Nigel Cliff | |
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Born | Manchester, England | 26 December 1969
Education | Winchester College Harris Manchester College, Oxford |
Occupations |
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Spouse | |
Children | 1 son |
Nigel Cliff (born 26 December 1969) is a British biographer, historian, translator and critic. In 2022 Oxford University awarded Cliff the degree of Doctor of Letters in recognition of a body of work of international importance. [1]
Born in Manchester, Cliff was educated on scholarships at Winchester College and Harris Manchester College, Oxford University, where he gained a first-class degree and was awarded the Beddington Prize for English Literature. [2] He has been a film and theatre critic for The Times , a contributor to The Economist , [3] a columnist for Dajia, the online magazine of Tencent, [4] and a reviewer for The New York Times Book Review. [5] Cliff has lectured at Oxford University, [6] the Harry Ransom Center [7] and the British Library [8] and is a regular guest on television and radio programmes including Start the Week [9] and MSNBC's Morning Joe. [10] He was a fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford, from 2016 to 2021 and a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund from 2017 to 2019. [11] He also runs a ballet company [12] and has produced shows for the Barbican Centre and the Bolshoi Theatre. [13]
Cliff's first book, The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-century America, was published in the United States by Random House in 2007. Centring on a feud between leading Shakespearean actors William Charles Macready and Edwin Forrest that led to the deadly Astor Place Riot of 1849, it dramatises the birth of a distinctly American entertainment industry and demonstrates the centrality of Shakespeare to nineteenth-century American identity.
Writing in the London Review of Books, Michael Dobson called the book 'wonderful... a brilliant debut... both enthralling and scholarly." [14] In the Los Angeles Times , Phillip Lopate called it 'Brilliantly engrossing... exemplary... engaging, worldly, fluent... crammed with entertaining nuggets.'. [15] The book was a Washington Post Book of the Year [16] and was a finalist for the National Award for Arts Writing. [17] Cliff wrote the adapted screenplay for Muse Productions. [18]
Cliff's second book was Holy War: How Vasco da Gama's Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries-old Clash of Civilisations (Harper, 2011). [19] It was subsequently issued as The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco da Gama by Harper Perennial in 2012. [20] The book was published under the latter name by Atlantic in the UK [21] and under the former name in Portugal, Brazil, Japan, Russia, Turkey, Poland, China and Taiwan. [22] The book was a New York Times Notable Book [23] and was shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize [24] and the Mountbatten Award. [25] In the New York Times Eric Ormsby wrote: "Cliff has a novelist's gift for depicting character." [26] In The Sunday Times James McConnachie called the book 'stirringly epic...[a] thrilling narrative." [27]
Cliff's third book was a new translation and critical edition of Marco Polo's Travels for Penguin Classics, which was released in the UK and U.S. in 2015. For this first all-new translation in a half-century, he went back to the original texts in French, Latin and Italian. [28]
Cliff's fourth book, Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story - How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War, was published by Harper in September 2016 [29] and subsequently in multiple translations. The Boston Globe named it a Book of the Year. In January 2017 it was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. [30] The book won Nautilus Gold And Silver Awards. [31]
Cliff married the ballerina Viviana Durante in June 2009. [32] They have a son, and live in London. [33]
D. Vasco da Gama, 1st Count of Vidigueira, was a Portuguese explorer and nobleman who was the first European to reach India by sea.
The PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize is awarded to the best work of non-fiction of historical content covering a period up to and including World War II, and published in the year of the award. The books are to be of high literary merit, but not primarily academic. The prize is organized by the English PEN. Marjorie Hessell-Tiltman was a member of PEN during the 1960s and 1970s; on her death in 1999 she bequeathed £100,000 to the PEN Literary Foundation to found a prize in her name. Each year's winner receives £2,000.
Os Lusíadas, usually translated as The Lusiads, is a Portuguese epic poem written by Luís Vaz de Camões and first published in 1572. It is widely regarded as the most important work of Portuguese-language literature and is frequently compared to Virgil's Aeneid. The work celebrates the discovery of a sea route to India by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama (1469–1524). The ten cantos of the poem are in ottava rima and total 1,102 stanzas.
The Vasco da Gama Bridge is a cable-stayed bridge flanked by viaducts that spans the Tagus River in Parque das Nações in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal.
Vasco da Gama is a cruise ship operated by German cruise line Nicko Cruises. Completed in 1993, she previously sailed for Holland America Line as MS Statendam, for P&O Cruises Australia as Pacific Eden and for Cruise & Maritime Voyages as Vasco da Gama. In 2020, following CMV's filing for administration, she was sold by CW Kellock & Co Ltd. at auction to Mystic Cruises' parent company, Mystic Invest for US$10,187,000.
Abraham Zacuto was a Castilian astronomer, astrologer, mathematician, rabbi and historian who served as Royal Astronomer to King John II of Portugal.
Amanda Lucy Foreman is a British-American biographer and historian. Her books include Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, A World on Fire, and The World Made by Women. She also wrote and starred in a four-part documentary regarding the role of women in society, entitled The Ascent of Woman. Currently, she is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal bi-weekly 'Historically Speaking' and an Honorary Research Senior Fellow in the History Department at the University of Liverpool.
Aḥmad ibn Mājid, also known as the "Arab Admiral" and the "Lion of the Sea", was an Arab navigator and cartographer born c. 1432 in Julfar, the present-day Ras Al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates. He was raised in a family famous for seafaring; at the age of seventeen he was able to navigate ships. The exact date is not known, but Ibn Mājid probably died around 1500. Although long identified in the West as the navigator who helped Vasco da Gama find his way from Africa to India, contemporary research has shown Ibn Mājid is unlikely even to have met Da Gama. Ibn Mājid was the author of nearly forty works of poetry and prose.
The Astor Place Riot occurred on May 10, 1849, at the now-demolished Astor Opera House in Manhattan and left between 22 and 31 rioters dead, and more than 120 people injured. It was the deadliest to that date of a number of civic disturbances in Manhattan, which generally pitted immigrants and nativists against each other, or together against the wealthy who controlled the city's police and the state militia.
Vasco da Gama, often shortened to Vasco, is a city in the state of Goa on the west coast of India. It is named after the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama. It is the headquarters of the Mormugão taluka (subdistrict). The city lies on the western tip of the Mormugao peninsula, at the mouth of the Zuari River, about 30 kilometres (19 mi) from Panaji, Goa's capital, 28 kilometres (17 mi) from Margao, the district headquarters and about 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) from Dabolim Airport.
L'Africaine is an 1865 French grand opéra in five acts with music by Giacomo Meyerbeer and a libretto by Eugène Scribe. Meyerbeer and Scribe began working on the opera in 1837, using the title L'Africaine, but around 1852 changed the plot to portray fictitious events in the life of the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama and introduced the working title Vasco de Gama, the French version of his name. The copying of the full score was completed the day before Meyerbeer died in 1864.
Mark Mazower is a British historian. His areas of expertise are Greece, the Balkans, and more generally, 20th-century Europe. He is Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University in New York City.
David Louis Mearns, OAM, is an American-born United Kingdom based marine scientist and oceanographer, who specializes in deep water search and recovery operations, and the discovery of the location of historic shipwrecks.
David Reynolds, is a British historian. He is Emeritus Professor of International History at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge.
Viviana Durante is an Italian ballet dancer, considered one of the great dramatic ballerinas of recent times. She was a principal dancer of The Royal Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Teatro alla Scala and K-Ballet. She is the artistic director of English National Ballet School and of the Viviana Durante Company.
Gaspar da Gama also known as Gaspar da India and Gaspar de Almeida was an interpreter and guide to several fleets of the Portuguese maritime explorations. He was of Jewish origin and was probably born in Poznań in the Kingdom of Poland. In 1498 he was taken captive aboard Vasco da Gama's fleet on its return voyage to Portugal from India. He was known to speak multiple languages including Hebrew and Chaldean, as well as a mixture of Italian and Spanish.
Daniel Gwynne Jones is a British popular historian, TV presenter, and journalist. He was educated at The Royal Latin School, a state grammar school in Buckingham, before attending Pembroke College, Cambridge.
Edward Wilson-Lee is an English literature academic at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and a specialist in the literature and the history of the book in the early modern period.
Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art is a 2020 book by Rebecca Wragg Sykes that examines Neanderthals. The book has three "positive" reviews and eight "rave" reviews according to review aggregator Book Marks.
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