Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (née Stevenson; 29 September 1810 – 12 November 1865), often referred to simply as Mrs. Gaskell, was an English novelist and short story writer during the Victorian era. She is perhaps best known for her biography of Charlotte Brontë. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society, including the very poor, and as such are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature.

Early life
She was born Elizabeth Stevenson in 1810 at 93, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, which was then on the outskirts of London. Her mother, Eliza Holland, was from a prominent Midlands family that was well-connected with other Unitarian and prominent families like the Wedgwoods and the Darwins. She died in 1812 when Elizabeth was a baby. Elizabeth was one of eight children, of whom only she and her brother John (born 1806) survived. John later went missing in 1827 on a voyage to India.

Her father, William Stevenson, a Unitarian minister and a writer, remarried after Elizabeth's mother died.

Much of Elizabeth's childhood was spent in Cheshire, where she lived with an aunt, Mrs Hannah Lumb, in Knutsford, a town she would later immortalise as Cranford. They lived in a large redbrick house, Heathwaite, on Heathside (now Gaskell Avenue), which faces the large open area of Knutsford Heath.

She also spent some time in Newcastle upon Tyne (with Rev. William Turner) and Edinburgh. Her stepmother was a sister of the Scottish miniature artist, William John Thomson, who painted a famous portrait of Elizabeth in 1832. In the same year, Elizabeth married William Gaskell, the minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel in Manchester, who had a literary career of his own. They honeymooned in North Wales, staying with Elizabeth's uncle, Samuel Holland, who lived near Porthmadog.


[edit] Married life and Plymouth Grove

Elizabeth Gaskell — from the 1851 portrait by George RichmondThe Gaskells settled in Manchester, where the industrial surroundings would offer inspiration for her novels (in the industrial genre). They had several children: a stillborn daughter in 1833, followed by Marianne (1834), Margaret Emily (1837), known as Meta, Florence Elizabeth (1842), William (1844-1845) and Julia Bradford (1846). Her daughter Florence married a barrister, Charles Crompton, in 1862.

They rented a villa in Plymouth Grove in 1850, after the publication of Gaskell's first novel, and Gaskell lived in the house with her family until her death 15 years later.[2] All of Gaskell's books, bar one, were written at Plymouth Grove, while her husband held welfare committees and tutored the poor in his study. The circles in which the Gaskells moved included literary greats, religious dissenters and social reformers, including William and Mary Howitt. Visitors to Plymouth Grove included Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Harriet Beecher Stowe and American writer Charles Eliot Norton, while conductor Charles Hallé lived close by, and taught the piano to one of Gaskell's four daughters. Close friend Charlotte Brontë is known to have stayed there three times, and on one occasion hid behind the drawing room curtains as she was too shy to meet Gaskell's visitors.[3]

Gaskell died in Holybourne, Hampshire in 1865 aged 55. The house on Plymouth Grove remained in the Gaskell family until 1913.


[edit] Works
Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton, was published anonymously in 1848. The best known of her remaining novels are Cranford (1853), North and South (1854), and Wives and Daughters (1865). She became popular for her writing, especially her ghost story writing, aided by her friend Charles Dickens, who published her work in his magazine Household Words. Her ghost stories are quite distinct in style from her industrial fiction and belong to the Gothic fiction genre.

Even though her writing conforms to Victorian conventions (including signing her name "Mrs. Gaskell"), Gaskell usually frames her stories as critiques of contemporary attitudes, particularly those toward women, with complex narratives and dynamic female characters.[4]

In addition to her fiction, Gaskell also wrote the first biography of Charlotte Brontë, which played a significant role in developing her fellow writer's reputation.


[edit] Dialect usage
Gaskell's style is notable for putting local dialect words into the voice of middle-class characters and of the narrator; for example in North and South, Margaret Hale suggests redding up (tidying) the Bouchers' house and even offers jokingly to teach her mother words such as knobstick (strike-breaker).[5] Her husband collected Lancashire dialect, and Gaskell defended her use of dialect as expressing otherwise inexpressible concepts in an 1854 letter to Walter Savage Landor:[5]

:'...you will remember the country people's use of the word "unked". I can't find any other word to express the exact feeling of strange unusual desolate discomfort, and I sometimes "potter" and "mither" people by using it.'[6]

She used the dialect word "nesh" (soft), which goes back to Old English, in Mary Barton:

"Sit you down here: the grass is well nigh dry by this time; and you're neither of you nesh folk about taking cold."[7]

and later in 'The Manchester Marriage' [1858]:

"Now, I'm not above being nesh for other folks myself. I can stand a good blow, and never change colour; but, set me in the operating-room in the Infirmary, and I turn as sick as a girl." "At Mrs Wilson's death, Norah came back to them, as nurse to the newly-born little Edwin; into which post she was not installed without a pretty strong oration on the part of the proud and happy father; who declared that if he found out that Norah ever tried to screen the boy by a falsehood, or to make him nesh either in body or mind, she should go that very day."[8]


[edit] Publications

[edit] Novels
Mary Barton (1848)
Cranford (1851-3)
Ruth (1853)
North and South (1854-5)
Sylvia's Lovers (1863)
Cousin Phillis (1864)
Wives and Daughters: An Everyday Story (1865)

[edit] Collections
The Moorland Cottage (1850)
The Old Nurse's Story (1852)
Lizzie Leigh (1855)
My Lady Ludlow (1859)
Round the Sofa (1859)
Lois the Witch (1861)
A Dark Night's Work (1863)

[edit] Short stories (partial)
Libbie Marsh's Three Eras (1847)
Christmas Storms and Sunshine (1848)
The Squire's Story (1853)
Half a Life-time Ago (1855)
An Accursed Race (1855)
"The Manchester Marriage" (1858), a chapter of A House to Let, co-written with Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Adelaide Anne Procter
The Half-brothers (1859)
The Grey Woman (1861)

[edit] Non-fiction
The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857)

[edit] References
^ [1] "Children in Early Victorian England: Infant Feeding in Literature and Society 1837-1857." Tropical Pediatrics and Environmental Child Health August 1978
^ Uglow J. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (Faber and Faber; 1993) (ISBN 0-571-20359-0)
^ Nurden, Robert. 'An ending Dickens would have liked' Independent (26 March 2006)
^ Excluding Reference to Gaskell's Ghost Stories, Abrams, M.H., et al. (Eds.) "Elizabeth Gaskell, 1810-1865". The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Major Authors: The Romantic Period through the Twentieth Century, 7th ed., Vol. B. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. ISBN 0-393-97304-2. DDC 820.8--dc21. LC PR1109.N6.
^ a b Ingham P. (1995) Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of North and South
^ Chapple JAV, Pollard A, eds. The Letters of Mrs Gaskell. Mandolin (Manchester University Press), 1997
^ Gaskell E. (1848) Mary Barton, chapter 1
^ Victorian Short Stories, Stories Of Successful Marriages, The Project Gutenberg

John Galsworthy

John Galsworthy OM (IPA: /ˈgɔːlzwɜːðɪ/) (14 August 1867 – 31 January 1933) was an English novelist and playwright. Notable works include The Forsyte Saga (1906–1921) and its sequels, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932.
Life
Galsworthy was born at Kingston Hill in Surrey, England into an established wealthy family, the son of John and Blanche Bailey (nee Bartleet) Galsworthy. He attended Harrow and New College, Oxford, training as a barrister and was called to the bar in 1890. However, he was not keen to begin practising law and instead travelled abroad to look after the family's shipping business interests. During these travels he met Joseph Conrad, then the first mate of a sailing-ship moored in the harbour of Adelaide, Australia, and the two future novelists became close friends. In 1895 Galsworthy began an affair with Ada Nemesis Pearson, the wife of one of his cousins. After her divorce the pair eventually married on 23 September 1905 and stayed together until his death in 1933.

From the Four Winds was Galsworthy's first published work in 1897, a collection of short stories. These, and several subsequent works, were published under the pen name John Sinjohn and it would not be until The Island Pharisees (1904) that he would begin publishing under his own name, probably owing to the death of his father. His first play, The Silver Box (1906) became a success, and he followed it up with The Man of Property (1906), the first in the Forsyte trilogy. Although he continued writing both plays and novels it was as a playwright he was mainly appreciated at the time. Along with other writers of the time such as Shaw his plays addressed the class system and social issues, two of the best known being Strife (1909) and The Skin Game (1920).

He is now far better known for his novels and particularly The Forsyte Saga, the first of three trilogies of novels about the eponymous family and connected lives. These books, as with many of his other works, dealt with class, and in particular upper-middle class lives. Although sympathetic to his characters he highlights their insular, snobbish and acquisitive attitudes and their suffocating moral codes. He is viewed as one of the first writers of the Edwardian era; challenging in his works some of the ideals of society depicted in the proceeding literature of Victorian England. The depiction of a woman in an unhappy marriage furnishes another recurring theme in his work. The character of Irene in The Forsyte Saga is drawn from Ada Pearson even though her previous marriage was not as miserable as Irene's.


Bury House, Galsworthy's West Sussex home.His work is often less convincing when it deals with the changing face of wider British society and how it affects people of the lower social classes. Through his writings he campaigned for a variety of causes including prison reform, women's rights, animal welfare and censorship, but these have limited appeal outside the era in which they were written. During World War I he worked in a hospital in France as an orderly after being passed over for military service. He was elected as the first president of the International PEN literary club in 1921, was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1929—after earlier turning down a knighthood—and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1932.

John Galsworthy lived for the final seven years of his life at Bury in West Sussex. He died from a brain tumour at his London home, Grove Lodge, Hampstead. In accordance with his will he was cremated at Woking and his ashes scattered over the South Downs from an aeroplane[1], but there is also a memorial in Highgate 'New' Cemetery [2]. The popularity of his fiction waned quickly after his death but the hugely successful adaptation of The Forsyte Saga in 1967 renewed interest in the writer.

A number of John Galsworthy's letters and papers are held at the University of Birmingham Special Collections.


[edit] Adaptations
The Forsyte Saga has been filmed several times:

That Forsyte Woman (1949), dir. by Compton Bennett, an MGM adaptation in which Errol Flynn played a rare villainous role as Soames.
BBC television drama (1967), dir. by James Cellan Jones, David Giles, starring Eric Porter, Nyree Dawn Porter, Kenneth More, Susan Hampshire, Joseph O'Conor, adaptor Lennox Philips and others, 26 parts
Granada television drama (2002), dir. by Christopher Menaul, starring Gina McKee, Damian Lewis, Rupert Graves, Corin Redgrave, 13 parts.
The Skin Game was adapted and directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1931. It starred VC France, Helen Haye, Jill Esmond, Edmund Gwenn, John Longden.

Escape was filmed in 1930 and 1948. The latter was directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, starring Rex Harrison, Peggy Cummins, William Hartnell. The screenplay was by Philip Dunne.

One More River (a film version of Galsworthy's Over the River) was filmed by James Whale in 1934. The film starred Frank Lawton, Colin Clive (one of Whale's most frequently used actors), and Diana Wynyard. It also featured Mrs. Patrick Campbell in a rare sound film appearance.


[edit] Selected works
From The Four Winds, 1897 (as John Sinjohn)
Jocelyn, 1898 (as John Sinjohn)
Villa Rubein, 1900 (as John Sinjohn)
A Man Of Devon, 1901 (as John Sinjohn)
The Island Pharisees, 1904
The Silver Box, 1906 (his first play)
The Forsyte Saga, 1906-21, 1922
The Man Of Property, 1906
(interlude) Indian Summer of a Forsyte, 1918
In Chancery, 1920
(interlude) Awakening, 1920
To Let, 1921
The Country House, 1907
A Commentary, 1908
Fraternity, 1909
A Justification For The Censorship Of Plays, 1909
Strife, 1909
Fraternity, 1909
Joy, 1909
Justice, 1910
A Motley, 1910
The Spirit Of Punishment, 1910
Horses In Mines, 1910
The Patrician, 1911
The Little Dream, 1911
The Pigeon, 1912
The Eldest Son, 1912
Moods, Songs, And Doggerels, 1912
For Love Of Beasts, 1912
The Inn Of Tranquillity, 1912
The Dark Flower, 1913
The Fugitive, 1913
The Mob, 1914
The Freelands, 1915
The Little Man, 1915
A Bit's Love, 1915
A Sheaf, 1916
The Apple Tree, 1916
Beyond, 1917
Five Tales, 1918
Saint's Progress, 1919
Addresses In America, 1912
The Foundations, 1920
In Chancery, 1920
Awakening, 1920
The Skin Game , 1920
To Let, 1920
A Family Man, 1922
The Little Man, 1922
Loyalties, 1922
Windows, 1922
Captures, 1923
Abracadabra, 1924
The Forest, 1924
Old English, 1924
The Show, 1925
Escape, 1926
Verses New And Old, 1926
Castles In Spain, 1927
A Modern Comedy, 1924-1928, 1929
The White Monkey, 1924
(Interlude) a Silent Wooing, 1927
The Silver Spoon, 1926
(Interlude) Passers By, 1927
Swan Song, 1928
Two Forsyte Interludes, 1927
The Manaton Edition, 1923-26 (collection, 30 vols.)
Exiled, 1929
The Roof, 1929
On Forsyte Change, 1930
Two Essays On Conrad, 1930
Soames And The Flag, 1930
The Creation Of Character In Literature, 1931 (The Romanes Lecture for 1931).
Maid In Waiting, 1931
Forty Poems, 1932
Flowering Wilderness, 1932
Over the River, 1933
Autobiographical Letters Of Galsworthy: A Correspondence With Frank Harris, 1933
The Grove Edition, 1927-34 (collection, 27 Vols.)
Collected Poems, 1934
End Of the Chapter, 1931-1933, 1934 (posthumously)
Maid In Waiting, 1931
Flowering Wilderness, 1932
One More River, 1933 (originally the English edition was called Over the River)
Punch And Go, 1935
The Life And Letters, 1935
The Winter Garden, 1935
Forsytes, Pendyces And Others, 1935
Selected Short Stories, 1935
Glimpses And Reflections, 1937
Galsworthy's Letters To Leon Lion, 1968
Letters From John Galsworthy 1900-1932, 1970

Stephen Fry

Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English comedian, writer, actor, humourist, novelist, columnist, filmmaker and television personality. As one half of the Fry and Laurie double act he has appeared in A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster; famous also for his roles in Blackadder and Wilde, and as the host of QI. In addition to writing for stage, screen, television and radio he has contributed columns and articles for numerous newspapers and magazines, also having written four successful novels and an autobiography, Moab is My Washpot.

Childhood and education
Fry was born in Hampstead, London, the son of Alan Fry, an English physicist with a 1st class degree, and Marianne Newman, of Austrian-Jewish parentage.[1] He has an older brother, Roger, and a younger sister, Joanna. Fry grew up in the village of Booton near Reepham, Norfolk, having moved from Chesham when very young.

Fry briefly attended Cawston Primary School, Cawston, Norfolk, described later in his 1999 book Moab is my Washpot[2] before going on to Stouts Hill Preparatory School, and then to Uppingham School, Rutland, where he joined Fircroft house. He was expelled from Uppingham when he was fifteen, and subsequently from the Paston School. At seventeen, following his failure at Norfolk College of Arts and Technology, Fry absconded with a credit card stolen from a family friend, and as a result spent three months in Pucklechurch Prison on grounds of fraud. Following his release he resumed education at Norwich City College, promising administrators that he would study rigorously to sit the Cambridge Entrance Exams. He passed well enough to gain a scholarship to Queens' College, Cambridge.

At Cambridge, Fry gained a 2:1 in English literature, joined the Cambridge Footlights, and appeared on University Challenge.[3] As a member of the Footlights he also met his future comedy collaborator, Hugh Laurie.


[edit] Career

[edit] Television
Fry's career in television began with the 1982 broadcasting of The Cellar Tapes, the 1981 Cambridge Footlights Revue written by himself, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery. The revue caught the attention of Granada Television, who, keen to replicate the success of the BBC's Not The Nine O'Clock News, hired Fry, Laurie and Thompson to star alongside Ben Elton in There's Nothing To Worry About!. A second series, re-titled Alfresco, was broadcast in 1983; a third in 1984. Alfresco established Fry and Laurie's reputation as a comedy double act. In 1983 the BBC offered them their own show, which became The Crystal Cube, a mixture of science fiction and mock documentary that was axed after the first episode. Undeterred, Fry and Laurie appeared in an episode of The Young Ones in 1984, and Fry in Ben Elton's 1985 series, Happy Families.

Forgiving Fry and Laurie for The Crystal Cube, the BBC commissioned a sketch show in 1986 that was to become A Bit of Fry and Laurie. The programme ran for 26 episodes spanning four series between 1986 and 1995, and was greatly successful. At the same time Fry was starring in Blackadder II, as Lord Melchett, Blackadder the Third, as the Duke of Wellington, and notably in Blackadder Goes Forth, as General Melchett. In 1988 he became a regular contestant on the popular improvisational comedy programme Whose Line Is It Anyway?.

Between 1990 and 1993, Fry starred as Jeeves (alongside Hugh Laurie's Bertie Wooster) in Jeeves and Wooster, 23, hour-long adaptations of P.G. Wodehouse's novels and short stories.

In 2001 he began hosting QI, an intellectual panel game that has become one of the most-watched entertainment programmes on British television.[4] In 2006 he won the Rose d'Or award for Best Game Show Host for his work on the series.[5]

A recent foray into documentary-making has seen Fry fronting The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, an emmy award winning 2006 programme about bipolar disorder (from which he suffers), and this year a documentary on the subject of HIV and AIDS, HIV and Me. He is currently filming a six-part travel series entitled Stephen Fry in America.[6] In 2006 he appeared on the genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?, tracing his family tree to discover his Slovakian Jewish ancestry.

This year Fry appeared in, and was executive producer for, a six-part legal drama entitled Kingdom, a second series of which is currently in production. He has also taken up a recurring guest role as a psychiatrist in the popular American drama, Bones.


[edit] Film
Having made his film debut in the 1988 movie A Fish Called Wanda, Fry appeared in the lead role for Kenneth Branagh's Peter's Friends in 1992. Portraying Oscar Wilde (a man of whom he had been a fan since 13) in the 1997 film Wilde, he fulfilled to critical acclaim a role that he has said he was "born to play". In 2001 he played the detective in Robert Altman's period costume drama, Gosford Park.

In 2003, Fry made his directorial debut with Bright Young Things, adapted himself from Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. In 2001 he had begun hosting the BAFTA Film Awards, a role from which he stepped down in 2006.[7] Later that same year he wrote the English libretto and dialogue for Kenneth Branagh's film adaptation of The Magic Flute.

Fry continues to make regular film appearances.[8]


[edit] Radio
Fry became famous to radio listeners with the creation of his supposed alter-ego - Donald Trefusis - whose "wireless essays" were broadcast on the Radio 4 programme Loose Ends. In 1988 Fry wrote and presented a renowned six-part comedy series entitled Saturday Night Fry, following which frequent radio appearances have ensued (notably on radio panel games Just a Minute and I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue). In 2000 he began starring as Charles Prentiss in the Radio 4 comedy Absolute Power, reprising the role for three further series on radio and two on television.

This year he has hosted Current Puns, an exploration into wordplay, and Radio 4: This Is Your Life, to celebrate the radio station's 40th anniversary. He has also interviewed Tony Blair as part of a series of podcasts released by 10 Downing Street.[9]


[edit] Theatre
Fry wrote a play - Latin! (or Tobacco and Boys) - for the 1980 Edinburgh Festival, at which it won the "Fringe First" prize. The Cellar Tapes, the Footlights Revue of the following year, won the Perrier Comedy Award. In 1984 Fry adapted the hugely successful 1930s musical Me and My Girl for the West End, where it ran for eight years. He also famously starred in Simon Gray's 1995 play Cell Mates, from which he left three days into the West End run, pleading stage fright. He later recalled the incident as a hypomanic episode in his documentary on bipolar disorder. This year Fry has written the Old Vic Christmas pantomime, Cinderella.[10]


[edit] Literature
Since the publication of his first novel, The Liar, Fry has written three further novels, several non-fiction works and an autobiography, all of which have been much acclaimed by critics. His most recent book, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within, is a guide to writing poetry. In the United Kingdom he is a well-known narrator of audiobooks, notably the Harry Potter series. He has recorded audio versions of works by Roald Dahl, Michael Bond, A. A. Milne, Anthony Buckeridge and Douglas Adams, as well as several of his own books.

When writing a book review for the Tatler, Fry wrote under an alias, Williver Hendry, editor of A Most Peculiar Friendship: The Correspondence of Lord Alfred Douglas and Jack Dempsey, a field close to Fry's heart as an Oscar Wilde enthusiast. Once a columnist in The Listener and The Daily Telegraph, he now writes a weekly technology column in the Saturday Guardian. His blog attracted over 300,000 visitors in its first two weeks of its existence.[11]


[edit] Personal life
Fry struggled to keep his homosexuality secret during his teenage years at public school, and was celibate for 16 years. When asked about when he knew he was homosexual he quotes an old friend and says, "I suppose it all began when I came out of the womb. I looked back up at my mother and thought to myself, 'That's the last time I'm going up one of those'". Fry currently lives in London with his partner, Daniel Cohen, whom he met in 1995. There Fry famously drives a former 1988 London black cab. He also has a second home in West Bilney, near King's Lynn, Norfolk.

Fry suffered a nervous breakdown in 1995, during a time in which he was appearing in Cell Mates, a West End play. Fry was also suffering from clinical depression and cyclothymia,[12] a form of bipolar disorder. He subsequently walked out of the production, prompting its early closure and incurring the displeasure of co-star Rik Mayall and playwright Simon Gray. Fry went missing for several days while contemplating suicide. He abandoned the idea and left the United Kingdom by ferry, eventually resurfacing in Belgium.[13]

Fry has spoken publicly about his experience with bipolar disorder and has presented his documentary about it, Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic-Depressive.[14] In the documentary he interviewed sufferers of the illness including celebrities Carrie Fisher, Richard Dreyfuss, and Tony Slattery. Also interviewed were chef Rick Stein, whose father committed suicide, Robbie Williams, who talks of his experience with unipolar depression, and comedian Jo Brand. The two-part series was broadcast on BBC Two in September 2006, repeated in March 2007 as part of the BBC's programming in aid of Comic Relief, and repeated in August 2007 as a celebration of Fry's 50th birthday.

Fry was an active supporter of the British Labour Party for many years, and appeared in a party political broadcast on its behalf with Hugh Laurie and Michelle Collins in November 1993. Despite this, he did not vote in the 2005 General Election because of the stance of both the Labour and Conservative parties with regard to the Iraq War. Despite his praising of the current government for social reform, Fry has been critical of the Labour Party's "Third Way" concept. He is on cordial terms with Prince Charles (despite satirising him heavily as King Charles I in the comedy programme Blackadder: The Cavalier Years), through his work with the Prince's Trust. He attended the wedding of the Prince of Wales to Camilla Parker-Bowles in 2005.

Fry is a friend of British comedian and actor Rowan Atkinson and was best man at Atkinson's wedding to Sunetra Sastry at the Russian Tea Room in New York City. He was also a friend of British actor John Mills.[15] He was best man at the wedding of Hugh Laurie and is godfather to all three of Laurie's children.

A great fan of cricket (he is related to legendary England cricketer and jack of all trades C.B. Fry[citation needed]), he was recently interviewed for the Ashes Fever DVD, reporting on England's victory against Australia in the 2005 Ashes series. In football he is a supporter of Norwich City (as mentioned in Ashes Fever).


[edit] Acclaim
In 1995, Fry was presented with an honorary doctorate from the University of Dundee, which named their main Students' Association bar after one of his novels (The Liar Bar). Fry is patron of its Lip Theatre Company.[16] He served two consecutive terms (1992-1995 and 1995-1998) as the student-elected Rector of the University (only the second Rector of the University to be elected twice, the first being Clement Freud); coincidentally, this post is currently held by his secondary school classmate, controversial former diplomat Craig Murray.
In 2005, Fry was made honorary president of the Cambridge University Quiz Society and honorary fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge.
In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, Fry was voted amongst the top 50 comedy acts ever by fellow comedians and business insiders, and, in September 2006, number 9 in a poll of TV's Greatest Stars as voted for by the general public.
In December 2006 he was ranked 6th for the BBC's Top Living Icon Award,[17] was featured on The Culture Show, and was voted most intelligent man on television by readers of Radio Times.
23rd on the previous year's list, the Independent on Sunday Pink List named Fry the second most influential gay person in Britain in May 2007.[18]
Later the same month he was announced as the 2007 BT Mind Champion of the Year[19] in recognition of the awareness raised by his documentary on bipolar disorder, and was also nominated for Best Entertainment Performance (QI) and Best Factual Series (Secret Life of the Manic Depressive) at the 2007 British Academy Television Awards.
BBC Four dedicated two nights of programming to Fry on 17th and 18th August 2007, in celebration of his 50th birthday. The first night, comprising programmes featuring Fry, began with a 60-minute documentary entitled Stephen Fry: 50 Not Out. The second night was composed of programmes selected by Fry, as well as a 60-minute interview with Mark Lawson and half-hour special, Stephen Fry: Guilty Pleasures. Stephen Fry Weekend proved such a ratings hit for BBC Four that it was repeated on BBC Two for 16th and 17th September.
Fry was the last person to be named Pipe Smoker of the Year before the award was discontinued for legal reasons.
He is a Patron of the Norwich Playhouse theatre and a Vice President of the Noël Coward Society.[20]

[edit] List of works

[edit] Written works
Films and screenplays
Bright Young Things (2003)
The Magic Flute (libretto, forthcoming[21])
Dambusters (2008)
Musicals
Me and My Girl (adapted Lupino Lane's script) (1984)
Novels
The Liar (1992) (in which Donald Trefusis is a character)
The Hippopotamus (1994)
Making History (an example of alternate history) (1997) Winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History
The Stars' Tennis Balls (as Revenge: A Novel in the United States) (Fry's take on The Count of Monte Cristo story (2000))
Other books
Paperweight (collection of articles) (1992), including, among others, some of the "wireless essays" supposedly by professor Donald Trefusis.
Moab is My Washpot (autobiography) (1997)
Rescuing the Spectacled Bear: A Peruvian Diary (2002)
Stephen Fry's Incomplete and Utter History of Classical Music (2004)
The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within (2005)
QI: The Book of General Ignorance (2006) ISBN 0-571-23368-6 drawn from his BBC QI comedy quiz programme
Plays
Latin! (or Tobacco and Boys.) (1979, included in Paperweight). Winner of the Fringe First at the 1980 Edinburgh Festival.
A pantomime version of Cinderella slated to open at the Old Vic for Christmas 2007.[22]
Published television scripts
A Bit of Fry & Laurie (1990)
A Bit More Fry & Laurie (1991)
3 Bits of Fry & Laurie (1992)
Fry & Laurie Bit No. 4 (1995)

[edit] Performances
Films
A Fish Called Wanda (1988, cameo)
Peter's Friends (1992)
IQ (1994)
Wind in the Willows (1996)
Wilde (1997)
Spiceworld (1997)
A Civil Action (1998)
Whatever Happened to Harold Smith? (1999)
Relative Values (2000)
Gosford Park (2001)
The Discovery of Heaven (2001)
Thunderpants (2002)
Le Divorce (2003)
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (voice) (2005)
MirrorMask (2005)
A Cock and Bull Story (2006)
V for Vendetta (2006)
Stormbreaker (2006)
Valkyrie (2008)
Plays
The Common Pursuit (1988)
Cell Mates, (1995)
Radio shows
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Quandary Phase: Murray Bost Henson, BBC Radio 4
Saturday Night Fry (1988, BBC Radio 4, six episodes)
A Bit of Fry and Laurie (1994, BBC Radio Four, two half-hour programmes compiled from selected previously-seen sketches from the TV series)
Absolute Power, BBC Radio Four
Occasional guest panellist on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, BBC Radio Four
Regular guest panellist on Just a Minute, BBC Radio Four
Has a regular slot, The Incomplete and Utter History of Classical Music on Classic FM
Played the lead, David Lander on Radio 4 series Delve Special
A series of "wireless essays", supposedly by his alter ego, the elderly Cambridge philology professor Donald Trefusis, were featured in the BBC Radio 4 programme Loose Ends, hosted by Ned Sherrin
Fry contributed regular parodies of BBC Radio 1's Newsbeat to the same station's arts programme Studio B15
Television programmes
The Crystal Cube (one-off BBC2 sketch show) (1983)
Alfresco (1983–84)
The Young Ones (1984)
Happy Families (TV Series) (1985)
Filthy Rich & Catflap (1986)
The Blackadder Series: Blackadder II (1986), Blackadder the Third (1987), Blackadder: The Cavalier Years and Blackadder's Christmas Carol (1988), Blackadder Goes Forth (1989), and Blackadder: Back & Forth (1999)
Whose Line Is It Anyway? (1988, 1997)
A Bit of Fry and Laurie (1987 pilot, 1989, 1990, 1992, 1995)
This is David Lander (1988)
The New Statesman (1989)
Jeeves and Wooster (1990–1993)
Common Pursuit (1992)
The Thin Blue Line (1995)
Cold Comfort Farm (1995)
In the Red (1998)
Watership Down (1999)
Gormenghast (2000)
QI (2003-onwards)
A Bear Named Winnie (2004)
Absolute Power (2003, 2005)
Tom Brown's Schooldays (2005)
Pocoyo (2005) - an animated children's television programme, which he narrated
Extras (2006)
The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive (2006)
Bones (2007)
Kingdom (2007)
Shrink Rap (2007) - a quasi-therapeutic interview conducted by Pamela Stephenson
Stephen Fry: HIV and Me (2007)
Audiobooks
Moab is My Washpot (1997) ISBN 1-85686-268-2
The Hippopotamus (2000) ISBN 1-84197-129-4
Harry Potter series, UK versions (2002-2007)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) ISBN 1-4050-5397-6
Higher Ground Project (2005) ISBN 1-84458-643-X
The Ode Less Travelled (2006) ISBN 1-85686-842-7
Montmorency (2004) ISBN 978-1844400256
Miscellaneous
Guest appearance in a webcast of Doctor Who called Death Comes to Time, as Time Lord, the Minister of Chance
Introduced the television show Wildlife SOS
Stephen is the voice of the Christmas 2007 adverts for Argos
Stephen is the character in the Twinings Earl Grey tea adverts on British TV

[edit] Directorial filmography
Films
Bright Young Things (director, 2003)

[edit] References
^ "Who Do You Think You Are?", British National Archives website.
^ Cawston Parish in Norfolk
^ University Challenge page at UK Game Shows.
^ QI Audience Statistics.
^ IMDB: Stephen Fry — Awards
^ StephenFry.com - Blog Entry - I Give Up.
^ BBC: "Fry quits as host of film Baftas"
^ IMDB: Stephen Fry.
^ Stephen Fry interviews Tony Blair.
^ Old Vic Theatre - Cinderella.
^ StephenFry.com - Blog Entry - I Give Up.
^ BBC Health: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive
^ BBC News: Comedian Fry reveals suicide bid
^ Cardiff University: Genetic research into mood disorders
^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/4476875.stm
^ Lip Theatre: History
^ BBC: Living Icons
^ Independent on Sunday Pink List 2007
^ Mind - Press Release
^ http://www.noelcoward.net/html/committee2007.html
^ Branagh to make Mozart opera film
^ Douglas Adams Continuum Forum: webchat

[edit] See also
Fry and Laurie
A Bit of Fry and Laurie

Christopher Fry

Christopher Fry (December 18, 1907 – June 30, 2005) was an English playwright.

Christopher Fry was born as Christopher Harris in Bristol. He took his mother's maiden name and he became a distinguished English dramatist and theatre manager. In his later life Fry lived in the village of East Dean in West Sussex[1] and died in Chichester on June 30 2005 from natural causes.


His most significant plays include: The Boy with a Cart in 1938 (on Saint Cuthman of Steyning), A Phoenix Too Frequent in 1946, The Firstborn in 1946, The Lady's Not for Burning in 1949, Thor, with Angels in 1949, Venus Observed in 1950 and The Dark is Light Enough in 1957.

“ Try thinking of love, or something. Amor vincit insomnia. ”
—Christopher Fry

“ Life is a hypocrite if I can't live The way it moves me! ”
—Christopher Fry





Beginning in the 1950s, many of his plays were adapted for the screen, and he wrote or collaborated on several screenplays, including Ben-Hur and Barabbas.

Fry was awarded the Benson Medal in 2000. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal (for Poetry) in 1962. Christopher Fry's wife died in 1987; he is survived by their son.


[edit] References
^ Interview with Christopher Fry

Frederick Forsyth

Frederick Forsyth, CBE (born August 25, 1938) is an English author and occasional political commentator. He is best known for thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, The Fist of God, Icon, The Veteran, Avenger and recently The Afghan.

Biography
Born in Ashford, Kent, Forsyth was educated at Tonbridge School and later attended the University of Granada in Spain. Becoming a journalist, he joined Reuters in 1961 and later the BBC in 1965, where he served as an assistant diplomatic correspondent. From July to September of 1967, he served as a correspondent covering the Nigerian Civil War between the region of Biafra and Nigeria. He left the BBC in 1968 after controversy arose over his alleged bias towards the Biafran cause and accusations that he falsified segments of his reports. Returning to Biafra as a freelance reporter, Forsyth wrote his first book, The Biafra Story in 1969.


[edit] Works
Forsyth decided to write a novel using similar research techniques to those used in journalism. His first full length novel, The Day of the Jackal, was published in 1971 and became an international bestseller. It was later made into a film of the same name. It also earned him the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel. In this book, the Organisation armée secrète hires an assassin to kill Charles de Gaulle.

His second novel, The Odessa File, was published in 1972 and is about a reporter attempting to track down a certain ex-Nazi SS officer in modern Germany, whom he discovered via the diary of a Jewish Holocaust survivor that committed suicide early in the book, who was being shielded by the organization that protects ex-Nazis, called ODESSA. As it turns out, the reporter discovers that this same SS officer killed a German Army officer during World War II for striking him after refusing to let SS soldiers take the place of his own wounded men. This book was later made into a movie with the same name, starring Jon Voight, but there were substantial adaptations. For example, the black Jaguar auto with yellow streaks depicted in the story, itself a thrill designed to engross the reader, was replaced by a Mercedes-Benz.

In 1974, he wrote The Dogs of War, in which a British mining executive hires a group of mercenaries to overthrow the government of an African country so that he can install a puppet regime that will allow him cheap access to its substantial mineral wealth.

The Shepherd was an illustrated novella published in 1975. It tells of a nightmare journey by a RAF pilot while flying home for Christmas in the late 1950s. His attempts to find a rational explanation for his eventual rescue prove as troublesome as his experience. Following this came The Devil's Alternative in 1979, which was set in 1982. In this book, the Soviet Union faces a disastrous grain harvest and Ukrainian freedom fighters. A Politburo faction fight ensues. In the end, a Norwegian oil tanker built in Japan, a Russian airliner hijacked to West Berlin and various governments find themselves involved.

In 1982, No Comebacks, a collection of ten short stories, was published. Some of these stories had been written earlier. Many were set in the Irish Republic where Forsyth was living at the time. One of them, There Are No Snakes In Ireland, won him a second Edgar Allan Poe Award, this time for best short story.

The Fourth Protocol was published in 1984 and involves renegade elements within the Soviet Union attempting to plant a nuclear bomb near an American airbase in the UK, intending to influence the upcoming British elections and lead to the election of an anti-NATO, anti-American, anti-nuclear, pro-soviet Labour government. The Fourth Protocol was later filmed, starring Pierce Brosnan and Michael Caine, in 1987. All the political content was removed from the film, which took a lot away from the original story.

Forsyth's tenth release came in 1989, when he wrote The Negotiator, in which the American President's son is kidnapped and one man's job is to negotiate his release.

Two years later, in 1991, The Deceiver was published. It includes four separate short stories reviewing the career of British secret agent Sam McCready. At the start of the book, the Permanent Under-Secretary (PUS) of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office requires the Chief of the SIS to push Sam into early retirement. The four stories are presented to a grievance committee in an attempt to allow Sam to stay on active duty with the SIS.

In 1994, Forsyth published The Fist of God, about the first Gulf War. Next, in 1996, he published Icon, about the rise of fascists to power in post-Soviet Russia.

In 1999, Forsyth published The Phantom of Manhattan, a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera. It was intended as a departure from his usual genre; Forsyth's explanation was that "I had done mercenaries, assassins, Nazis, murders, terrorists, special forces soldiers, fighter pilots, you name it, and I got to think, could I actually write about the human heart?"[1] However, it did not achieve the same success as his other novels, and he subsequently returned to modern-day thrillers.

In 2001, The Veteran, another collection of short stories, was published followed by the Avenger, published in September 2003, about a Canadian billionaire who hires a Vietnam veteran to bring his grandson's killer to the US.

His latest book, The Afghan published in August 2006 is an indirect sequel to The Fist of God. Set in the very near future, the threat of a catastrophic assault on the West, discovered on a senior al-Qaeda member's computer, compels the leaders of the U.S. and the U.K. to attempt a desperate gambit—to substitute a seasoned British operative, retired Col. Mike Martin, for an Afghan Taliban commander being held prisoner at Guantánamo Bay. The plot of the novel shows familiarity with terrorist methodology, counter-surveillance techniques and grandiose thinking as evidenced in The Bojinka Plot.


[edit] Style
Forsyth eschews psychological complexity in favour of meticulous plotting, based on detailed factual research. His books are full of information about the technical details of such subjects as money laundering, gun running and identity theft. His novels read like investigative journalism in fictional guise. His moral vision is a harsh one: the world is made up of predators and prey, and only the strong survive. The novels he wrote in the 1970s are often regarded as his best work.

Forsyth's novels typically show the ways in which spies, assassins, mercenaries, diplomats, business leaders and politicians go about their business behind-the-scenes; the sort of things that the average reader would not suspect while reading a simple headline. The Jackal does not just go and kill Charles de Gaulle: he does meticulous research on the man at the library of the British Museum; obtains papers for his false identities; goes around Paris to find a good location for a sniper's nest; and buys and tests his weapons.

Also a subtle twist at the end of the novel can reveal that a lot more was going on than the reader initially suspected: Cat Shannon, the central figure of The Dogs of War, turns out to having his own agenda all the time; Adam Munro of The Devil's Alternative finds out that he was a pawn rather than a player of people in high places; in The Odessa File, the reporter's motivation is revealed at the end, and a number of events in Icon turn out to have been committed by people other than those who the reader had been led to believe.

Forsyth's novels also feature famous personalities and political leaders as characters — the Day of the Jackal features the French president Charles de Gaulle and his interior minister, Roger Frey, who heads the government search for the assassin. The Odessa File features the real-life Nazi murderer Edward Roschmann and the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. The Fourth Protocol and Icon involve several chapters indirectly featuring former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and former U.S. president George H. W. Bush. Although unnamed or of fictional identity, the leader of the Soviet Union is portrayed as the lead antagonist in several novels. The Negotiator involves a fictional U.S. president loosely based on the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis.


[edit] Issues raised by his work
His research has caused headaches for governments. In The Day of the Jackal, he describes a technique used by a would-be assassin to obtain a new passport. The assassin visits a church, and looks for a tombstone of someone who was born nearly the same time he was, but died in infancy. He then obtains a birth certificate, which enables him to obtain a passport in that person's name - effectively stealing an identity. In the story, the government didn't cross check passport requests with the death registry. Unfortunately, this was actually government practice at the time, and Forsyth revealed this in his writings. In The Deceiver, he describes how a British agent bugs the coffin of a dead IRA member. The microphone records the conversation of senior IRA members, who are using the funeral as a chance for a conference about terrorist activities. Journalists pressed the British government to ask if this had ever been done, and the British government was forced to admit that indeed it had.

Intriguingly, Forsyth's novels have had echoes in reality in recent years. In 2004, a group of British-led alleged mercenaries were arrested in Zimbabwe allegedly en route to Equatorial Guinea, where it was believed they intended to assist the country's opposition in overthrowing the government. In exchange for this assistance, the leaders of the group were allegedly offered lucrative mineral concessions in Equatorial Guinea. Media commentators immediately drew comparisons with the plot of Forsyth's novel The Dogs of War, which had been written more than 30 years before, and also involved a coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea. One of those convicted of involvement in the coup was an ex-SAS officer, Simon Mann. Mann is a former associate of Lt. Col. Tim Spicer, the chief executive of the British "private military company" Aegis, and for this reason the British government had sought advice from Spicer when they first received intelligence that a coup was being planned.

Spicer, in turn, has an interesting connection with Forsyth, in that the author is reportedly one of a small number of people who own shares in Spicer's company.

Furthermore, in The Fist of God, set during the First Gulf War, a memorandum to the then United States Secretary of State James Baker from the Pentagon strongly advises against any invasion of Iraq. The reasons for this are stated to be that without the strength of the police state under Saddam Hussein, fractures would begin to appear between 'three nations' of Iraq, leading to an undesirable and almost unmanagable situation for the American government. This is strikingly similar to the events which have taken place since the American-led 2003 Invasion of Iraq.


[edit] Public life
Forsyth is a Eurosceptic Conservative. In 2003, he was awarded the One of Us Award from the Conservative Way Forward group for his services to the Conservative movement in Britain. He is also a patron of the Young Britons' Foundation. In 2005, he came out in opposition to Kenneth Clarke's candidacy for the leadership of The Conservative Party, calling Clarke's record in government "unrivaled; a record of failure which at every level has never been matched". Instead, he endorsed and donated money to David Davis's campaign.

He is also a strong supporter of the British monarchy. In his book "Icon" he actually recommended a constitutional monarchy as a solution to the Russian problems of the 90's.

He is an occasional radio broadcaster on political issues, and has also written for newspapers throughout his career, including, at present (2005- ), a weekly page in the Daily Express.

In August 2006, Forsyth appeared on the ITV gameshow Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? to raise funds for charity.

On 8 February 2007, Forsyth appeared on BBC's political panel show Question Time. On it, he expressed scepticism on the climate change phenomena.


[edit] Bibliography
Year Title Notes
1969 The Biafra Story
1971 The Day of the Jackal
1972 The Odessa File
1974 The Dogs of War
1975 The Shepherd
1979 The Devil's Alternative
1982 Emeka
1983 No Comebacks Short story collection
1984 The Fourth Protocol
1989 The Negotiator
1991 The Deceiver
1991 Great Flying Stories
1994 The Fist of God
1996 Icon
1999 The Phantom of Manhattan
2001 The Veteran Short story collection
2003 Avenger
2006 The Afghan


[edit] See also
List of bestselling novels in the United States

E. M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster, OM (January 1, 1879 – June 7, 1970), was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect."

Forster was gay, but this fact was not made public during his lifetime.[1] His posthumously released novel Maurice tells of the coming of age of an explicitly gay male character

Early years
Forster was born January 1, 1879, in London, at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square NW1 (The building no longer exists.) His father was an architect and died when Forster was only a year old. Among Forster's ancestors were members of the Clapham Sect. As a boy he inherited £8,000 from his paternal aunt Marianne Thornton, daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton, which was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer. He attended Tonbridge School in Kent as a day boy.

At King's College, Cambridge between 1897 and 1901, he became a member of the Apostles (formally named the Cambridge Conversazione Society), a discussion society. Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a peripheral member in the 1910s and 1920s. There is a famous recreation of Forster's Cambridge at the beginning of The Longest Journey.

After leaving university he traveled on the continent with his mother. He visited Egypt, Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in 1914. When what came to be called the First World War (1914-18) broke out, he became a conscientious objector; while engaged in hospital work for the Red Cross in Egypt in the winter of 1916-17, he met in Alexandria a seventeen-year-old tram conductor, Mohammed el-Adl, with whom he fell in love. He later wrote of the experience, which was his first gay sexual encounter, "I am so happy - not for the actual pleasure but because the last barrier has fallen." Mohammed was to become one of the principal inspirations for Forster's literary work. When the youth died of tuberculosis in Alexandria in the spring of 1922, Forster was driven to keep his memory alive and attempted to do so in the form of a book-length letter, preserved at King's College, Cambridge. The letter begins with a quotation from A.E. Housman: "Good-night, my lad, for nought's eternal; No league of ours, for sure"; it concludes with an acknowledgement that the task of resurrecting their love is impossible.

Forster spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as the private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas. The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this trip. While living at the court, Forster has the first ongoing sexual relationship of his life, with Kanaya, a young boy who serves him also as barber. After returning from India, he completed his last novel, A Passage to India (1924), which became his most famous and widely translated work and for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.


[edit] After A Passage to India
Forster stopped writing novels at the age of 45, and produced little more fiction apart from short stories intended only for himself and a small circle of friends.

In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a successful broadcaster on BBC Radio and a public figure associated with the British Humanist Association. He was awarded a Benson Medal in 1937.

Forster had a happy personal relationship, beginning in the early 1930s, with Bob Buckingham, a constable in the London Metropolitan Police. He developed a friendship with Buckingham's wife May and included the couple in his circle, which also included the writer and editor of The Listener J.R. Ackerley, the psychologist W.J.H. Sprott, and, for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten. Other writers with whom Forster associated included the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the Belfast-based novelist Forrest Reid.

After the death of his mother, Forster accepted an honorary fellowship at King's College, Cambridge and lived for the most part in the college, doing relatively little. In 1969 he was made a member of the Order of Merit. Forster died in Coventry the following year at the age of 91, at the home of the Buckinghams.


[edit] Novels
Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Although Maurice appeared shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. A seventh novel, Arctic Summer, was never finished.

His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), is the story of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano (based on San Gimignano). The mission of Philip Herriton to retrieve her from Italy has features in common with that of Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors, a work Forster discussed ironically and somewhat disapprovingly in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927). Where Angels Fear to Tread was adapted into a film by Charles Sturridge in 1991.

Next, Forster published The Longest Journey (1907), an inverted bildungsroman following the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then to a post as a schoolmaster, married to the unappetising Agnes Pembroke. In a series of scenes on the hills of Wiltshire which introduce Rickie's wild half-brother Stephen Wonham, Forster attempts a kind of sublime related to those of Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence.

Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908) is his lightest and most optimistic. It was started before any of his others, as early as 1901, and exists in earlier forms referred to as "Lucy." The book is the story of young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with her cousin, and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. George's father Mr. Emerson quotes thinkers who influenced Forster, including Samuel Butler. A Room with a View was filmed by Merchant-Ivory in 1985.

Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen collectively as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad. The books share many themes with short stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.

Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel concerned with different groups within the Edwardian middle classes represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants).

It is frequently observed that characters in Forster's novels die suddenly. This is true of Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End and, most particularly, The Longest Journey.

Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. Forster connects personal relationships with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves.

Maurice (1971) was published after the novelist's death. It is a homosexual love story which also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. The novel was controversial, given that Forster's sexuality had not been previously known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to argue over the extent to which Forster's sexuality, even his personal activities[2], influenced his writing.


[edit] Key themes
Forster's views as a secular humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society. His humanist attitude is expressed in the non-fictional essay What I Believe.

Forster's two best-known works, A Passage to India and Howards End, explore the irreconcilability of class differences. Although considered by some to have less serious literary weight, A Room with a View also shows how questions of propriety and class can make connection difficult. The novel is his most widely read and accessible work, remaining popular long after its original publication. His posthumous novel Maurice explores the possibility of class reconciliation as one facet of a homosexual relationship.

Sexuality is another key theme in Forster's works, and it has been argued that a general shift from heterosexual love to homosexual love can be detected over the course of his writing career. The foreword to Maurice describes his struggle with his own homosexuality, while similar issues are explored in several volumes of homosexually charged short stories. Forster's explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short-story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death.

Forster is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised (as by his friend Roger Fry) for his attachment to mysticism. One example of his symbolism is the Wych Elm tree in Howards End; the characters of Mrs Wilcox in that novel and Mrs Moore in A Passage to India have a mystical link with the past and a striking ability to connect with people from beyond their own circles.


[edit] Notes
^ http://www.glbtq.com/literature/forster_em.html
^ BBC News Website.

[edit] Notable works by Forster

[edit] Novels
Where Angels Fear to Tread 1905;
The Longest Journey 1907;
A Room with a View 1908;
Howards End 1910;
A Passage to India 1924;
Maurice (written in 1913-1914, published posthumously in 1971);
Arctic Summer (an incomplete fragment, written in 1912-1913, published posthumously);

[edit] Short stories
The Celestial Omnibus (and other stories) 1911 ·
The Eternal Moment and other stories 1928 ·
Collected Short Stories (1947) (- a combination of the above two titles, containing:
"The Story of A Panic" ·
"The Other Side Of The Hedge" ·
"The Celestial Omnibus" ·
"Other Kingdom" ·
"The Curate's Friend" ·
"The Road From Colonus" ·
"The Machine Stops" ·
"The Point Of It" ·
"Mr Andrews" ·
"Co-ordination" ·
"The Story Of The Siren" ·
"The Eternal Moment" ·
The Life to Come and other stories 1972 (posthumous) (containing the following stories written between approximately 1903 and 1960:
"Ansell" ·
"Albergo Empedocle" ·
"The Purple Envelope" ·
"The Helping Hand" ·
"The Rock" ·
"The Life to Come" ·
"Dr Woolacott" ·
"Arthur Snatchfold" ·
"The Obelisk" ·
"What Does It Matter? A Morality" ·
"The Classical Annex" ·
"The Torque" ·
"The Other Boat" ·
"Three Courses and a Dessert: Being a New and Gastronomic Version of the Old Game of Consequences") ·
"My Wood"

[edit] Plays and Pageants
Abinger Pageant 1934 ·
England's Pleasant Land 1940

[edit] Film Scripts
A Diary for Timothy 1945 (directed by Humphrey Jennings, spoken by Michael Redgrave)

[edit] Libretto
Billy Budd 1951 (based on Melville's novel, for the opera by Britten)

[edit] Collections of essays and broadcasts
Abinger Harvest 1936 ·
Two Cheers for Democracy 1951

[edit] Literary criticism
Aspects of the Novel 1927 ·
The Feminine Note in Literature (posthumous) 2001

[edit] Biography
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson 1934 ·
Marianne Thornton, A Domestic Biography 1956

[edit] Travel writing
Alexandria: A History and Guide 1922 ·
Pharos and Pharillon (A Novelist's Sketchbook of Alexandria Through the Ages) 1923 ·
The Hill of Devi 1953

[edit] Miscellaneous writings
Selected Letters 1983-1985 ·
Commonplace Book 1985 ·
Locked Diary forthcoming 2007 (held at King's College, Cambridge)

[edit] Notable films based upon novels by Forster
A Passage to India (1984), dir. David Lean
A Room with a View (1985), dir. James Ivory
Maurice (1987), dir. James Ivory
Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991), dir. Charles Sturridge
Howards End (1992), dir. James Ivory

[edit] Secondary Works on Forster
Abrams, M.H. and Stephen Greenblatt, "E.M. Forster." The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2C., 7th Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000: 2131-2140.
Ackerley, J. R., E. M. Forster: A Portrait (Ian McKelvie, London, 1970)
Bakshi, Parminder Kaur, Distant Desire. Homoerotic Codes and the Subversion of the English Novel in E. M. Forster's Fiction (New York, 1996).
Beauman, Nicola, Morgan (London, 1993).
Brander, Lauwrence, E.M. Forster. A critical study (London, 1968).
Cavaliero, Glen, A Reading of E.M. Forster (London, 1979).
Colmer, John, E.M. Forster - The personal voice (London, 1975).
E.M. Forster, ed. by Norman Page, Macmillan Modern Novelists (Houndmills, 1987).
E.M. Forster: The critical heritage, ed. by Philip Gardner (London, 1973).
Forster: A collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Malcolm Bradbury (New Jersey, 1966).
Furbank, P.N., E.M. Forster: A Life (London, 1977-1978).
Haag, Michael, Alexandria: City of Memory (London and New Haven, 2004). This portrait of Alexandria during the first half of the twentieth century includes a biographical account of E.M. Forster, his life in the city, his relationship with Constantine Cavafy, and his influence on Lawrence Durrell.
King, Francis, E.M. Forster and his World, (London, 1978).
Martin, John Sayre, E.M. Forster. The endless journey (London, 1976).
Martin, Robert K. and George Piggford eds., Queer Forster (Chicago, 1997)
Mishra, Pankaj (ed.). "E.M. Forster." India in Mind: An Anthology. New York: Vintage Books, 2005: 61-70.
Scott, P.J.M., E.M. Forster: Our Permanent Contemporary, Critical Studies Series (London, 1984).
Summers, Claude J., E.M. Forster (New York, 1983).
Trilling, Lionel, E. M. Forster: A Study (Norfolk: New Directions, 1943).
Wilde, Alan, Art and Order. A Study of E.M. Forster (New York, 1967).

[edit] Sources
Author and Book Info.com

C. S. Forester

Cecil Scott Forester was the pen name of Cecil Louis Troughton Smith (August 27, 1899 – April 2, 1966), an English novelist who rose to fame with tales of adventure with military themes. His most notable works were the 11-book Horatio Hornblower series, about naval warfare during the Napoleonic era, and The African Queen (1935; filmed in 1951 by John Huston). His novels A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours were jointly awarded the 1938 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

Born in Cairo, Forester had a complicated life, including imaginary parents, a secret marriage, a murder charge, and a debilitating illness. He was educated at Alleyn's School, Dulwich College and Guy's Hospital (now part of King’s College London). He married Kathleen Belcher in 1926, had two sons, and divorced in 1945. His eldest son, John, is a noted cycling activist and wrote a biography of his father.

During World War II Forester moved to the United States where he wrote propaganda to encourage the country to join the Allies, and eventually settled in Berkeley, California; while living in Washington, D.C., he met a young British intelligence officer named Roald Dahl, of whose experiences in the R.A.F. he had heard word, and encouraged him to write about them. In 1947, he secretly married a woman named Dorothy Foster. He suffered extensively from arteriosclerosis later in life.

The popularity of the Hornblower series, built around a central character who was heroic but not too heroic, has continued to grow over time. It is perhaps rivalled only by the much later Aubrey–Maturin series of seafaring novels by Patrick O'Brian. Both Hornblower and Aubrey are based in part on the historical Admiral Lord Dundonald of Great Britain (known as Lord Cochrane during the period when the novels are set). Brian Perett has written a book The Real Hornblower: The Life and Times of Admiral Sir James Gordon, GCB, ISBN 1-55750-968-9, presenting the case for a different inspiration, namely James Alexander Gordon. In his work "The Hornblower Companion", however, Forester makes no indication of any historical influences or inspiration regarding his character. Rather, he describes a process whereby Hornblower was constructed based on what attributes made a good character for the original Hornblower story, "A Happy Return" (published in America as "Beat to Quarters"). Forester does reveal that the original trigger for his central character as an officer in the Royal Navy was his finding of three bound volumes of the Naval Chronicle when looking in a second-hand bookshop for some reading matter to take on a small boat; this, he implies, provided enough material for his subconscious to work on to ensure the eventual emergence of the Hornblower we know.

Forester wrote many other novels, among them The African Queen (1935) and The General (1936); Peninsular War novels in Death to the French and The Gun (filmed as The Pride and the Passion in 1957); and seafaring stories that did not involve Hornblower, such as Brown on Resolution (1929), The Ship (1943) and Hunting the Bismarck, which was used as the basis of the screenplay for the 1960 film Sink the Bismarck! Several of his works were filmed, most notably the 1951 film The African Queen directed by John Huston. Forester is also credited as story writer for several movies not based on his published fiction, including Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942).

He wrote several volumes of short stories set during the Second World War. Those in The Nightmare (1954) were based around events in Nazi Germany, ending at the Nuremberg Trials. Stories in The Man in the Yellow Raft (1969) followed the career of the destroyer USS Boon, while many of those in Gold from Crete (1971) followed the destroyer HMS Apache. The last of the stories in the latter book - If Hitler had invaded England - offers a plausible sequence of events starting with Hitler's attempt to implement Operation Sea Lion, and culminating in the early military defeat of Nazi Germany in the summer of 1941.

In addition to his novels of seafaring life, Forester also published two crime novels, Payment Deferred (1926), and Plain Murder (1930), and two children's books. One, Poo-Poo and the Dragons (1943), was created as a series of stories told to his son to encourage him to finish his meals while Forester was left alone to care for him as his wife was absent.[1] The second, The Barbary Pirates (1953), is a children's history of those early 19th-century pirates.


[edit] Notes
^ Poo-Poo and the Dragons: Preface

[edit] References
John Forester: Novelist & Storyteller. The Life of C. S. Forester, ISBN 0-940558-04-1 (excerpt).

Ian fleming

Ian Lancaster Fleming (May 28, 1908 – August 12, 1964) was a British author, journalist and Second World War Navy Commander. Fleming is best remembered for creating the character of James Bond and chronicling his adventures in twelve novels and nine short stories. Additionally, Fleming wrote the children's story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and two non-fiction books.

Biography
Ian Fleming was born in Mayfair, London, to Valentine Fleming, a Member of Parliament, and his wife Evelyn Ste Croix Fleming (née Rose). Ian was the younger brother of travel writer Peter Fleming and the older brother of Michael and Richard Fleming (1910–77). He also had an illegitimate half-sister, the cellist Amaryllis Fleming. He was the grandson of Scottish financier Robert Fleming, who founded the Scottish American Investment Trust and merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co. (since 2000 part of JP Morgan Chase). He was cousin to actor Christopher Lee and actress Dame Celia Johnson was his sister-in-law (wife of his brother Peter).

Fleming was educated at Durnford School in Dorset, Eton College, and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He was Victor Ludorum at Eton two years running, something that had been achieved only once before him. He found Sandhurst to be uncongenial, and after an early departure from there, his mother sent him to study languages on the continent. He first went to a small private establishment in Kitzbühel, Austria, run by the Adlerian disciples Ernan Forbes Dennis and his American wife, the novelist Phyllis Bottome, to improve his German and prepare him for the Foreign Office exams, then to Munich University, and, finally, to the University of Geneva to improve his French. He was unsuccessful in his application to join the Foreign Office, and subsequently worked as a sub-editor and journalist for the Reuters news service, including time in 1933 in Moscow, and then as a stockbroker with Rowe and Pitman, in Bishopsgate. He was a member of Boodle's, the gentleman's club in St. James's Street, from 1944 until his death in 1964.

His marriage in Jamaica in 1952 to Anne Charteris, daughter of Lord Wemyss and former wife of Viscount Rothermere, was witnessed by his friend, playwright Noel Coward.


[edit] World War II
In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence of the Royal Navy, recruited Fleming (then a reserve subaltern in the Black Watch) as his personal assistant. He was commissioned first as a Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve lieutenant, and subsequently promoted to Lieutenant Commander, then Commander. His known codename was 17F.

In 1940 Fleming and Godfrey contacted Kenneth Mason, Professor of Geography at Oxford University, about preparing reports devoted to the geography of countries engaged in military operations. These reports were the precursors of the Naval Intelligence Division Geographical Handbook Series produced between 1941 and 1946.[1]

In Naval Intelligence, Fleming conceived of Operation Ruthless, a plan – not executed – for capturing the German naval version of the Wehrmacht's Enigma communications encoder.

He also conceived of a plan to use British occultist Aleister Crowley to trick Rudolf Hess into attempting to contact a faux cell of anti-Churchill Englishmen in Britain, but this plan was not used because Rudolf Hess had flown to Scotland in an attempt to broker peace behind Hitler's back. Anthony Masters's book The Man Who Was M: The Life of Charles Henry Maxwell Knight asserts Fleming conceived the plan that lured Hess into flying to Scotland, in May 1941, to negotiate Anglo–German peace with Churchill, and resulted in Hess's capture: this claim has no other source.

Fleming also formulated Operation Goldeneye, a plan to maintain communication with Gibraltar as well as a plan of defence in the unlikely event that Spain joined the Axis Powers and, together with Germany, invaded the Mediterranean colony.

In June 1941, General William Donovan requested that Fleming write a memorandum describing the structure and functions of a secret service organisation; for that, Fleming was rewarded with a .38 Police Positive Colt revolver inscribed, "For Special Services." Parts of this memorandum were later used in the official charter for the OSS, which was dissolved in 1945 following the end of World War II; the OSS's successor, the Central Intelligence Agency, was created two years later.

In 1942, Fleming formed an Auxiliary Unit known as 30AU or 30 Assault Unit that he nicknamed his own "Red Indians"; it was specifically trained in lock-picking, safe-cracking, forms of unarmed combat, and other techniques and skills for collecting intelligence. He meticulously planned all their raids, alongside Patrick Dalzel-Job (one of the Inspirations for James Bond), going so far as to memorize aerial photographs so that their missions could be planned in detail; because of their successes in Sicily and Italy, 30AU was greatly enlarged and Fleming's direct control was increased before D-Day.

Fleming even visited 30AU in the field during and after Operation Overlord, especially after the Cherbourg attack, in which he felt that the unit had been incorrectly used as a frontline force rather than as an intelligence gathering unit, and from then on tactics were revised.

It is often reported, and perpetuated by Fleming, that he travelled to Whitby, Ontario to train at Camp X, a top secret training school for Allied forces. However no evidence of Fleming having been at Camp X has ever been uncovered, nor do any of the staff recall Fleming ever having been there.[2]


[edit] Writing career

Ian Fleming. LIFE cover.As the DNI's personal assistant, Fleming's intelligence work provided the background for his spy novels. In 1953, he published his first novel, Casino Royale. In it he introduced secret agent James Bond, also famously known by his code number, 007. The double "00" indicating that he has a licence to kill. Bond appears with the beautiful heroine Vesper Lynd, who was modelled on SOE agent Christine Granville.[citation needed] Ideas for his characters and settings for Bond came from his time at Boodle's. Blade's, M's club (at which Bond is an occasional guest), is partially modelled on Boodle's and the name of Bond's arch enemy, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, was based on a fellow member's name.[citation needed] Bond's name came from famed ornithologist James Bond (1900-1989), the son of the Bond family who allowed Fleming the use of their estate in Jamaica to write.[citation needed] The Bonds were wealthy manufacturers whose estate outside of Philadelphia, Pa. eventually became the grounds of Gwynedd Mercy College. Fleming used the name after seeing Bond's Birds of the West Indies (1936).[citation needed]

Initially Fleming's Bond novels were not bestsellers in America, but when President John F. Kennedy included From Russia With Love on a list of his favourite books, sales quickly jumped. Fleming wrote 14 Bond books in all: Casino Royale (1953), Live and Let Die (1954), Moonraker (1955), Diamonds Are Forever (1956), From Russia With Love (1957), Dr. No (1958),Goldfinger (1959), For Your Eyes Only (1960),Thunderball (1961), The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963), You Only Live Twice (1964), The Man With The Golden Gun (1965), and Octopussy/The Living Daylights (1966).

In the late 1950s, the financial success of Fleming's James Bond series allowed him to retire to Goldeneye, his estate in Saint Mary Parish, Jamaica. The name of the house and estate where he wrote his novels has many sources. Notably, Ian Fleming himself cited Operation Goldeneye, a plan to bedevil the Nazis should the Germans enter Spain during World War II. He also cited the 1941 novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers. The location of the property may also have been a factor — Oracabessa, or "Golden head". There is also a Spanish tomb on the property with a bit of carving that looks like an eye on one side. It is likely that most or all of these factors played a part in Fleming's naming his Jamaican home. In Ian Fleming's interview published in Playboy in December 1964, he states, "I had happened to be reading Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers, and I'd been involved in an operation called Goldeneye during the war: the defense of Gibraltar, supposing that the Spaniards had decided to attack it; and I was deeply involved in the planning of countermeasures which would have been taken in that event. Anyway, I called my place Goldeneye." The estate, next door to that of Fleming's friend and rival Noel Coward, is now the centerpiece of an exclusive resort by the same name.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) stylistically departs from other books in the Bond series as it is written in the first person perspective of the (fictional) protagonist, Vivienne Michel, whom Fleming credits as co-author. It is the story of her life, up until when James Bond serendipitously rescues her from the wrong circumstance at the wrong place and time.

Besides writing twelve novels and nine short stories featuring James Bond, Fleming also wrote the children's novel Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He also wrote a guide to some of the worlds most famous cities in "Thrilling Cities" and a novel on diamond smuggling entitled "The Diamond Smugglers".

In 1961, he sold the film rights to his already published as well as future James Bond novels and short stories to Harry Saltzman, who, with Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli, co-produced the film version of Dr. No (1962). For the cast, Fleming suggested friend and neighbour Noël Coward as the villain Dr. Julius No, and David Niven or, later, Roger Moore as James Bond. Both were rejected in favour of Sean Connery, who was both Broccoli and Saltzman's choice. Fleming also suggested his cousin, Christopher Lee, either as Dr. No or even as James Bond. Although Lee was selected for neither role, in 1974 he portrayed assassin Francisco Scaramanga, the eponymous villain of The Man with the Golden Gun.

Neither Saltzman nor Broccoli expected Dr. No to be much of a success, but it was an instant sensation and sparked a spy craze through the rest of the 1960s.

The successful Dr. No was followed by From Russia with Love (1963), the second and last James Bond movie Ian Fleming saw.

During the Istanbul Pogroms, which many Greek and some Turkish scholars attributed to secret orchestrations by Britain, Fleming wrote an account of the events, "The Great Riot of Istanbul", which was published in the The Sunday Times on 11 September 1955.


[edit] Later life

Ian Fleming's grave and memorial at Sevenhampton.Fleming was a bibliophile who collected a library of books that had, in his opinion, "started something", and therefore were significant in the history of western civilization. He concentrated on science and technology, e.g. On the Origin of Species, but also included other significant works ranging from Mein Kampf to Scouting for Boys. He was a major lender to the 1963 exhibition Printing and the Mind of Man. Some six hundred books from Fleming's collection are held in the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, U.S.A.

In March 1960, Fleming met John F. Kennedy through Marion Oates Leiter who was a mutual friend and invited to dinner. Leiter had introduced Kennedy to Fleming's books during his recovery from an operation in 1955. After dinner Fleming related his ideas on discrediting Fidel Castro; these were reported to Central Intelligence Agency chief Allen Welsh Dulles, who gave the ideas serious consideration.[3]

Fifty-six-year-old Ian Fleming died of a heart attack on the morning of August 12, 1964, in Canterbury, Kent, England, and was later buried in the churchyard of Sevenhampton village, near Swindon. Upon their own deaths, Fleming's widow, Ann Geraldine Mary Fleming (1913–1981), and son Caspar Robert Fleming (1952–1975), were buried next to him. Caspar committed suicide with a drug overdose.


[edit] Selected works

[edit] James Bond books
Nr Name Year
1. Casino Royale1 1953
2. Live and Let Die 1954
3. Moonraker² 1955
4. Diamonds Are Forever 1956
5. From Russia with Love 1957
6. Dr. No 1958
7. Goldfinger 1959
8. For Your Eyes Only³ 1960
9. Thunderball4 1961
10. The Spy Who Loved Me5 1962
11. On Her Majesty's Secret Service 1963
12. You Only Live Twice 1964
13. The Man with the Golden Gun6 1965
14. Octopussy and The Living Daylights7 1966

Notes
1 First U.S. paperback edition was retitled You Asked for It.
² First U.S. paperback edition was retitled Too Hot to Handle.
³ Short story collection: (i) "From a View to a Kill," (ii) "For Your Eyes Only," (iii) "Risico," (iv) "Quantum of Solace", and (v) "The Hildebrand Rarity."
4 Subject of a legal battle over story credit which led to the book's storyline also being credited to Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham; see the controversy over Thunderball
5 Fleming gives co-author credit to "Vivienne Michel", the fictional heroine of the book; Fleming refused to allow a paperback edition to be published in the UK, but one was eventually published after his death. His agreement with Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman only allowed the use of the title for a movie.
6 For years, it has been alleged that Kingsley Amis, and/or others, completed this novel as Fleming died before a finished manuscript was created. Many Fleming biographers dispute this; see the controversy over The Man With The Golden Gun.
7 Posthumously compiled short story collection. Originally published with two stories: (i) "Octopussy" and (ii) "The Living Daylights". The 1967 paperback edition's title was shortened to Octopussy and a third story, "The Property of a Lady", increased its page count. In the 1990s, the collection's longer, original title was restored, and with the 2002 edition, the story, "007 in New York" (originally published in some editions of Thrilling Cities (see below) was added.


[edit] Children's story
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1964)

[edit] Non-fiction
The Diamond Smugglers (1957)
Thrilling Cities (1963; the American editions contain the short story "007 in New York")

[edit] Unfinished/unpublished works
Fleming kept a scrapbook containing notes and ideas for future James Bond stories. It included fragments of possible short stories or novels featuring Bond that were never published. Excerpts from some of these can be found in The Life of Ian Fleming by John Pearson.[4]
The author Geoffrey Jenkins worked with Fleming on a James Bond story idea between 1957 and 1964. After Fleming's death, Jenkins was commissioned by Bond publishers Glidrose Productions to turn this story, Per Fine Ounce, into a novel, but it was never published.
In 1960 Fleming was commissioned by the Kuwait Oil Company to write a book on the country and its oil industry. The typescript is titled State of Excitement: Impressions of Kuwait but was never published due to Kuwait government disapproval. According to Fleming: "The Oil Company expressed approval of the book but felt it their duty to submit the typescript to members of the Kuwait Government for their approval. The Sheikhs concerned found unpalatable certain mild comments and criticisms and particularly the passages referring to the adventurous past of the country which now wishes to be 'civilised' in every respect and forget its romantic origins."[5]

[edit] Biographical films
Goldeneye: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming, 1989. A TV movie starring Charles Dance as Fleming. The movie focuses on Fleming's life during World War II, and his love life, and the factors that led to his creation of James Bond.
Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming, 1990. A TV movie starring Jason Connery (son of Sean) as the writer in a fanciful dramatisation of his career in British intelligence. His life is depicted with the kind of Bond-like action and glamour that Fleming secretly wished he could have had.
Ian Fleming: Bondmaker, 2005. A TV documentary/drama by Wall to Wall first broadcast on BBC in August 2005. Laurence Olivier Theatre Award-winning British actor Ben Daniels portrays Ian Fleming.[6]

[edit] References
^ http://phg.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/27/2/153.pdf
^ Chancellor, Henry (2005). James Bond: The Man and His World. John Murray. ISBN 0-7195-6815-3.
^ Chancellor, Henry James Bond the Man and His World (2005)
^ http://www.ajb007.co.uk/articles/007/scrapbook/
^ Annotation by Fleming in the original typescript. Fleming mss., Lilly Library, Indiana. http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/etexts/fleming/
^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0479931/fullcredits

Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding (April 22, 1707 – October 8, 1754) was an English novelist and dramatist known for his rich earthy humour and satirical prowess, and as the author of the novel Tom Jones.

Aside from his literary achievements, he has a significant place in the history of law-enforcement, having founded what some have called London's first police force, the Bow Street Runners


Biography
Born into an aristocratic family at Sharpham near Glastonbury in Somerset in 1707, Fielding was educated at Eton College, where he established a lifelong friendship with Pitt the Elder. His younger sister, Sarah, was also destined to be a successful writer.

After a romantic episode with a young woman that ended in his getting into trouble with the law, he went to London where his literary career began.

In 1728, he traveled to Leiden to study classics and law at the University. However, due to lack of money he was obliged to return to London and he began writing for the theatre, some of his work being savagely critical of the contemporary government under Sir Robert Walpole.

The Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737 is alleged to be a direct result of his activities. The particular play that triggered the Licensing Act was The Vision of the Golden Rump, but Fielding's satires had set the tone.

Once the Licensing Act passed, political satire on the stage was virtually impossible, and playwrights whose works were staged were viewed as suspect. Fielding therefore retired from the theatre and resumed his career in law and, in order to support his wife Charlotte Cradock and two children, he became a barrister.

His lack of money sense meant that he and his family often endured periods of poverty, but he was also helped by Ralph Allen, a wealthy benefactor who later formed the basis of Squire Allworthy in Tom Jones. After Fielding's death, Allen provided for the education and support of his children.

Fielding never stopped writing political satire and satires of current arts and letters. His Tragedy of Tragedies of Tom Thumb (for which Hogarth designed the frontispiece) was, for example, quite successful as a printed play.

He also contributed a number of works to journals of the day. He wrote for Tory periodicals, usually under the name of "Captain Hercules Vinegar".

As Justice of the Peace he issued a warrant for the arrest of Colley Cibber for "murder of the English language".

During the late 1730s and early 1740s Fielding continued to air his liberal and anti-Jacobite views in satirical articles and newspapers. Almost by accident, in anger at the success of Richardson's Pamela, Fielding took to writing novels in 1741 and his first major success was Shamela, an anonymous parody of Samuel Richardson's melodramatic novel. It is a satire that follows the model of the famous Tory satirists of the previous generation (Jonathan Swift and John Gay, in particular).

He followed this up with Joseph Andrews (1742), an original work supposedly dealing with Pamela's brother, Joseph. Although also begun as a parody, this work developed into an accomplished novel in its own right and is considered to mark Fielding's debut as a serious novelist.

In 1743, he published a novel in the Miscellanies volume III (which was the first volume of the Miscellanies). This was The History of the Life of the Late Mr Jonathan Wild the Great.

This novel is sometimes thought of as his first because he almost certainly began composing it before he wrote Shamela and Joseph Andrews. It is a satire of Walpole that draws a parallel between Walpole and Jonathan Wild, the infamous gang leader and highwayman.

He implicitly compares the Whig party in Parliament with a gang of thieves being run by Walpole, whose constant desire to be a "Great Man" (a common epithet for Walpole) should culminate only in the antithesis of greatness: being hanged.

His anonymously-published The Female Husband of 1746 is a fictionalized account of a notorious case in which a female transvestite was tried for duping another woman into marriage. Though a minor item in Fielding's total oeuvre, the subject is consistent with his ongoing preoccupation with fraud, sham, and masks.

His greatest work was Tom Jones (1749), a meticulously constructed picaresque novel telling the convoluted and hilarious tale of how a foundling came into a fortune.

Charlotte, on whom he later modeled the heroines of both Tom Jones and Amelia, died in 1744. Three years later Fielding - disregarding public opinion - married her former maid, Mary, who was pregnant.

Despite this, his consistent anti-Jacobism and support for the Church of England led to him being rewarded a year later with the position of London's Chief Magistrate, and his literary career went from strength to strength.

Joined by his younger half-brother John, he helped found what some have called London's first police force, the Bow Street Runners in 1749.

According to the historian G.M. Trevelyan, they were two of the best magistrates in eighteenth-century London, and did a great deal to enhance the cause of judicial reform and improve prison conditions.

His influential pamphlets and enquiries included a proposal for the abolition of public hangings. [1] This did not, however, imply opposition to capital punishment as such—as evident, for example, in his presiding in 1751 over the trial of the notorious criminal James Field, finding him guilty in a robbery and sentencing him to hang.

However, Fielding's ardent commitment to the cause of justice as a great humanitarian in the 1750s, coincided with a rapid deterioration in his health to such an extent that he went abroad to Portugal in 1754 in search of a cure. Gout, asthma and other afflictions meant that he had to use crutches.

He died in Lisbon two months later and his tomb at the English Church may be visited. Despite being now blind, John Fielding succeeded his older brother as Chief Magistrate and became known as the 'Blind Beak' of Bow Street for his ability to recognise criminals by their voice alone.


[edit] Literary Style
Whereas Defoe and Richardson both attempt to hide the fictional nature of their work under the guise of 'memoirs' and 'letters' respectively, Henry Fielding adopted a position which represented a new departure in terms of prose fiction—in no way do his novels constitute an effort to disguise literary devices. In fact, he was the first major novelist to openly admit that his prose fiction was pure artefact. Also, in comparison with his arch rival and contemporary, Richardson, Fielding presents his reader with a much wider range of characters taken from all social classes.

Fielding's lack of psychological realism (i.e. the feelings and emotions of his characters are rarely explored in any depth) can perhaps be put down to his overriding concern to reveal the universal order of things. It can be argued that his novel Tom Jones reflects its author's essentially neoclassical outlook—character is something the individual is blessed with at birth, a part of life's natural order or pattern. Characters within Fielding's novels also correspond largely to types; e.g. Squire Western is a typically boorish and uncultivated Tory squire, obsessed with fox hunting, drinking and acquiring more property.

So Fielding's comic epic contains a range of wonderful—but essentially static—characters whose motives and behaviour are largely predetermined. There is little emotional depth to his portrayal of them, and the complex realities of interactive human relationships that are so much a part of the modern novel are of negligible importance to him. Perhaps the character we come to know best is the figure of the omniscient narrator himself (i.e. Fielding) whose company some of his readers come to enjoy.[2]


[edit] References
^ Words, Words, Words, From the Beginnings to the 18th Century, La Spiga languages, 2003
^ Words, Words, Words, From the Beginnings to the 18th Century, La Spiga languages, 2003

[edit] Partial list of works
Love in Several Masques - play, 1728
Rape upon Rape - play, 1730. Adapted by Bernard Miles as Lock Up Your Daughters! in 1959, filmed in 1974
The Temple Beau - play, 1730
The Author's Farce - play, 1730
The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb - play, 1731
Grub-Street Opera - play, 1731
The Modern Husband - play, 1732
Pasquin - play, 1736
The Historical Register for the Year 1736 - play, 1737
An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews - novel, 1741
The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend, Mr. Abraham Abrams (Joseph Andrews) - novel, 1742
The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great - novel, 1743, ironic treatment of Jonathan Wild, the most notorious underworld figure of the time.
Miscellanies - collection of works, 1743, contained the poem Part of Juvenal's Sixth Satire, Modernized in Burlesque Verse
The Female Husband or the Surprising History of Mrs Mary alias Mr George Hamilton, who was convicted of having married a young woman of Wells and lived with her as her husband, taken from her own mouth since her confinement - pamphlet, fictionalized report, 1746
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling - novel, 1749
A Journey from This World to the Next - 1749
Amelia - novel, 1751
The Covent Garden Journal - 1752
Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon - travel narrative, 1755
Tom Thumb N.D.