Margaret Alice Murray (13 July 1863 - 13 November 1963) was a prominent British Egyptologist and anthropologist. Primarily known for her work in Egyptology, which was "the core of her academic career," she is also known for her propagation of the Witch-cult hypothesis, the theory that the witch trials in the Early Modern period of Christianized Europe and North America were an attempt to extinguish a surviving pre-Christian, pagan religion devoted to a Horned God. Whilst this theory is today widely disputed and discredited by historians like Norman Cohn, Keith Thomas and Ronald Hutton, it has had a significant effect in the origins of Neopagan religions, primarily Wicca, a faith she supported.

Her work in Egyptology took place largely alongside her mentor and friend, the archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie, whom she worked alongside at University College London. One of the earliest women to "make a serious impact upon the world of professional scholarship," she was also an ardent feminist, being actively involved in the Suffragette movement. From 1953 to 1955, she was the president of the Folklore Society, although since her death various members of the society have attempted to dissociate the organisation from her and the Murrayite theory of the Witch-Cult.

Carl Orff ((1895-07-10)July 10, 1895 – March 29, 1982(1982-03-29)) was a 20th-century German composer, best known for his cantata Carmina Burana (1937). In addition to his career as a composer, Orff developed an influential method of music education for children.

Orff was born in Munich on July 10, 1895. His family was Bavarian and was active in the Army of the German Empire.

Orff started studying the piano at the age of five, and he also took organ and cello lessons. However, he was more interested in composing original music than in studying to be a performer. Orff wrote and staged puppet shows for his family, composing music for piano, violin, zither, and glockenspiel to accompany them. He had a short story published in a children's magazine in 1905 and started to write a book about nature. In his spare time he enjoyed collecting insects.

By the time he was a teenager, Orff was writing songs, although he had not studied harmony or composition; his mother helped him set down his first works in musical notation. Orff wrote his own texts and he learned the art of composing, without a teacher, by studying classical masterworks on his own.

The German educator Gunild Keetman (1904–1990) was the primary originator, along with Carl Orff, of the approach to teaching music known as Orff Schulwerk. Keetman was responsible for most of the actual teaching that was done in the early stages of the movement, perhaps most prominently as the teacher for the radio and television broadcasts that popularized the Schulwerk throughout Germany in the 1950s.

Keetman was a prolific composer, and the five volume "Music for Children" contains many of her pieces. In addition, there are several volumes of music for recorder and percussion.

Gassenhauer, a short piece associated with Carl Orff, is credited to Keetman on at least one recent release of the Schulwerk. It has been used multiple times on television, radio, and in films, including the films Badlands,

Much of the Orff-Schulwerk scholarship prior to the 1990s did not give attention to Keetman's extensive contributions, but that is being remedied through many recent publications (see Additional references). Keetman was normally credited, along with Orff, on LP recordings of the Schulwerk compositions.

Ruth Maria Kelly (born 9 May 1968) is a British Labour Party politician of Irish descent who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Bolton West from 1997 until she stood down in 2010. Previously, she served as the Secretary of State for Transport, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Minister for Women and Equality and Secretary of State for Education and Skills, serving under both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. She is currently an economist working for HSBC.

Kelly was born in Limavady, Northern Ireland. She also lived briefly in the Republic of Ireland before moving to England where she attended Edgarley Hall - the prep school for Millfield School. She was educated at the independent Sutton High School, run by the Girls' Day School Trust (GDST). After being moved up a year and sitting O-levels at Sutton High School at the age of 15, she decided to move back to Ireland to look after her ill grandmother. Her grandmother died after six weeks, but Kelly stayed for a year, living with her aunt and taking A-level French. She returned to England on winning a scholarship to the sixth-form of Westminster School. From Westminster, Kelly went up to The Queen's College, Oxford to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1986, graduating in 1989, and then on to the London School of Economics where she was awarded a MSc degree in Economics in 1992. Kelly taught at University of Navarra and after she joined the Labour Party in 1990, becoming a member of the party's Bethnal Green and Stepney constituency party. She was an economics writer for The Guardian from 1990, before becoming deputy head of the Inflation Report Division of the Bank of England in 1994. She married Derek John Gadd, a local government officer, in 1996, and they have four children.

Margaret Wise Brown (May 23, 1910 – November 13, 1952) was a prolific American author of children's literature, including the books Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, both illustrated by Clement Hurd.

The middle child of three whose parents suffered from an unhappy marriage, Brown was born in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, and in 1923 attended boarding school in Woodstock, Connecticut, while her parents were living in Canterbury. She began attending Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1926, where she did well in athletics. After graduation in 1928, Brown went on to Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia.

Following her graduation with a B.A. in English from Hollins in 1932, Brown worked as a teacher, and also studied art. It was while working at the Bank Street Experimental School in New York City that she started writing books for children. Her first book was When the Wind Blew, published in 1937 by Harper & Brothers.

Brown then went on to develop her Here and Now stories, and later the Noisy Book series while employed as an editor at William R. Scott. Her popular book The Little Fur Family, illustrated by Garth Williams, was published in 1946. Also in 1946, Brown wrote The Little Island and "Little Lost Lamb", both under the pseudonym Golden MacDonald and illustrated by Leonard Weisgard. The former won a Caldecott Honor recognition in 1946 and the latter the Caldecott Medal in 1947. In the early 1950s, she wrote several books for the Little Golden Books series including The Color Kittens, Mister Dog and Scuppers The Sailor Dog.