Robert Daniel Leaf (February 20, 1936 - October 11, 2005), was an American composer.
Robert Daniel Leaf was born and raised in Lindsborg, Kansas. The son of Bernard and Judith (Valine) Leaf, he attended Luther Academy and College in Wahoo, Nebraska, played trumpet in the Air Force band, and completed his undergraduate degree at MacPhail School of Music in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
After a short career as an elementary school music teacher and a series of records of Children's music; he enrolled in graduate studies in composition at the University of Minnesota. Having nearly completed the program, he left school and began composing hymns and secular choral music from the home he shared with his wife and three children in suburban Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.
He was especially interested in music for hymns and was completing a book on the subject at the time of his death. In particular, he had a belief in the value of hymn as one of the last commonplace examples of community singing outside of 'The Birthday Song' and The National Anthem.
Robert Llewellyn (born 10 March 1956, in Northampton, Northamptonshire, England) is an English actor, presenter and writer. He is best known as the mechanoid Kryten in the hit sitcom Red Dwarf, and for his role as presenter of Scrapheap Challenge.
Llewellyn's first foray into the world of show business started out as a hobby, organising a few amateur cabaret evenings in a riverside warehouse overlooking Tower Bridge in London. The shows were a great success and he eventually helped form an alternative comedy theatre group called the Joeys. Within six months he had stopped working as a shoemaker and started performing professionally with the group alongside Bernie Evans, Nigel Ordish and Graham Allum. The group toured the UK and Europe in the early 1980s with an initial idea of exploring sexual politics between men. Llewellyn wrote much of the material, and also began writing novels. The group split in 1985, having toured for years and done thousands of shows.
Llewellyn's involvement with Red Dwarf came about as a result of his appearance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, performing in his comedy, Mammon, Robot Born Of Woman. The story is about a robot who, as he becomes more human, begins to behave increasingly badly. This was seen by Paul Jackson, producer of Red Dwarf, and he was invited to audition for the role of Kryten.
Robert John Gorham, (born 24 June 1974) known by the pseudonym Rob da Bank, is a British disc jockey. He presents a Friday-night/Saturday-morning show, Rob da Bank, on BBC Radio 1 from 5am-7am, focused on promoting new left field music. Examples of artists featured on his show include Tipper, Moloko and a host of unsigned acts.
Until September 2006, he and Chris Coco were the presenters of the Blue Room on Radio 1. The show had a dedicated following, and was one of the few show-cases for a unique blend of quirky chillout tunes. He also hosted Radio 1's One Music show on Thursday nights, the content of which is more similar to the music played on his current show. Rob Da Bank filled in for John Peel's show for several weeks following his death in 2004. In 2009 he gave BBC Blast an exclusive look behind the scenes of his show. The music played by Rob da Bank on Sunday Best helped launch the "bar culture" (as opposed to "club culture"), which features more relaxed activities than dancing.[dead link]
Robert John Downey Jr. (born April 4, 1965) is an American actor who made his screen debut in 1970 at the age of five, appearing in his father's film Pound, and has worked consistently in film and television ever since. During the 1980s, he had roles in series such as coming of age films associated with the Brat Pack. His role in Less Than Zero (1987) was the first time Downey's acting would be commended by critics. After Zero, Downey was cast in starring roles in bigger films, such as Air America (1990), Soapdish (1991), and Natural Born Killers (1994). He played Charlie Chaplin in the 1992 film Chaplin, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
Between 1996 and 2001, Downey was frequently arrested on drug-related charges. After being released from the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in 2000, Downey joined the cast of the hit television series Ally McBeal playing the new love interest of Calista Flockhart's title character. His performance was praised and received accolades, but his character was written out when Downey was fired after two drug arrests in late 2000 and early 2001. After one last stay in a court-ordered drug treatment program, Downey finally achieved lasting sobriety and his career began to take off again. He appeared in semi-independent films such as The Singing Detective (2003), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), and A Scanner Darkly (2006). He also had supporting roles in the mainstream films Gothika (2003) and Zodiac (2007). In 2004, Downey released his debut studio album The Futurist.
Robert P. Brenner (born November 28, 1943, in New York) is a professor of history and director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA, editor of the socialist journal Against the Current, and editorial committee member of New Left Review. His research interests are Early Modern European History; economic, social and religious history; agrarian history; social theory/Marxism; and Tudor–Stuart England.[1]
He has been one of the contributors in a major Marxist debate, "Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism". In this debate he has sided on the importance of the transformation of agricultural production in Europe, especially in the English countryside, as opposed to the rise of international trade as the main cause of the transition. His influential 1976 article on "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe" set forth the controversial "Brenner thesis." He argued that smallholding peasants had strong property rights and had little incentive to give up traditional technology or go beyond local markets, and thus no incentive toward capitalism