Peter Sellers was an English actor and comedian. He first came to prominence performing in the BBC Radio comedy series The Goon Show. Sellers featured on a number of hit comic songs, and became known to a worldwide audience through his many film roles, among them Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther series.
Louis XVI was the last king of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution.
Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Count of Mirabeau was a French writer, orator, statesman and a prominent figure of the early stages of the French Revolution.
Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, Marquis de La Fayette, known in the United States as Lafayette, was a French aristocrat, freemason, and military officer who volunteered to join the Continental Army, led by General George Washington, in the American Revolutionary War. Lafayette was ultimately permitted to command Continental Army troops in the decisive siege of Yorktown in 1781, the Revolutionary War's final major battle that secured American independence. After returning to France, Lafayette became a key figure in the French Revolution of 1789 and the July Revolution of 1830 and continues to be celebrated as a hero in both France and the United States.
Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore was an English politician, peer and lawyer who was the first proprietor of Maryland. Born in Kent in 1605, he inherited the proprietorship after the death of his father, George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, for whom it had been intended. Calvert proceeded to establish and manage the Province of Maryland as a proprietary colony for English Catholics from his English country house of Kiplin Hall in North Yorkshire.
Clann na Poblachta was an Irish republican political party founded in 1946 by Seán MacBride, a former Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army.
National Velvet is a novel by Enid Bagnold (1889–1981), first published in 1935. It was illustrated by Laurian Jones, Bagnold's daughter, who was born in 1921. The novel tells the story of a teenaged girl who wins a horse racing competition. It was a best-seller, and adapted into a highly successful 1944 film and a 1960-62 television series.
In diplomatic history, the Eastern question was the issue of the political and economic instability in the Ottoman Empire from the late 18th to early 20th centuries and the subsequent strategic competition and political considerations of the European great powers in light of this. Characterized as the "sick man of Europe", the relative weakening of the empire's military strength in the second half of the eighteenth century threatened to undermine the fragile balance of power system largely shaped by the Concert of Europe. The Eastern question encompassed myriad interrelated elements: Ottoman military defeats, Ottoman institutional insolvency, the ongoing Ottoman political and economic modernization programme, the rise of ethno-religious nationalism in its provinces, and Great Power rivalries.
Ian Edmund Bannen was a Scottish actor with a long career in film, on stage, and on television. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), the first Scottish actor to receive the honour, as well as two BAFTA Film Awards for his performances in Sidney Lumet's The Offence (1973) and John Boorman's Hope and Glory (1987).
Water is a 1985 British comedy film directed by Dick Clement and starring Michael Caine. It was scripted by Clement and Ian La Frenais. The plot spoofs elements of the comedies Carlton-Browne of the F.O. (1958) and Passport to Pimlico (1948) and the then-recent invasions of the Falkland Islands and Grenada. Caine plays Baxter Thwaites, a Governor who has 'gone native', and Billy Connolly as local biracial activist Delgado, supported by the last performance of Leonard Rossiter, as Sir Malcolm Leveridge, and one of the last performances of Fulton Mackay.
The Tripartite Convention of 1899 concluded the Second Samoan Civil War, resulting in the formal partition of the Samoan archipelago into a German colony and a United States territory.
Thorley Swinstead Walters was an English character actor. He is probably best remembered for his comedy film roles such as in Two-Way Stretch and Carlton-Browne of the FO.
Carlton Towers in the civil parish of Carlton, 5 miles (8 km) south-east of Selby, North Yorkshire, England, is a very large Grade I listed country house, in the Gothic Revival style, and is surrounded by a 250-acre park.
Luciana Paluzzi is an Italian actress. She is perhaps best known for playing SPECTRE assassin Fiona Volpe in the fourth James Bond film, Thunderball, but she had important roles in notable films of the 1960s and 1970s in both the Italian film industry and Hollywood, including Chuka, The Green Slime, 99 Women, Black Gunn, The Klansman and The Sensuous Nurse.
The Botanic Garden (1791) is a set of two poems, The Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of the Plants, by the British poet and naturalist Erasmus Darwin. The Economy of Vegetation celebrates technological innovation and scientific discovery and offers theories concerning contemporary scientific questions, such as the history of the cosmos. The more popular Loves of the Plants promotes, revises and illustrates Linnaeus's classification scheme for plants.
Marie Lohr was an Australian-born actress, active on stage and in film in Britain. During a career of more than 60 years she created roles in plays by, among others, Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie, Frederick Lonsdale, Somerset Maugham, William Douglas-Home and Noël Coward. She appeared mainly in the West End, but toured the British provinces at intervals throughout her career, appeared in Broadway productions and toured Canada.
"Lot No. 249" is a Gothic horror short story by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle, first published in Harper's Magazine in 1892. The story tells of a University of Oxford athlete named Abercrombie Smith who notices a strange series of events surrounding Edward Bellingham, an Egyptology student who owns many ancient Egyptian artefacts, including a mummy. After seeing his mummy disappear and reappear, and two instances of Bellingham's enemies getting attacked, Smith concludes that Bellingham is reanimating his mummy. Smith confronts Bellingham, who denies this is the case; the next day, Smith is attacked by the mummy and escapes. Smith then forces Bellingham to destroy his mummy and the associated artefacts at gunpoint.
Tenderness is a 2009 crime film directed by John Polson and written by Emil Stern, based on the novel of the same name by Robert Cormier. Starring Russell Crowe, Jon Foster, Sophie Traub, and Laura Dern, the film follows the intersecting lives of three people - a young man just released from jail, a girl looking for escape who becomes fascinated with him and the police detective who is sure the boy will kill again.
The Snake Woman is a low budget black-and-white 1961 British horror film produced by George Fowler and directed by Sidney J. Furie. It stars Susan Travers and John McCarthy. The film was shown on a double bill in the UK with several movies, including re-releases of The Split (1959) and The Vikings (1958), and as the second feature on a double bill with Doctor Blood's Coffin (1961) in the US. The film is set in a small English village at the turn of the 20th century. It tells the story of Atheris, a young woman who has the power to transform from human to cobra, and the Scotland Yard detective sent to investigate a series of deaths, unusual because all the victims died after being bitten by snakes that are not native to the UK.
Finding Carter is an American teen drama television series that aired on MTV for two seasons from July 8, 2014, to December 15, 2015. The series stars Kathryn Prescott as Carter Stevens, a teenage girl whose life is torn apart when she discovers that the woman she thought was her mother, Lori, had in fact abducted her from her family when she was a young child. Cynthia Watros and Alexis Denisof co-star as her true parents, Elizabeth and David Wilson, along with Anna Jacoby-Heron and Zac Pullam as her siblings, Taylor and Grant Wilson. The first season focuses on Carter's return to the Wilson family and her adjustment within friendships and romances, while the second season explores the true motives behind Lori's abduction of Carter as well as focusing on Carter's struggle to belong and as the relationships between her, Taylor and their social group.
