![]() |
Vanora Bennett (born 1962) is a British author and journalist.
Bennett grew up in London, the eldest daughter of the flute player William Bennett and the cellist Rhuna Martin, and read Russian and French at the University of Oxford. She also studied Russian at Voronezh State University in the former Soviet Union and at Le Centre d'Études Russes du Potager du Dauphin, a centre established by White Russian emigres outside Paris, at Meudon.
She has published four historical novels since 2006, a travel book about Russia in 2003, and a non-fiction book about the first Chechen war in 1998. She reported from France and Africa, then spent seven years as a foreign correspondent in Russia and the CIS for Reuters and the Los Angeles Times, [1] before returning to the UK as a leader writer for The Times of London. She left the newspaper in 2004 to write a new book and to study the Middle East. [1]
Bennett won an American Overseas Press Club award in 1997 for her work on Russia, [2] and the British Orwell Prize for journalism in 2004. [3]
Bennett's first novel, Portrait of an Unknown Woman, told the story of the German Protestant artist Hans Holbein painting the family of the English statesman Sir Thomas More, a committed Catholic, at the time of King Henry VIII's decision to take England out of the Church of Rome in the early 1530s. It was shortlisted for the 2007 Authors' Club First Novel Award.
Her novel, Midnight in St Petersburg, set during the Russian Revolution, was published in 2013.
Bennett now lives in London. She is married to the barrister Chris McWatters. They have two children.
Marie Antoinette was the last queen consort of France prior to the French Revolution as the wife of King Louis XVI. Born Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria, she was the penultimate child and youngest daughter of Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Francis I. She married Louis, Dauphin of France, in May 1770 at age 14. She then became the Dauphine of France. On 10 May 1774, her husband ascended the throne and she became queen.
Beverly Atlee Cleary was an American writer of children's and young adult fiction. One of America's most successful authors, 91 million copies of her books have been sold worldwide since her first book was published in 1950. Some of her best known characters are Ramona Quimby and Beezus Quimby, Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, and Ralph S. Mouse.
We is a dystopian novel by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, written in 1920–1921. It was first published as an English translation by Gregory Zilboorg in 1924 by E. P. Dutton in New York, with the original Russian text first published in 1952. The novel describes a world of harmony and conformity within a united totalitarian state. It influenced the emergence of dystopia as a literary genre. George Orwell said that Aldous Huxley's 1931 Brave New World must be partly derived from We, although Huxley denied this. Orwell's own Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was also inspired by We.
Michael Hague is an American illustrator, primarily of children's fantasy books.
Andrew Pyper is a Canadian author.
Third Girl is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in November 1966 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company the following year. The UK edition retailed at eighteen shillings (18/-) and the US edition at $4.50.
Lisa Anne Jardine was a British historian of the early modern period.
Francis Manning Marlborough Pryor is an English archaeologist specialising in the study of the Bronze and Iron Ages in Britain. He is best known for his discovery and excavation of Flag Fen, a Bronze Age archaeological site near Peterborough, as well as for his frequent appearances on the Channel 4 television series Time Team.
The Ballets Russes was an itinerant ballet company begun in Paris that performed between 1909 and 1929 throughout Europe and on tours to North and South America. The company never performed in Russia, where the Revolution disrupted society. After its initial Paris season, the company had no formal ties there.
Lynne Reid Banks was a British author of books for children and adults, including The Indian in the Cupboard, which has sold over 15 million copies and has been successfully adapted to film. Her first novel, The L-Shaped Room, published in 1960, was an instant and lasting best seller. It was later made into a movie of the same name and led to two sequels, The Backward Shadow and Two is Lonely. Banks also wrote a biography of the Brontë family, entitled Dark Quartet, and a sequel about Charlotte Brontë, Path to the Silent Country.
Marilyn Singer is an author of children's books in a wide variety of genres, including fiction and non-fiction picture books, juvenile novels and mysteries, young adult fantasies, and poetry. Some of her poems are written as reverso poems.
Fleur Fenton Cowles was an American writer, editor and artist best known as the creative force behind the short-lived Flair magazine.
Shadow of a Dark Queen is a fantasy novel by American writer Raymond E. Feist. It is the first book in The Serpentwar Saga and was first published in June 1994. It was followed by Rise of a Merchant Prince which was published in 1995.
Barathea, sometimes spelled barrathea, is a soft fabric, with a broken twill weft rib, giving a surface that is lightly pebbled or ribbed, with the effect of a twill running both left and right. Originally developed as a cloth for mourning clothes in the 1840s, it took several decades to become popular for other purposes, due to its association with bereavement.
Marie-Eugène-Melchior, vicomte de Vogüé was a French diplomat, Orientalist, travel writer, archaeologist, philanthropist and literary critic.
Marina Andreevna Kozlovskaya was a Soviet and Russian painter who lived and worked in Leningrad – Saint Petersburg, regarded as one of the leading representatives of the Leningrad school of painting, most famous for her landscape paintings.
Efim Etkind was a Soviet philologist and translation theorist. In the 1960s and 1970s he was a dissident; from 1974 he lived in France.
Beth Gutcheon is a best-selling American author who has written ten novels and two quilting books.
The Flashman Papers is a series of novels and short stories written by George MacDonald Fraser, the first of which was published in 1969. The books centre on the exploits of the fictional protagonist Harry Flashman. He is a cowardly British soldier, rake and cad who is placed in a series of real historical incidents between 1839 and 1894. While the incidents and much of the detail in the novels have a factual background, Flashman's actions in the stories are either fictional, or Fraser uses the actions of unidentified individuals and assigns them to Flashman. Flashman is a character in the 1857 novel by Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days; Hughes' version of the character is a bully at Rugby School who is expelled for drunkenness. The character was then developed by Fraser, and appeared in the 1969 novel Flashman. Fraser went on to write a total of eleven novels and one collection of short stories featuring the character.
Dorothea Olivia Benton Frank was a best-selling American novelist. Her novels, including Porch Lights and By Invitation Only, are set in South Carolina.