy
Born	Charles McCarthy (1933-07-20) July 20, 1933 (age 78) Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, playwright
Nationality	American
Genres	Southern Gothic, Western, Post-apocalyptic
Notable work(s)	Suttree (1979), Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (Border Trilogy), No Country for Old Men, The Road (2006)
Children	Cullen McCarthy, son (with Lee Holleman) John McCarthy, son (with Jennifer Winkley)
Influences Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, MacKinlay Kantor, Flannery O'Connor

Signature
www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/cormacmccarthy/

Persondata
Name	McCarthy, Cormac
Alternative names
Short description	Novelist
Date of birth	1933-07-20
Place of birth	Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.
Date of death
Place of death

Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens speaking in 2007
Born	Christopher Eric Hitchens (1949-04-13)13 April 1949 Portsmouth, England
Died	15 December 2011(2011-12-15) (aged 62) Houston, Texas
Occupation	Writer, journalist, public speaker
Nationality	English American
Citizenship	British and American
Alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford
Subjects	Politics, religion, history, biography, literature
Spouse(s)	Eleni Meleagrou (m. 1981-1989; divorced) Carol Blue (m. 1989-2011; his death)
Relative(s)	Peter Hitchens (brother)
Influences George Orwell,^[1] Leszek Kolakowski, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Eliot, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, John Stuart Mill, Joseph Heller, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Llewellyn, Aldous Huxley, PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Richard Hofstadter, Paul Mark Scott, James Fenton, James Joyce, Albert Camus, Oscar Wilde, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Bertrand Russell, Wilfred Owen, Israel Shahak,^[2] Isaiah Berlin, Émile Zola, W. H. Auden, Susan Sontag^[3]
Influenced Johann Hari,^[4] Martin Amis,^[5]

Signature

Year	Film and/or Television
1984	Opinions: "Greece to their Rome"
1988	Frontiers (TV series)
1993	Everything You Need to Know
1994	Tracking Down Maggie: The Unofficial Biography of Margaret Thatcher
1994	Hell's Angel
1996	Where's Elvis This Week?
1996–2010	Charlie Rose (talk show) (13 episodes)
1998	Princess Diana: The Mourning After
1999–2002	Dennis Miller Live (TV show) (4 episodes)
2002	The Trials of Henry Kissinger
2003	Hidden in Plain Sight
2003–2009	Real Time with Bill Maher (TV show) (6 episodes)
2004	Mel Gibson: God's Lethal Weapon
2004–2006	Newsnight (TV show) (3 episodes)
2004–2010	The Daily Show (TV show) (4 episodes)
2005	Penn & Teller: Bullshit! (TV show)(1 episode, s03e05)
2005	The Al Franken Show (TV show)(1 episode)
2005	Confronting Iraq: Conflict and Hope
2005	Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism
2005–2008	Hardball with Chris Matthews (TV show)(3 episodes)
2006	American Zeitgeist
2006	Blog Wars
2007	Manufacturing Dissent
2007	Question Time (TV series) (1 episode)
2007	Your Mommy Kills Animals
2007	Personal Che
2007	Heckler
2007	In Pot We Trust
2008	Discussions with Richard Dawkins: Episode 1: "The Four Horsemen"
2008	Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
2009	Holy Hell
2009	Presidency
2009	Collision: "Is Christianity GOOD for the World?"
2010	Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune

Persondata
Name	Hitchens, Christopher Eric
Alternative names
Short description	English author, journalist and literary critic
Date of birth	13 April 1949
Place of birth	Portsmouth, England
Date of death	15 December 2011
Place of death	Houston, Texas, United States

Year	Fiction Award	Year	Biography Award
1919	Hugh Walpole, The Secret City	1919	Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (1835-1902) - A Memoir
1920	D. H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl	1920	G. M. Trevelyan, Lord Grey of the Reform Bill
1921	Walter de la Mare, Memoirs of a Midget	1921	Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria
1922	David Garnett, Lady into Fox	1922	Percy Lubbock, Earlham
1923	Arnold Bennett, Riceyman Steps	1923	Sir Ronald Ross, Memoirs, Etc.
1924	E. M. Forster, A Passage to India	1924	Rev. William Wilson, The House of Airlie
1925	Liam O'Flaherty, The Informer	1925	Geoffrey Scott, The Portrait of Zelide
1926	Radclyffe Hall, Adam's Breed	1926	Reverend Dr H. B. Workman, John Wyclif: A Study of the English Medieval Church
1927	Francis Brett Young, Portrait of Clare	1927	H. A. L. Fisher, James Bryce, Viscount Bryce of Dechmont, O.M.
1928	Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man	1928	John Buchan, Montrose^[5]
1929	J. B. Priestley, The Good Companions	1929	Lord David Cecil, The Stricken Deer: or The Life of Cowper
1930	E. H. Young, Miss Mole	1930	Francis Yeats-Brown, Lives of a Bengal Lancer
1931	Kate O'Brien, Without My Cloak	1931	J. Y. T. Greig, David Hume
1932	Helen de Guerry Simpson, Boomerang	1932	Stephen Gwynn, The Life of Mary Kingsley
1933	A. G. Macdonell, England, Their England	1933	Violet Clifton, The Book of Talbot^[6]
1934	Robert Graves, I, Claudius and Claudius the God	1934	J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth
1935	L. H. Myers, The Root and the Flower	1935	Raymond Wilson Chambers, Thomas More
1936	Winifred Holtby, South Riding	1936	Edward Sackville West, A Flame in Sunlight: The Life and Work of Thomas de Quincey
1937	Neil M. Gunn, Highland River	1937	Lord Eustace Percy, John Knox
1938	C. S. Forester, A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours	1938	Sir Edmund Chambers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1939	Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan	1939	David C. Douglas, English Scholars^[7]
1940	Charles Morgan, The Voyage	1940	Hilda F. M. Prescott, Spanish Tudor: Mary I of England
1941	Joyce Cary, A House of Children	1941	John Gore, King George V
1942	Arthur Waley, Translation of Monkey by Wu Cheng'en	1942	Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, Henry Ponsonby: Queen Victoria's Private Secretary
1943	Mary Lavin, Tales from Bective Bridge	1943	G. G. Coulton, Fourscore Years
1944	Forrest Reid, Young Tom	1944	C. V. Wedgwood, William the Silent
1945	L. A. G. Strong, Travellers	1945	D. S. MacColl, Philip Wilson Steer
1946	Oliver Onions, Poor Man's Tapestry	1946	Richard Aldington, A Life of Wellington: The Duke
1947	L. P. Hartley, Eustace and Hilda	1947	Rev. C. C. E. Raven, English Naturalists from Neckam to Ray
1948	Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter	1948	Percy A. Scholes, The Great Dr. Burney
1949	Emma Smith, The Far Cry	1949	John Connell, W. E. Henley
1950	Robert Henriques, Through the Valley	1950	Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale
1951	Chapman Mortimer, Father Goose	1951	Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen
1952	Evelyn Waugh, Men at Arms	1952	G. M. Young, Stanley Baldwin
1953	Margaret Kennedy, Troy Chimneys	1953	Carola Oman, Sir John Moore
1954	C. P. Snow, The New Men and The Masters	1954	Keith Feiling, Warren Hastings
1955	Ivy Compton-Burnett, Mother and Son	1955	R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Thomas Gray
1956	Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond	1956	St John Greer Ervine, George Bernard Shaw
1957	Anthony Powell, At Lady Molly's	1957	Maurice Cranston, Life of John Locke
1958	Angus Wilson, The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot	1958	Joyce Hemlow, The History of Fanny Burney
1959	Morris West, The Devil's Advocate	1959	Christopher Hassall, Edward Marsh
1960	Rex Warner, Imperial Caesar	1960	Canon Adam Fox, The Life of Dean Inge
1961	Jennifer Dawson, The Ha-Ha	1961	M. K. Ashby, Joseph Ashby of Tysoe
1962	Ronald Hardy, Act of Destruction	1962	Meriol Trevor, Newman: The Pillar and the Cloud and Newman: Light in Winter
1963	Gerda Charles, A Slanting Light	1963	Georgina Battiscombe, John Keble: A Study in Limitations
1964	Frank Tuohy, The Ice Saints	1964	Elizabeth Longford, Victoria R.I.
1965	Muriel Spark, The Mandelbaum Gate	1965	Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: The Later Years 1803-1850
1966	Christine Brooke-Rose, Such, and Aidan Higgins, Langrishe, Go Down	1966	Geoffrey Keynes, The Life of William Harvey
1967	Margaret Drabble, Jerusalem The Golden	1967	Winifred Gérin, Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius
1968	Maggie Ross, The Gasteropod	1968	Gordon Haight, George Eliot
1969	Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout	1969	Antonia Fraser, Mary, Queen of Scots
1970	Lily Powell, The Bird of Paradise	1970	Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston
1971	Nadine Gordimer, A Guest of Honour	1971	Julia Namier, Lewis Namier
1972	John Berger, G	1972	Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf
1973	Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince	1973	Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great
1974	Lawrence Durrell, Monsieur: or, The Prince of Darkness	1974	John Wain, Samuel Johnson
1975	Brian Moore, The Great Victorian Collection	1975	Karl Miller, Cockburn's Millennium
1976	John Banville, Doctor Copernicus	1976	Ronald Hingley, A New Life of Chekhov
1977	John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy	1977	George Painter, Chateaubriand: Volume 1 - The Longed-For Tempests
1978	Maurice Gee, Plumb	1978	Robert Gittings, The Older Hardy
1979	William Golding, Darkness Visible	1979	Brian Finney, Christopher Isherwood: A Critical Biography
1980	J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians	1980	Robert B. Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart
1981	Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children, and Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast	1981	Victoria Glendinning, Edith Sitwell: Unicorn Among Lions
1982	Bruce Chatwin, On The Black Hill	1982	Richard Ellmann, James Joyce
1983	Jonathan Keates, Allegro Postillions	1983	Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years
1984	J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun, and Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus	1984	Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life
1985	Robert Edric, Winter Garden	1985	David Nokes, Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed
1986	Jenny Joseph, Persephone	1986	Dame Felicitas Corrigan, Helen Waddell
1987	George Mackay Brown, The Golden Bird: Two Orkney Stories	1987	Ruth Dudley Edwards, Victor Gollancz: A Biography
1988	Piers Paul Read, A Season in the West	1988	Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein, A Life: Young Ludwig (1889-1921)
1989	James Kelman, A Disaffection	1989	Ian Gibson, Federico García Lorca: A Life
1990	William Boyd, Brazzaville Beach	1990	Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens
1991	Iain Sinclair, Downriver	1991	Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin
1992	Rose Tremain, Sacred Country	1992	Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe
1993	Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River	1993	Richard Holmes, Dr Johnson and Mr Savage
1994	Alan Hollinghurst, The Folding Star	1994	Doris Lessing, Under My Skin
1995	Christopher Priest, The Prestige	1995	Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth
1996	Graham Swift, Last Orders, and Alice Thompson, Justine	1996	Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life
1997	Andrew Miller, Ingenious Pain	1997	R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, Volume 1 - The Apprentice Mage 1965-1914
1998	Beryl Bainbridge, Master Georgie	1998	Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More
1999	Timothy Mo, Renegade, or Halo2	1999	Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian
2000	Zadie Smith, White Teeth	2000	Martin Amis, Experience
2001	Sid Smith, Something Like a House	2001	Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Volume 3 - Fighting for Britain 1937-1946
2002	Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections	2002	Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future 1730-1810
2003	Andrew O'Hagan, Personality	2003	Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Volume 2 - The Power of Place
2004	David Peace, GB84	2004	Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography
2005	Ian McEwan, Saturday	2005	Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream (Edvard Munch)
2006	Cormac McCarthy, The Road	2006	Byron Rogers, The Man Who Went into the West: The life of R. S. Thomas (R. S. Thomas)
2007	Rosalind Belben, Our Horses in Egypt	2007	Rosemary Hill, God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain^[8]
2008	Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture	2008	Michael Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History
2009	A. S. Byatt, The Children's Book	2009	John Carey, William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies
2010	Tatjana Soli, The Lotus Eaters	2010	Hilary Spurling, Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China^[9]

Persondata
Name	Berger, John
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	5 November 1926
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death

Persondata
Name	Peace, David
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1967
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death

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