Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto

Born in 1953, and served as the Prime Minister of Pakistan 1988 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1996. She was the first ever Muslim woman to lead a Muslim country. Early days She was born into a wealthy landholding family in province of Sindh, Pakistan into a family which had an illustrious tradition of political activism. Her Father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had also served as both President as well as Prime Minister of Pakistan while her grandfather Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto was one of the most high profile Sindhi politicians under British India and also served as a ‘dewan’ or the Prime Minister of the state of Junagagh.
Education

Bhutto enjoyed a privileged childhood, and studied at the Jesus and Mary convent school in Murree Hills, before proceeding overseas for higher studies. She was educated at Harvard's Radcliffe College in the United States and at the University of Oxford in England, where she excelled in studies as well as other activities including debating competitions. While at Oxford University she was the first Asian woman to be elected president of the Oxford Union.

Return to Pakistan

After completing her studies she returned to Pakistan in 1977, planning on a career in the foreign service. Her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was Prime Minister at the time. Only weeks after her return military officers led by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in a military coup,a nd arrested her father. Benazir Bhutto spent the next eighteen months in and out of house arrest as she struggled to rally political support to force Zia to drop fallacious murder charges against her father. The military dictator ignored worldwide appeals for clemency and had Zulfikar Bhutto hanged in April of 1979.
Benazir Bhutto's persecution began in earnest after the dismissal of her father's government in 1977 and his execution in 1979 as she intensified her denunciations of Zia and sought to organize a political movement against him. Repeatedly put under house arrest, she was finally imprisoned under solitary confinement in a cell in Sindh province during the summer of 1981. Bhutto described the hellish conditions in her wall less cage in her book "Daughter of the East ":
In her books Daughter of the East, she writes "The summer heat turned my cell into an oven. My skin split and peeled, coming off my hands in sheets. Boils erupted on my face. My hair, which had always been thick, began to come out by the handful. Insects crept into the cell like invading armies. Grasshoppers, mosquitoes, stinging flies, bees and bugs came up through the cracks in the floor and through the open bars from the courtyard. Big black ants, cockroaches, seething clumps of little red ants and spiders. I tried pulling the sheet over my head at night to hide from their bites, pushing it back when it got too hot to breathe."
Released in 1984, she went into exile in Britain until 1986, when martial law was lifted in Pakistan. She returned with a huge crowd numbering in the hundreds of thousands turned out on the streets to greet her, by then the leading symbol of the anti-Zia movement, when she returned to Lahore in April of 1986. Formally elected chair in the following month, Bhutto lost no time in organizing mass protests and civil disobedience campaigns to pressure Zia to relinquish office and call national elections. Bhutto's stirring oratory, familiar name, and striking appearance helped give her a strong mass appeal, but she had to struggle to wrest real power from the PPP's old-guard leadership, members of which were wary of her gender, youth, and political wisdom. Supported by tumultuous crowds, Bhutto again called for fresh elections, resulting in another short prison term that same year. She also had to contend with internal dissension among the anti-Zia forces.
In 1988 Zia was killed in an airplane crash, less than three months after announcing that elections would take place. In the November elections the PPP gained a huge popularity in the National Assembly, and in December 1988 Bhutto, 35 only became prime minister of Pakistan, the first woman to hold this office in any modern Islamic state. During her first term, Her objective was to return Pakistan to civilian rule and oust the men who executed her father, she also started Peoples Program for economic uplift of the masses. Benazir Bhutto lifted a ban on student and trade unions. The PPP. Government hosted the fourth S. A. A. R. C. Summit held in Islamabad, in December 1988.
In August 1990, however, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed her government using controversial powers which were introduced under military government. After the dismissal of her government, her husband, Mr. Asif Ali Zardari was arrested and imprisoned for over two years on a number of up charges. In the next elections, which were disputed her party did not secure enough seats to form government and Bhutto became an opposition leader in the parliament. Subsequent attempts to oust the ruling party resulted in Bhutto’s deportation to the city of Karachi in 1992, and she was temporarily banned from entering Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.
In July 1993, the President of Pakistan dismissed the Government of Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif on corruption charges and called for fresh elections. The Pakistan Peoples Party went to the people in October, 1993 with a new "Agenda for Change". The programme envisaged government at the door-step of the people and priority to the social sectors. Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto was again elected Prime Minister with a broad mandate after achieving strong popular support in all the four provinces of Pakistan .Bhutto's platform has been leftist, including food for the hungry, health care, jobs, slum clearance and a monthly minimum wage. She has been opposed by Islamic fundamentalists who have been suspicious of the PPP because of its alleged leftist.
Due to Benazir’s Personal world popularity, during her term Pakistan’s relation with other countries improved ,her moderate foreign policy had been credited for improving the wrong image of Pakistan around the world ,however domestically she and her party have been widely blamed for excessive corruption.
Benazir again faced trouble from the opposition. In the autumn of 1994, Nawaz Sharif led a "train march" from Karachi to Peshawar. This was followed by general strike on September 20. Two weeks later Nawaz Sharif called a "wheel jam" strike on October 11.
Once again, using the controversial powers given to the President under Article 58-2 B, elected government of Benazir Bhutto was dismissed from office for the second time in late 1996. Once again a a vendetta was launched against Benazir Bhutto in which politically motivated cases were registered against her and her husband Asif Ali Zardari in order to persecute her and put her under pressure. She denounced all charges as politically motivated, and went into self-imposed exile. Since then she 1999 until 18th October 2007, she remained in exile.
Home Coming - Back with her people

On 18th October 2007 Benazir Bhutto ended her exile and returned to Pakistan and it is estimated that she was received by crowds exceeding 3 million people. This was perhaps the most historic gathering of people in Pakistan. The massive support on the street was evidence that she remains as the most popular leader in Pakistan despite a barrage of disinformation campaign against her. She was assassinated on December 27, 2007, after departing a PPP rally in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, two weeks before the scheduled Pakistani general election of 2008 where she was a leading opposition candidate.
She has been mentioned as "The world's most popular politician" in the New Guinness Book of Record 1996. According to The "Times" and the "Australian Magazine" (May 4, 1996) she was one of the 100 most powerful women in the World.

Stephen William Hawking

• Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (was born on 8 January 1942 - 300 years after the death of Galileo in Oxford, England) is a British theoretical physicist. Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is known for his contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity, especially in the context of black holes, and his popular works in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general. These include the runaway popular science bestseller A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times bestseller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.
  His key scientific works to date have included providing, with Roger Penrose, theorems regarding singularities in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes should emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking radiation, or sometimes as Bekenstein-Hawking radiation.His scientific career spans more than 40 years and his books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity and world-renowned theoretical physicist. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.Hawking is disabled by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known in the United States as Lou Gehrig's Disease. The illness has progressed over the years and he is now almost completely paralysed.
  Research fieldsHawking's principal fields of research are theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity.
  In the late 1960s, he and his Cambridge friend and colleague, Roger Penrose, applied a new, complex mathematical model they had created from Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. This led, in 1970, to Hawking proving the first of many singularity theorems; such theorems provide a set of sufficient conditions for the existence of a singularity in space-time. This work showed that, far from being mathematical curiosities which appear only in special cases, singularities are a fairly generic feature of general relativity.
  He supplied a mathematical proof, along with Brandon Carter, Werner Israel and D. Robinson, of John Wheeler’s "No-Hair Theorem" — namely, that any black hole is fully described by the three properties of mass, angular momentum, and electric charge.
  Hawking also suggested that, upon analysis of gamma ray emissions, after the Big Bang, primordial or mini black holes were formed. With Bardeen and Carter, he proposed the four laws of black hole mechanics, drawing an analogy with thermodynamics. In 1974, he calculated that black holes should thermally create and emit subatomic particles, known today as Hawking radiation, until they exhaust their energy and evaporate.
  In collaboration with Jim Hartle, Hawking developed a model in which the Universe had no boundary in space-time, replacing the initial singularity of the classical Big Bang models with a region akin to the North pole: one cannot travel North of the North pole, there is no boundary there. While originally the no-boundary proposal predicted a closed Universe, discussions with Neil Turok led to the realisation that the no-boundary proposal is consistent with a Universe which is not closed also.
  Among Hawking's many other scientific investigations, included are the study of: quantum cosmology, cosmic inflation, helium production in anisotropic Big Bang universes, large N cosmology, the density matrix of the universe, topology and structure of the universe, baby universes, Yang-Mills instantons and the S matrix; anti de Sitter space, quantum entanglement and entropy; the nature of space and time, including the arrow of time; spacetime foam, string theory, supergravity, Euclidean quantum gravity, the gravitational Hamiltonian; Brans-Dicke and Hoyle-Narlikar theories of gravitation; gravitational radiation, and wormholes.

Popular Books

A Brief History of Time, (Bantam Press 1988)

Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, (Bantam Books 1993)

The Universe in a Nutshell, (Bantam Press 2001)

On The Shoulders of Giants. The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy, (Running Press 2002) A Briefer History of Time, (Bantam Books 2005)

Awards

• 1975 Eddington Medal
• 1976 Hughes Medal of the Royal Society
• 1979 Albert Einstein Medal
• 1982 Order of the British Empire (Commander)
• 1985 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society
• 1986 Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
• 1988 Wolf Prize in Physics
• 1989 Prince of Asturias Awards in Concord
• 1989 Companion of Honour
• 1999 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society
• 2003 Michelson Morley Award of Case Western Reserve University
• 2006 Copley Medal of the Royal Society
  
  

Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama (born August 4, 1961) is the junior United States Senator from Illinois and a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.
Born to a black Kenyan father and a white American mother, he lived most of his childhood in Honolulu, Hawaii. From ages six to ten, he lived in Jakarta with his mother and Indonesian stepfather. A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, Obama worked as a community organizer, university lecturer, and civil rights lawyer before running for public office and serving in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. After an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for U.S. Senate in 2003.
The following year, while still an Illinois state legislator, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 with 70% of the vote.As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, he co-sponsored bipartisan legislation for controlling conventional weapons and for promoting greater public accountability in the use of federal funds. He also made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In the current 110th Congress, he has sponsored legislation on lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, and care for returned U.S. military personnel.
Since announcing his presidential campaign in February 2007, Obama has emphasized ending the Iraq War, increasing energy independence, and providing universal health care as major priorities.He married in 1992 and has two daughters. He has written two bestselling books: a memoir of his youth titled Dreams from My Father, and The Audacity of Hope, a personal commentary on U.S. politics.

Education:- Graduated: Columbia University (1983) - Major: Political Science- Law Degree from Harvard (1991) - Major: J.D. - Magna Cum Laude- Attended: Occidental College

Career: U.S. Senator from Illinois sworn in January 4, 2005

Books:- Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)- The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006)- It Takes a Nation: How Strangers Became Family in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina (2006)

R. K. Laxman

Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Laxman (b. 23-10-1924) is an Indian cartoonist, illustrator and humorist. He is widely regarded as India's greatest-ever cartoonist[1] and is best known for his creation The Common Man.

R. K. Laxman was born in Mysore, now a part of the South Indian state of Karnataka. His father was a headmaster and Laxman is the youngest of six boys.One of his elder brothers, Rasipuram Krishnaswami Ayyar Narayanaswami, went on to become one of India's best known English language novelists.
Laxman was engrossed by the illustrations in magazines such as Strand Magazine, Punch, Bystander, Wide World and Tit-Bits, even before he could read. Soon he was drawing on his own, on the floors, walls and doors of his house and doodling caricatures of his teachers at school; praised by a teacher for his drawing of a peepal leaf, he began to think of himself as an artist in the making. Another early influence on Laxman were the cartoons of the world-renowned British cartoonist, Sir David Low (whose signature he misread as "cow" for a long time) that appeared now and then in The Hindu. Laxman notes in his autobiography, The Tunnel of Time:
Laxman was the captain of his local "Rough and Tough and Jolly" cricket team and his antics inspired the stories "Dodu the money maker" and "The Regal Cricket Club" written by his brother, Narayan. Laxman's idyllic childhood was shaken for a while when his father suffered a paralytic stroke and died around a year later, but the elders at home bore most of the increased responsibility, while Laxman continued with his schooling.

After high school, Laxman applied to the JJ School of Arts, Bombay hoping to concenterate on his lifelong interests of drawing and painting, but the dean of the school wrote to him that his drawings lacked, "the kind of talent to qualify for enrollment in our institution as a student", and refused admission. He finally graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Mysore. In the meantime he continued his freelance artistic activities and contributed cartoons to Swarajya and an animated film based on the mythological character, Narada
BeginningLaxman's earliest work was for newspapers & magazines such as Swarajya and Blitz. Whilst still at the Maharaja's College, Mysore, he began to illustrate his elder brother R K Narayan's stories in The Hindu, and he drew political cartoons for the local newspapers and for the Swatantra. He held a summer job at the Gemini Studios, Madras. His first full-time job was as a political cartoonist for the Free Press Journal. He later joined The Indian Express, beginning a career that has spanned for over fifty years.
It is said that R K Laxman started his career as a cartoonist for Koravanji a Kannada humour monthly, published from Bangalore by Dr.Shivaram.
The Times of IndiaLaxman is best known for his daily one panel comic "pocket cartoon" series You Said It, which features The Common Man, and chronicles the state of Indian life. The strip began in 1961.
Other creations
Among his other works, Laxman is known for his distinctive illustrations in several books, most notably for the Malgudi stories written by his elder brother R.K. Narayan. He also created a popular mascot for the Asian Paints group called Gattu. Laxman has also penned a few novels. His cartoons have appeared in Hindi films such as Mr. and Mrs. 55.

Life
Laxman is a resident of both Mumbai and Pune.

Awards

• B.D. Goenka Award - Indian Express


• Durga Ratan Gold Medal - Hindustan Times


• Padma Bhushan - Govt. of India Padma Vibhushan - Govt. of India


• Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts - 1984 Lifetime Achivement Award for Journalism - CNN IBN TV18, 29th Jan 2008.

Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo (1802-1885), novelist, poet, and dramatist, is one of the most important of French Romantic writers. Among his best-known works are The Hunchback of Notre Dame(1831) and Les Misérables(1862).
Victor Hugo was born in Besançon as the son of a army general, who taught young Victor to admire Napoleon as a hero. After the separation of his parents, he was raised and educated in Paris by his mother, where the family settled when Hugo was two. From 1815 to 1818 Hugo attended the Lycée Louis-le Grand in Paris. He began in early adolescence to write verse tragedies and poetry, and translated Virgil. Hugo's first collection of poems, Odes Et Poesies Diverses gained him a royal pension from Louis XVIII. As a novelist Hugo made his debut with Han D'Islande (1823) followed by Bug-Jargal (1826). In 1822 Hugo married Adèle Foucher who was the daughter of an officer at the ministry of war.
Hugo gained wider fame with his play Hernani (1830) and with his famous historical work The Hunchback of Notre Dame(1831) which became an instant success. Since its appearance in 1831 the story has became part of popular culture. The novel, set in 15th century Paris, tells a moving story of a gypsy girl Esmeralda and the deformed bell ringer, Quasimodo, who loves her.
In the 1830s Hugo published several volumes of lyric poetry, Hugo's lyrical style was rich, intense and full of powerful sounds and rhythms, and although it followed the bourgeois popular taste of the period it also had bitter personal tones. Among his most ambitious works was an epic poem, "Et nox facta est," ("And There Was Night"), a study of Satan's fall. The poem was never completed.
In his later life Hugo became involved in politics as a supporter of the republican form of government. After three unsuccessful attempts, Hugo was elected in 1841 to the Académie Francaise. This triumph was shadowed by the death of Hugo's daughter Léopoldine in 1843. It was only after a decade that Hugo again published books. He devoted himself to politics, advocating social justice. After the 1848 revolution, with the formation of the Second Republic, Hugo was elected to the Constitutional Assembly and to the Legislative Assembly. When the coup d'état by Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) took place in 1851, Hugo believed his life to be in danger. He fled to Brussels and then to Jersey and Guernsey in the English Channel. Hugo's partly voluntary exile lasted 20 years. During this time he wrote at Hauteville House some his best works, including Les Chatimets (1853) and Les Misérables (1862), an epic story about social injustice.
The political upheaval in France and the proclamation of the Third Republic made Hugo return to France. During the period of the Paris Commune, Hugo lived in Brussels, from where he was expelled for sheltering defeated revolutionaries. After a short time of living as a refuge in Luxemburg, he returned to Paris and was elected senator. Hugo died in Paris on May 22, 1885. He was given a national funeral, attended by two million people, and buried in the Panthéon.

Mark Twain (1835–1910)

Mark Twain

Writer, journalist, and lecturer, born in Florida, Missouri, USA. A printer (1847–57) and later a Mississippi river-boat pilot (1857–61), he adopted his name from a well-known call used when sounding the river shallows (‘Mark twain!’ meaning ‘by the mark two fathoms’). He edited for two years the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and in 1864 moved to San Francisco as a reporter. In 1867 he visited France, Italy, and Palestine, gathering material for his The Innocents Abroad (1869), which established his reputation as a humorist. On his return to America, he settled in the East, and in 1870 married Olivia Langdon (d.1904), the daughter of a wealthy New York coal merchant. In 1871 they moved to Hartford, CT, where they built a distinctive house (now open to the public) at the centre of a community of artists, known as Nook Farm. His two greatest masterpieces, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), drawn from his own boyhood experiences, are firmly established among the world's classics; other favourites are A Tramp Abroad (1880) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Widely known as a lecturer, he developed a great popular following. Financial speculations led to the loss of most of his earnings by 1894, and he embarked on a world lecture tour to restore some of his wealth. In his later years, he was greatly honoured (especially in England), but following the death of his wife and of two of his daughters, his writing took on a darker, pessimistic character, as seen in his autobiography (1924).

His Works

Novels
1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
1882 The Prince and the Pauper
1883 Life on the Mississippi
1884 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
1892 The American Claimant
1892 Tom Sawyer Abroad
1894 The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson
1895 Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
1896 Tom Sawyer, Detective
1906 What Is Man?
Stories
1865 The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
1869 The Innocents Abroad
1872 Roughing It
1875 Mark Twain's Sketches, New and Old
1880 A Tramp Abroad
1882 The Stolen White Elephant and Other Stories
1897 Following the Equator
1900 The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
1902 A Double Barrelled Detective Story
Editor
182–64 Territorial Enterprise
Collaborations
1873 The Gilded Cage
Autobiography
1924 Autobiography
Other
1897 How to Tell a Story and Other Essays
1904 Extracts from Adam's Diary
1905 King Leopold's Soliloquy
1906 Eve's Diary
1907 Christian Science
1909 Is Shakespeare Dead?
1909 Extracts from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing was born in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Doris's mother adapted to the rough life in the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a civilized, Edwardian life among savages; but her father did not, and the thousand-odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth.Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother, Harry, was one retreat from an otherwise miserable existence. Her mother, obsessed with raising a proper daughter, enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home, then installed Doris in a convent school, where nuns terrified their charges with stories of hell and damnation. Lessing was later sent to an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury, from which she soon dropped out. She was thirteen; and it was the end of her formal education.
But like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer), Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. She recently commented that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers. "Yes, I think that is true. Though it wasn't apparent to me then. Of course, I wasn't thinking in terms of being a writer then - I was just thinking about how to escape, all the time." The parcels of books ordered from London fed her imagination, laying out other worlds to escape into. Lessing's early reading included Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, Kipling; later she discovered D.H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. Bedtime stories also nurtured her youth: her mother told them to the children and Doris herself kept her younger brother awake, spinning out tales. Doris's early years were also spent absorbing her fathers bitter memories of World War I, taking them in as a kind of "poison." "We are all of us made by war," Lessing has written, "twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it."
In flight from her mother, Lessing left home when she was fifteen and took a job as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics and sociology to read, while his brother-in-law crept into her bed at night and gave her inept kisses. During that time she was, Lessing has written, "in a fever of erotic longing." Frustrated by her backward suitor, she indulged in elaborate romantic fantasies. She was also writing stories, and sold two to magazines in South Africa.
Lessing's life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against the biological and cultural imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood. "There is a whole generation of women," she has said, speaking of her mother's era, "and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them." Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing is a process of "setting at a distance," taking the "raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general."
In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read." Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.
During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer.
Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individuals own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good. Her stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the fifties and early sixties, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials, and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa. In 1956, in response to Lessing's courageous outspokenness, she was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.
Over the years, Lessing has attempted to accommodate what she admires in the novels of the nineteenth century - their "climate of ethical judgement" - to the demands of twentieth-century ideas about consciousness and time. After writing the Children of Violence series (1951-1959), a formally conventional bildungsroman (novel of education) about the growth in consciousness of her heroine, Martha Quest, Lessing broke new ground with The Golden Notebook (1962), a daring narrative experiment, in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing depth and detail. Anna Wulf, like Lessing herself, strives for ruthless honesty as she aims to free herself from the chaos, emotional numbness, and hypocrisy afflicting her generation.
Attacked for being "unfeminine" in her depiction of female anger and aggression, Lessing responded, "Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise." As at least one early critic noticed, Anna Wulf "tries to live with the freedom of a man" - a point Lessing seems to confirm: "These attitudes in male writers were taken for granted, accepted as sound philosophical bases, as quite normal, certainly not as woman-hating, aggressive, or neurotic."
In the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing began to explore more fully the quasi-mystical insight Anna Wulf seems to reach by the end of The Golden Notebook. Her "inner-space fiction" deals with cosmic fantasies (Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971), dreamscapes and other dimensions (Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974), and science fiction probings of higher planes of existence (Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979-1983). These reflect Lessing's interest, since the 1960s, in Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufi mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation can come about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of society.
Lessing's other novels include The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Fifth Child (1988); she also published two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers (The Diary of a Good Neighbour, 1983 and If the Old Could..., 1984). In addition, she has written several nonfiction works, including books about cats, a love since childhood. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 appeared in 1995 and received the James Tait Black Prize for best biography.
Addenda (by Jan Hanford)
In June 1995 she received an Honorary Degree from Harvard University. Also in 1995, she visited South Africa to see her daughter and grandchildren, and to promote her autobiography. It was her first visit since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. Ironically, she is welcomed now as a writer acclaimed for the very topics for which she was banished 40 years ago.
She collaborated with illustrator Charlie Adlard to create the unique and unusual graphic novel, Playing the Game. After being out of print in the U.S. for more than 30 years, Going Home and In Pursuit of the English were republished by HarperCollins in 1996. These two fascinating and important books give rare insight into Mrs. Lessing's personality, life and views.
In 1996, her first novel in 7 years, Love Again, was published by HarperCollins. She did not make any personal appearances to promote the book. In an interview she describes the frustration she felt during a 14-week worldwide tour to promote her autobiography: "I told my publishers it would be far more useful for everyone if I stayed at home, writing another book. But they wouldn't listen. This time round I stamped my little foot and said I would not move from my house and would do only one interview." And the honors keep on coming: she was on the list of nominees for the Nobel Prize for Literature and Britain's Writer's Guild Award for Fiction in 1996.
Late in the year, HarperCollins published Play with A Tiger and Other Plays, a compilation of 3 of her plays: Play with a Tiger, The Singing Door and Each His Own Wilderness. In an unexplained move, HarperCollins only published this volume in the U.K. and it is not available in the U.S., to the disappointment of her North American readers.
In 1997 she collaborated with Philip Glass for the second time, providing the libretto for the opera "The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five" which premiered in Heidelberg, Germany in May. Walking in the Shade, the anxiously awaited second volume of her autobiography, was published in October and was nominated for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award in the biography/autobiography category. This volume documents her arrival in England in 1949 and takes us up to the publication of The Golden Notebook. This is the final volume of her autobiography, she will not be writing a third volume.
Her new novel, titled "Mara and Dann", was been published in the U.S in January 1999 and in the U.K. in April 1999. In an interview in the London Daily Telegraph she said, "I adore writing it. I'll be so sad when it's finished. It's freed my mind." 1999 also saw her first experience on-line, with a chat at Barnes & Noble (transcript). In May 1999 she will be presented with the XI Annual International Catalunya Award, an award by the government of Catalunya.
December 31 1999: In the U.K.'s last Honours List before the new Millennium, Doris Lessing was appointed a Companion of Honour, an exclusive order for those who have done "conspicuous national service." She revealed she had turned down the offer of becoming a Dame of the British Empire because there is no British Empire. Being a Companion of Honour, she explained, means "you're not called anything - and it's not demanding. I like that". Being a Dame was "a bit pantomimey". The list was selected by the Labor Party government to honor people in all walks of life for their contributions to their professions and to charity. It was officially bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II.
In January, 2000 the National Portrait Gallery in London unveiled Leonard McComb's portrait of Doris Lessing.
Ben, in the World, the sequel to The Fifth Child was published in Spring 2000 (U.K.) and Summer 2000 (U.S.).
In 2001 she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, one of Spain's most important distinctions, for her brilliant literary works in defense of freedom and Third World causes. She also received the David Cohen British Literature Prize.
In 2005 she was on the shortlist for the first Man Booker International Prize.
In 2007 she received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Her most recent novel is The Cleft.

Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe

English novelist, pamphleteer, and journalist, author of ROBINSON CRUSOE (1719), a story of a man shipwrecked alone on an island. Along with Samuel Richardson, Defoe is considered the founder of the English novel. Before his time stories were usually written as long poems or dramas. He produced some 200 works of nonfiction prose in addition to close 2 000 short essays in periodical publications, several of which he also edited.
"One day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand." (from Robinson Crusoe)
Daniel Defoe was born as the son of Alice and James Foe. His father was a City tradesman and member of the Butchers’ Company. James Foe's stubborn puritanism - the The Foes were Dissenters, Protestants who did not belong to the Anglican Church - come occasionally comes through Defoe's writing. He studied at Charles Morton's Academy, London. Although his Nonconformist father intended him for the ministry, Defoe plunged into politics and trade, travelling extensively in Europe. Throughout his life, Defoe also wrote about mercantile projects, but his business ventures failed and left him with large debts, amounting over seventeen thousand pounds. This burden shadowed the remainder of his life, which he once summoned: "In the School of Affliction I have learnt more Philosophy than at the Academy, and more Divinity than from the Pulpit: In Prison I have learnt to know that Liberty does not consist in open Doors, and the free Egress and Regress of Locomotion. I have seen the rough side of the World as well as the smooth, and have in less than half a Year tasted the difference between the Closet of a King, and the Dungeon of Newgate."
In the early 1680s Defoe was a commission merchant in Cornhill but went bankrupt in 1691. In 1684 he married Mary Tuffley; they had two sons and five daughters. Defoe was involved in Monmouth rebellion in 1685 against James II. While hiding as a fugitive in a churchyard after the rebellion was put down, he noticed the name Robinson Crusoe carved on a stone, and later gave it to his famous hero. Defoe became a supporter of William, joining his army in 1688, and gaining a mercenary reputation because change of allegiance. From 1695 to 1699 he was an accountant to the commissioners of the glass duty and then associated with a brick and tile works in Tilbury. The business failed in 1703.
In 1702 Defoe wrote his famous pamphlet THE SHORTEST-WAY WITH THE DISSENTERS. Himself a Dissenter he mimicked the bloodthirsty rhetoric of High Anglican Tories and pretended to argue for the extermination of all Dissenters. Nobody was amused, Defoe was arrested in May 1703, but released in return for services as a pamphleteer and intelligence agent to Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford, and the Tories. While in prison Defoe wrote a mock ode, HYMN TO THE PILLORY (1703). The poem was sold in the streets, the audience drank to his health while he stood in the pillory and read aloud his verses.
"Actions receive their tincture from the times, And as they change are virtues made of crimes." (from 'A Hymn to the Pillory')
When the Tories fell from power, Defoe continued to carry out intelligence work for the Whig government. In his own days Defoe was regarded as an unscrupulous, diabolical journalist. Defoe used a number of pen names, including Eye Witness, T.Taylor, and Andrew Morton, Merchant. His most unusual pen name was 'Heliostrapolis, secretary to the Emperor of the Moon,' used on his political satire The Consolidator, or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon (1705). His political writings were widely read and made him powerful enemies. His most remarkable achievement during Queen Anne's reign was the periodical A Review of the Affairs of France, and of All Europe (1704-1713). It was published weekly, later three times a week and resembled a modern newspapers. From 1716 to 1720 Defoe edited Mercurius Politicus, then the Manufacturer (1720), and the Director (1720-21). He was contributor from 1715 to periodicals published by Nathaniel Mist.
Defoe was one of the first to write stories about believable characters in realistic situations using simple prose. He achieved literary immortality when in April 1719 he published Robinson Crusoe, which was based partly on the memoirs of voyagers and castaways, such as Alexander Selkirk, who spent on his island four years and four months. The first edition was printed in London by a publisher of a popular books, W. Taylor. No author's name was given.

Thomas Jefferson (13 April 1743 – 4 July 1826)

Thomas Jefferson




Thomas Jefferson (13 April 1743 – 4 July 1826) was the third President of the United States (1801–1809), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and one of the most influential Founding Fathers for his promotion of the ideals of Republicanism in the United States. Major events during his presidency include the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806).
As a political philosopher, Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment and knew many intellectual leaders in Britain and France. He idealized the independent yeoman farmer as exemplar of the republican virtue, distrusted cities and financiers, and favored states' rights and a strictly limited federal government. Jefferson supported the separation of church and state and was the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1779, 1786). He was the eponym of Jeffersonian democracy and the co-founder and leader of the Democratic-Republican Party, which dominated American politics for a quarter-century and was the precursor of the modern-day Democratic Party. Jefferson served as the wartime Governor of Virginia (1779–1781), first United States Secretary of State (1789–1793) and second Vice President (1797–1801).
A polymath, Jefferson achieved distinction as an horticulturist, statesman, architect, archaeologist, paleontologist, author, inventor, and the founder of the University of Virginia, among other roles. When President John F. Kennedy welcomed forty-nine Nobel Prize winners to the White House in 1962 he said, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House—with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Early life and education

Thomas Jefferson was born on 13 April 1743 into a family closely related to some of the most prominent individuals in Virginia, the third of eight children. His mother was Jane Randolph, daughter of Isham Randolph, a ship's captain and sometime planter, and first cousin to Peyton Randolph. Jefferson's father was Peter Jefferson, a planter and surveyor who owned plantations in Albemarle County (Shadwell, then Edge Hill, Virginia.)
Painting of Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale (1805)In 1752, Jefferson began attending a local school run by William Douglas, a Scottish minister. At the age of nine, Jefferson began studying Latin, Greek, and French. In 1757, when he was 14 years old, his father died. Jefferson inherited about 5,000 acres (20 km²) of land and dozens of slaves. He built his home there, which eventually became known as Monticello.
After his father's death, he was taught at the school of the learned minister James Maury from 1758 to 1760. The school was in Fredericksville Parish near Gordonsville, Virginia, twelve miles from Shadwell, and Jefferson boarded with Maury's family. There he received a classical education and studied history and science.
In 1760 Jefferson entered the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg at the age of 16; he studied there for two years, graduating with highest honors in 1762. At William & Mary, he enrolled in the philosophy school and studied mathematics, metaphysics, and philosophy under W&M Professor William Small, who introduced the enthusiastic Jefferson to the writings of the British Empiricists, including John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Sir Isaac Newton (Jefferson called them the "three greatest men the world had ever produced"). He also perfected his French, carried his Greek grammar book wherever he went, practiced the violin, and read Tacitus and Homer. A keen and diligent student, Jefferson displayed an avid curiosity in all fields and, according to the family tradition, frequently studied fifteen hours a day. His closest college friend, John Page of Rosewell, reported that Jefferson "could tear himself away from his dearest friends, to fly to his studies."
While in college, Jefferson was a member of a secret organization called the Flat Hat Club, now the namesake of the William & Mary student newspaper. He lodged and boarded at the College in the building known today as the Sir Christopher Wren Building, attending communal meals in the Great Hall, and morning and evening prayers in the Wren Chapel. Jefferson often attended the lavish parties of royal governor Francis Fauquier, where he played his violin and developed an early love for wines. After graduating in 1762 with highest honors, he studied law with his friend and mentor, George Wythe, and was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1767.
In 1772, Jefferson married a 23-year-old widow, Martha Wayles Skelton. They had six children: Martha Jefferson Randolph (1772–1836), Jane Randolph (1774–1775), a stillborn or unnamed son (1777), Mary Wayles (1778–1804), Lucy Elizabeth (1780–1781), and Lucy Elizabeth (1782–1785). Martha died on September 6, 1782

Voltaire

"Those who can make you believe absurditiescan make you commit atrocities".
—Voltaire

Born: 1694

Death: 1778

Nationality: French

François-Marie Arouet(Voltaire)

François-Marie Arouet 21 November1694 – 30 May 1778), better known by the pen name Voltaire, was a French Enlightenmentwriter,essayist,deist and philosopher known for his wit, philosophical sport, and defense of civil liberties, including freedom of religion and the right to a fair trial. He was an outspoken supporter of social reform despite strict censorship and harsh penalties for those who broke them. A satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize Christian Church dogma and the French institutions of his day

The French author François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire was born November 21, 1694 in Paris, the last of the three children of François Arouet(1650-January 1, 1722) a notary who was a minor treasury official, and his wife, Marie Marguerite d'Aumart (c.1660–July 13, 1701) from a noble family of Poitou province. Voltaire was educated by Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand (1704-11), where he learned Latin and Greek; later in life he became fluent in Italian, Spanish, and English. From 1711 to 1713 he studied law. Before devoting himself entirely to writing, Voltaire worked as a secretary to the French ambassador in Holland, where he fell in love with a French refugee named Catherine Olympe Dunoyer. Their scandalous elopement was foiled by Voltaire's father and he was forced to return to France. Most of Voltaire's early life revolved around Paris until his exile. From the beginning Voltaire had trouble with the authorities for his energetic attacks on the government and the Catholic Church. These activities were to result in numerous imprisonments and exiles. In his early twenties he spent eleven months in the Bastille for allegedly writing satirical verses about the aristocracy.
After graduating, Voltaire set out on a career in literature. His father, however, intended his son to be educated in the law. Voltaire, pretending to work in Paris as an assistant to a lawyer, spent much of his time writing satirical poetry. When his father found him out, he again sent Voltaire to study law, this time in the provinces. Nevertheless, he continued to write, producing essays and historical studies not always noted for their accuracy. Voltaire's wit made him popular among some of the aristocratic families. One of his writings, about Louis XV's regent, Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, led to his being imprisoned in the Bastille. While there, he wrote his debut play, Œdipe), and adopted the name Voltaire which came from his hometown in southern France . Œdipe's success began Voltaire's influence and brought him into the French Enlightenment. Voltaire was a prolific writer, and produced works in almost every literary form, authoring plays, poetry, novels, essays, historical and scientific works, over 20,000 letters and over two thousand books and pamphlets.

Dale Carnegie(orig. Dale Carnegey)

Dale Carnegie(orig. Dale Carnegey)

Born: 1888 AD

Died: 1955 AD, at 66 years of age.

Nationality: American

Dale Carnegie

1888 - Born in Maryville, Missouri on the 24th of November.

1908 - He was elected class president his sophomore year, then left the university after receiving a regent's certificate to teach in Missouri.

1912 - He was unsuccessful as a salesman, and moved to New York City where he gave classes in public speaking at the Young Men's Christian Association.

1930 - He became known for a radio programme and his books, notably How to Win Friends and Influence People which enjoyed immediate success and would remain one of the best-sellers of all time

- He was married to Dorothy Price Vanderpool Carnegie, and had one daughter, Donna Dale Carnegie

1931 - His first marriage ended in divorce. On the 5th of November, in Tulsa, Oklahoma,

1938 - Dale Carnegie returned to Warrensburg for "Dale Carnegie Day" on the 28th of June.

1955 - He died of Hodgkin's disease on the 1st of November and is buried in Belton.