Peter Mason | |
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Born | 1963 (age 60–61) |
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Nationality | English |
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Peter Mason (born 1963) is an English journalist and author.
His books include biographies of two great West Indies cricketers-turned-statesmen, Learie Constantine and Clyde Walcott, Bacchanal! (a study of Trinidad Carnival) and The Brown Dog Affair , about the "brown dog riots" of Edwardian London, which was made into a BBC Radio 4 play, The Strange Affair of the Brown Dog. [1]
Among his other works are Jamaica in Focus, a study of the culture, politics and economics of Jamaica, and a history of Southend United football club.
As a journalist, Mason's longest running association has been with The Guardian , [2] for whom he has been a staffer on the foreign and sports desks and for whom he is a regular obituarist. He is also an arts critic for the Morning Star newspaper. [3]
In the late 1980s, Mason was among a small coterie of British journalists focusing on writing about green issues, in particular on the role of business in fostering environmental and social change. In the early 1990s, he was news editor of Green magazine, the UK’s first publication for green consumers, and in 1999, with its former editor Alistair Townley, [4] he co-founded Ethical Performance, an international publication on corporate social responsibility. He was its editor and managing editor for 12 years.
With Football Factory author John King, Mason was also co-founder of Two Sevens [5] small press magazine, which included one of the first ever interviews with Irvine Welsh.
Mason has written extensively on the Caribbean as well as on reggae and calypso. For a number of years he was a contributor to the weekly Black Echoes music newspaper (now known as Echoes ).
In 2024, Mason abridged, edited and wrote an introduction to Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), excising most of the scientific content to recreate the book purely as a piece of travel literature.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott OM was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
Sir Frank Mortimer Maglinne Worrell, sometimes referred to by his nickname of Tae, was a Barbadian West Indies cricketer and Jamaican senator. A stylish right-handed batsman and useful left-arm seam bowler, he became famous in the 1950s as the second black captain of the West Indies cricket team. Along with Everton Weekes and Clyde Walcott, he formed what was known as "The Three Ws" of the West Indian cricket. He was the first batter to have been involved in two 500-run partnerships and remained the only one until Ravindra Jadeja emulated him in the 2010s.
Learie Nicholas Constantine, Baron Constantine was a Trinidadian cricketer, lawyer and politician who served as Trinidad and Tobago's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and became the UK's first black peer. He played 18 Test matches for the West Indies before the Second World War and took the team's first wicket in Test cricket. An advocate against racial discrimination, in later life he was influential in the passing of the 1965 Race Relations Act in Britain. He was knighted in 1962 and made a life peer in 1969.
Sir Everton DeCourcy Weekes, KCMG, GCM, OBE was a cricketer from Barbados. A right-handed batsman, he was known as one of the hardest hitters in world cricket. Weekes holds the record for the most consecutive Test hundreds, with five. Along with Frank Worrell and Clyde Walcott, he formed what was known as "The Three Ws" of the West Indies cricket team. Weekes played in 48 Test matches for the West Indies cricket team from 1948 to 1958. Weekes occasionally donned the wicketkeeping gloves as well. He continued to play first-class cricket until 1964, surpassing 12,000 first-class runs in his final innings. As a coach he was in charge of the Canadian team at the 1979 Cricket World Cup, and he was also a commentator and international match referee.
Falmouth is the chief town and capital of the parish of Trelawny in Jamaica. It is situated on Jamaica's north coast 29 km east of Montego Bay. It is noted for being one of the Caribbean's best-preserved Georgian towns.
Leslie George Hylton was a Jamaican cricketer, a right-arm bowler and useful lower-order batsman who played in six Test matches for the West Indies between 1935 and 1939. In May 1955 he was hanged for the murder of his wife, whom he had shot in a jealous rage a year earlier.
Caribbean literature is the literature of the various territories of the Caribbean region. Literature in English from the former British West Indies may be referred to as Anglo-Caribbean or, in historical contexts, as West Indian literature. Most of these territories have become independent nations since the 1960s, though some retain colonial ties to the United Kingdom. They share, apart from the English language, a number of political, cultural, and social ties which make it useful to consider their literary output in a single category. Note that other non-independent islands may include the Caribbean unincorporated territories of the United States, however literature from this region has not yet been studied as a separate category and is independent from West Indian literature. The more wide-ranging term "Caribbean literature" generally refers to the literature of all Caribbean territories regardless of language—whether written in English, Spanish, French, Hindustani, or Dutch, or one of numerous creoles.
Edwin Lloyd St Hill was a Trinidadian cricketer who played two Test matches for the West Indies in 1930. His brothers, Wilton and Cyl, also played for Trinidad and Tobago; in addition, the former played Test matches for the West Indies.
Destra Garcia is a Trinidadian musician, singer and songwriter of soca music. She is also known by the mononym Destra. She is one of the most popular female soca artists in the world.
The English cricket team in the West Indies in 1953–54 played five Test matches, five other first-class matches and seven other games, three of them on a two-week stop-over in Bermuda that included Christmas.
Abdhur Rahman Slade Hopkinson was a Guyana-born poet, playwright, actor and teacher.
Kimberly-Ann Robinson-Walcott is a Jamaican poet and editor. She has been the editor-in-chief of the Jamaica Journal since 2004 and editor-in-chief of the Caribbean Quarterly since 2010. Robinson-Walcott is the author of a study of the white Jamaican novelist Anthony Winkler, titled Out of Order! (2006).
The English cricket team in the West Indies in 1934–35 was a cricket touring party sent to the West Indies under the auspices of the Marylebone Cricket Club for a tour lasting 2+1⁄2 months in 1934–35. The team played four Test matches against the West Indian cricket team, winning one match but losing two – the first series defeat of an English side by the West Indies.
The West Indies cricket team toured England in the 1939 season to play a three-match Test series against England. England won the series 1–0 with two matches drawn. A total of 25 first-class matches were played and the West Indian side won eight of them and lost six, with the others drawn. The tour was abandoned a few days after the final test match because of the worsening international situation with the Second World War imminent. The last six matches from 26 August to 12 September were cancelled.
The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about vivisection that raged in Britain from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration of University of London medical lectures by Swedish feminists, battles between medical students and the police, police protection for the statue of a dog, a libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice, and the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the use of animals in experiments. The affair became a cause célèbre that divided the country.
The Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society (ADAVS) was an animal rights advocacy organisation, co-founded in England, in 1903, by the animal rights advocates Lizzy Lind af Hageby, a Swedish-British feminist, and the English peeress Nina Douglas-Hamilton, Duchess of Hamilton.
Caribbean Voices was a radio programme broadcast by the BBC World Service from Bush House in London, England, between 1943 and 1958. It is considered "the programme in which West Indian literary talents first found their voice, in the early 1950s." Caribbean Voices nurtured many writers who went on to wider acclaim, including Samuel Selvon, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, John Figueroa, Andrew Salkey, Michael Anthony, Edgar Mittelholzer, Sylvia Wynter, and others.
George Alphonso Headley OD, MBE was a West Indian cricketer who played 22 Test matches, mostly before World War II. Considered one of the best batsmen to play for the West Indies and one of the greatest cricketers of all time, Headley also represented Jamaica and played professional club cricket in England. West Indies had a weak cricket team through most of Headley's playing career; as their one world-class player, he carried a heavy responsibility and the side depended on his batting. He batted at number three, scoring 2,190 runs in Tests at an average of 60.83, and 9,921 runs in all first-class matches at an average of 69.86. He was chosen as one of the Wisden Cricketers of the Year in 1934.
Gordon Rohlehr was a Guyana-born scholar and critic of West Indian literature, noted for his study of popular culture in the Caribbean, including oral poetry, calypso and cricket. He pioneered the academic and intellectual study of Calypso, tracing its history over several centuries, writing a landmark work entitled Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (1989), and is considered the world's leading authority on its development.
Jim Mason is an American lawyer, journalist and animal rights activist.