William Topaz McGonagall was a Scottish poet of Irish descent. He gained notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited no recognition of, or concern for, his peers' opinions of his work.
Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954), he published another twelve volumes of fiction in his lifetime. In 1980, he was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first novel in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth. He was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Patrick Oliver Cockburn is a journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent for the Financial Times since 1979 and, from 1990, The Independent. He has also worked as a correspondent in Moscow and Washington and is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books.
Jon Savage is an English writer, broadcaster and music journalist, best known for his definitive history of the Sex Pistols and punk music, England's Dreaming (1991).
The Iron Man: A Children's Story in Five Nights is a 1968 science fiction novel by British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, first published by Faber and Faber in the UK with illustrations by George Adamson. Described by some as a modern fairy tale, it narrates the unexpected arrival in England of a giant "metal man" of unknown origin who rains destruction on the countryside by eating industrial farm equipment, before befriending a small boy and defending the world from a dragon from outer space. Expanding the narrative beyond a criticism of warfare and inter-human conflict, Hughes later wrote a sequel, The Iron Woman (1993), describing retribution based on environmental themes related to pollution.
David William Gentleman is an English artist. He studied art and painting at the Royal College of Art under Edward Bawden and John Nash. He has worked in watercolour, lithography and wood engraving, at scales ranging from platform-length murals for Charing Cross Underground Station in London to postage stamps and logos.
Joan Alison Smith is an English journalist, novelist, and human rights activist, who is a former chair of the Writers in Prison committee in the English section of International PEN and was the Executive Director of Hacked Off.
Ninon is a lightweight, sheer fabric made with plain or leno weaving, it is a suitable material for curtains, evening wear and lingerie. Ninon is made with variety of filament yarns such as polyester, silk, rayon or nylon.
The Last King of Scotland is a novel by journalist Giles Foden, published by Faber and Faber in 1998. Focusing on the rise of Ugandan President Idi Amin and his reign as dictator from 1971 to 1979, the novel, which interweaves fiction and historical fact, is written as the memoir of a fictional Scottish doctor in Amin's employ. Foden's novel received critical acclaim and numerous awards when it was published. In 2006, a loose eponymous film adaptation was released.
The Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain club was started by Stephen Pile in order to bring together people of notable ineptitude so that they could share common experiences of failure. The club had a handbook, The Book of Heroic Failures, which became a best-seller.
Thomas Michael Bower is a British writer and former BBC journalist and television producer. He is known for his investigative journalism and for his unauthorised biographies, often of business tycoons and newspaper proprietors.
Vikram Chandra is an Indian-American writer. His first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book.
Tobias Jones is a British author, journalist, teacher and community-builder. He was educated at Jesus College, Oxford, and then worked at the London Review of Books and the Independent on Sunday. He has written various works of fiction and non-fiction, and appears regularly on British and Italian TV and Radio. He lives in Parma in Italy.
Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet, translator, and critic. The Guardian has described him as "arguably the world's most influential translator of German into English".
Sonnet 30 is one of the 154 sonnets written by the English poet and playwright William Shakespeare. It was published in the Quarto in 1609. It is also part of the Fair Youth portion of the Shakespeare Sonnet collection where he writes about his affection for an unknown young man. While it is not known exactly when Sonnet 30 was written, most scholars agree that it was written between 1595 and 1600. It is written in Shakespearean form, comprising fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, divided into three quatrains and a couplet.
Hugh Walters was a British writer of juvenile science fiction novels from Bradley in the West Midlands region of the United Kingdom.
Leonard Robert Palmer was author and Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford from 1952 to 1971. He was also a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Palmer made some significant contributions to the study of Classical languages, and in the area of historical linguistics.
"Des Dichters Abendgang" is an art song composed by Richard Strauss using the text of a poem with the same name by Ludwig Uhland (1787–1862), the second in his Opus 47 collection, which was published in 1900. Originally written for piano and voice, Strauss wrote an orchestral version in 1918.
Young England was a patriotic melodrama written by Walter Reynolds. It ran for 278 performances in the West End in 1934. The play attracted a cult following, transferring from the Victoria Palace Theatre to the Kingsway Theatre and then to Daly's Theatre.
The Plumb trilogy is a series of three novels written by New Zealand author Maurice Gee: Plumb (1978), Meg (1981), and Sole Survivor (1983). The trilogy follows the lives of a New Zealand family across three generations, exploring the impacts of history, politics and religion on the family, and has been described by New Zealand writers and literary critics as one of the greatest achievements in New Zealand literature.
