Lucien X. Polastron (born 1944) is a French writer and historian, specializing in paper, books, writing, library history, and Chinese and Arab studies. He has written some 12 French-language books, some of which have been translated into other languages, including English. He lives and works in Paris.The 1992 destruction of the National Library in Sarajevo, the capital city and largest urban center of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was the catalyst for Polastron's research into the destruction of libraries. [1]
Société des Gens de Lettres Prize for Nonfiction/History, 2004, for Livres en feu: Histoire de la destruction sans fin des bibliothéques.
Merlin is a mythical figure prominently featured in the legend of King Arthur and best known as a magician, with several other main roles. The familiar depiction of Merlin, based on an amalgamation of historic and legendary figures, was introduced by the 12th-century British pseudo-historical author Geoffrey of Monmouth and then built on by the French poet Robert de Boron and their prose successors in the 13th century.
Book burning is the deliberate destruction by fire of books or other written materials, usually carried out in a public context. The burning of books represents an element of censorship and usually proceeds from a cultural, religious, or political opposition to the materials in question. Book burning can be an act of contempt for the book's contents or author, intended to draw wider public attention to this opinion, or conceal the information contained in the text from being made public, such as diaries or ledgers.
The Bibliothèque nationale de France is the national library of France, located in Paris on two main sites known respectively as Richelieu and François-Mitterrand. It is the national repository of all that is published in France. Some of its extensive collections, including books and manuscripts but also precious objects and artworks, are on display at the BnF Museum on the Richelieu site.
René Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz, born René Adolphe Schwaller in Alsace-Lorraine, was a French Egyptologist and mystic who popularized the idea of sacred geometry in ancient Egypt during his study of the art and architecture of the Temple of Luxor in Egypt, and his subsequent book The Temple In Man.
Joscelyn Godwin is a composer, musicologist, and translator, known for his work on ancient music, paganism, and music in the occult.
Alain Daniélou was a French historian, Indologist, intellectual, musicologist, translator, writer, and notable Western convert to and expert on the Shaivite branch of Hinduism.
An egregore is a concept in Western esotericism of a non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals.
The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, named after Ashurbanipal, the last great king of the Assyrian Empire, is a collection of more than 30,000 clay tablets and fragments containing texts of all kinds from the 7th century BCE, including texts in various languages. Among its holdings was the famous Epic of Gilgamesh.
Lucien Pissarro was a French landscape painter, printmaker, wood engraver, designer, and printer of fine books. His landscape paintings employ techniques of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism, but he also exhibited with Les XX. Apart from his landscapes, he painted a few still lifes and family portraits. Until 1890 he worked in France, but thereafter was based in Great Britain. He was the oldest son of the French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro and his wife Julie.
Nizas is a commune in the Hérault department in the Occitanie region in southern France.
Pierre Mac Orlan, sometimes written MacOrlan, was a French novelist and songwriter.
The Saint-Germain-des-Prés Library is university library at Université Paris-Cité, located in rue des Saints-Pères, in the Latin Quarter of Paris. It is the heir to the sociology library of the University of Paris, founded in 1946 and one of the most important French libraries concerning sociology, linguistics and science education, and to the science library on the Saint-Germain-dès-Prés campus. The two libraries merged in 2021.
Marie Louise d’Esparbès de Lussan, by marriage vicomtesse then comtesse de Polastron was a French lady-in-waiting, known as the mistress of the comte d’Artois, who later reigned as Charles X of France.
From the time of Muhammad, the final prophet of Islam, many Muslim states and empires have been involved in warfare. The concept of jihad, the religious duty to struggle, has long been associated with struggles for promoting a religion, although some observers refer to such struggle as "the lesser jihad" by comparison with inner spiritual striving. Islamic jurisprudence on war differentiates between illegitimate and legitimate warfare and prescribes proper and improper conduct by combatants. Numerous conquest wars as well as armed anti-colonial military campaigns were waged as jihads.
Fernando Báez is a Venezuelan writer, poet, essayist and "El Director de la Biblioteca Nacional de Venezuela". He is known for his work on the destruction of Iraqi books and art caused by the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The Nishimura Library was a collection of about 10,000 books that were destroyed in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake and following fires in Japan. The books were the former possessions of Nishimura Shigeki before becoming part of the library of Tokyo University and were mainly about Chinese philosophy and history.
Henri-Lucien Cheffer was a French painter, engraver and illustrator. Cheffer was chiefly known for his postage stamp designs, the first of which he designed in 1911. He also designed bank notes for French Algeria, Tunisia, the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies.
Rémi Mathis is a French historian and curator. He was president of Wikimedia France from 2011 to 2014.
Paul Naudon, was a Doctor of Law and a 20th-century French historian, author of several books on freemasonry.