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]
Vasco da Gama, 1st Count of Vidigueira, was a Portuguese explorer and the first European to reach India by sea.
The Hessell-Tiltman History 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. It is the second longest bridge in Europe, after the Crimean Bridge, the longest one in the European Union. It was built to alleviate the congestion on Lisbon's 25 de Abril Bridge, and eliminate the need for traffic between the country's northern and southern regions to pass through the capital city.
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.
Aḥmad ibn Mājid, known as "Amīr al-Baḥr al-ʿArabī" in Arabic, “Prince of the Sea” and known also as the Lion of the Sea, was an Arab navigator and cartographer born c. 1432 in Julfar,. 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.
Vasco da Gama was a South African football club based in the Parow suburb of the city of Cape Town that played in the National First Division. Coming from the lower ranks, the club had its roots entrenched in the local Portuguese South African community, and adopted its name, crest and team colours from the Brazilian club Club de Regatas Vasco da Gama.
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, M.Sc., 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.
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.
The 4th Portuguese India Armada was assembled in 1502 on the order of King Manuel I of Portugal and placed under the command of D. Vasco da Gama. It was Gama's second trip to India. The fourth of some thirteen Portuguese India Armadas, it was designed as a punitive expedition, targeting Calicut, to avenge the travails of the 2nd Armada and the massacre of the Portuguese factory in 1500. A feeling of vengeance drove the expedition.
Daniel Gwynne Jones is a British historian, TV presenter, and journalist. He was educated at The Royal Latin School, a state grammar school in Buckingham, before attending Pembroke College, Cambridge.
The Guntakal–Vasco da Gama section, or Mormugao Railway, is a railway line connecting the town of Guntakal in Andhra Pradesh and Vasco da Gama in Goa, India. It traverses the Western Ghats and covers a distance of 457 kilometres (284 mi) across Goa, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.
Kenya–Portugal relations are bilateral relations between Kenya and Portugal. Both nations have had relations dating back 500 years since the Age of Discovery.
Maurício Ferreira de Souza, known as Maurício Souza, is a Brazilian professional football manager and former football and futsal player.
Andrey Nascimento dos Santos is a Brazilian professional footballer who plays as a central midfielder for Campeonato Brasileiro Série A club Vasco da Gama, on loan from Premier League club Chelsea, and the Brazil national team.
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