Benazir Bhutto


Benazir Bhutto (IPA: [beːnɜziːr bʰʊʈʈoː]; 21 June 1953 - 27 December 2007) was a Pakistani politician. Bhutto was the first woman elected to lead a post-colonial Muslim state. She was twice elected Prime Minister of Pakistan. She was sworn in for the first time in 1988 but removed from office 20 months later under orders of then-president Ghulam Ishaq Khan on grounds of alleged corruption. In 1993 Bhutto was re-elected but was again removed in 1996 on similar charges, this time by President Farooq Leghari.

Bhutto went into self-imposed exile in Dubai in 1998, where she remained until she returned to Pakistan on October 18, 2007, after reaching an understanding with General Musharraf by which she was granted amnesty and all corruption charges were withdrawn.

She was the eldest child of former premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a Pakistani of Sindhi extraction, and Begum ("Lady") Nusrat Bhutto, a Pakistani of Iranian-Kurdish extraction. Her paternal grandfather was Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto who came to Larkana Sindh before partition from his native town of Bhatto Kalan which was situated in the Indian state of Haryana.

She was assassinated on December 27, 2007 in a presumed suicide bomb attack during a political rally of the Pakistan Peoples Party in the town of Rawalpindi. Ex-government spokesman Tariq Azim Khan said that, although it appeared that she'd been shot, it was unclear whether her bullet wounds had been caused by a shooting or shrapnel from the bomb.

Education and personal life
Benazir Bhutto was born in Karachi, Dominion of Pakistan on June 21, 1953. She attended the Lady Jennings Nursery School and then the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Karachi.After two years of schooling at the Rawalpindi Presentation Convent, she was sent to the Jesus and Mary Convent at Murree. She passed her O-level examination at the age of 15. She then went on to complete her A-Levels from the Karachi Grammar School.

After completing her early education in Pakistan, she pursued her higher education in the United States. From 1969 to 1973 she attended Radcliffe College, and then Harvard University, where she obtained a B.A. degree cum laude in comparative government.She was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

The next phase of her education took place in the United Kingdom. Between 1973 and 1977 Bhutto studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She completed a course in International Law and Diplomacy while at Oxford. In December 1976 she was elected president of the Oxford Union, becoming the first Asian woman to head the prestigious debating society.

On 18 December 1987 she married Asif Ali Zardari in Karachi. The couple had three children: Bilawal, Bakhtwar, and Aseefa.


Family 

Benazir Bhutto's father, former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was dismissed as Prime Minister in 1975, on charges similar to those Benazir Bhutto would later face. Later, in a 1977 trial on charges of conspiracy to murder the father of dissident politician Ahmed Raza Kasuri, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was sentenced to death.

Despite the accusation being "widely doubted by the public",[8] and despite many clemency appeals from foreign leaders, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged on 4 April 1979. Appeals for clemency were dismissed by acting President General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Benazir Bhutto and her mother were held in a "police camp" until the end of May, after the execution.

In 1980, Benazir Bhutto's brother Shahnawaz was killed under suspicious circumstances, in France. The killing of another of her brothers, Mir Murtaza, in 1996, contributed to destabilizing her second term as Prime Minister.


Prime Minister

Benazir Bhutto on a visit to Washington, D.C. in 1988Bhutto, who had returned to Pakistan after completing her studies, found herself placed under house arrest in the wake of her father's imprisonment and subsequent execution. Having been allowed in 1984 to return to the United Kingdom, she became a leader in exile of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), her father's party, though she was unable to make her political presence felt in Pakistan until after the death of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. She had succeeded her mother as leader of the Pakistan People's Party and the pro-democracy opposition to the Zia-ul-Haq regime.

On 16 November 1988, in the first open election in more than a decade, Benazir's PPP won the largest bloc of seats in the National Assembly. Bhutto was sworn in as Prime Minister of a coalition government on 2 December, becoming at age 35 the youngest person — and the first woman — to head the government of a Muslim-majority state in modern times. That same year, People Magazine included Ms. Bhutto in its list of The Fifty Most Beautiful People. In 1989, she was awarded the Prize For Freedom by the Liberal International.

Bhutto's government was dismissed in 1990 following charges of corruption, for which she never was tried. Zia's protégé Nawaz Sharif subsequently came to power. Bhutto was re-elected in 1993 but was dismissed three years later amid various corruption scandals by then president Farooq Leghari, who used the Eighth Amendment discretionary powers to dissolve the government. The Supreme Court upheld President Leghari's dismissal by a 6-1 ruling. In 2006, Interpol issued a request for her arrest and that of her husband.

The criticism against Benazir came largely from the Punjabi elites and powerful landlord families who opposed Bhutto as she pushed Pakistan into nationalist reform, opposing feudals, whom she blamed for the destabilization of Pakistan.


Musharraf's disqualification

On 17 September 2007 Benazir Bhutto accused Pervez Musharraf's allies of pushing Pakistan into crisis by their refusal to permit democratic reforms and power-sharing. A nine-member panel of Supreme Court judges deliberated on six petitions (including one from Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan's largest Islamic group) asserting that Musharraf be disqualified from contending for the presidency of Pakistan. Bhutto stated that her party could join one of the opposition groups, potentially that of Nawaz Sharif. Attorney-general Malik Mohammed Qayyum stated that, pendente lite, the Election Commission was "reluctant" to announce the schedule for the presidential vote. Bhutto's party's Farhatullah Babar stated that the Constitution could bar Musharraf from being elected again because he was already chief of the army: "As Gen. Musharraf was disqualified from contesting for President, he has prevailed upon the Election Commission to arbitrarily and illegally tamper with the Constitution of Pakistan."


Policies for women

During election campaigns the Bhutto government voiced its concern for women's social and health issues, including the issue of discrimination against women. Bhutto announced plans to establish women's police stations, courts, and women's development banks. Despite these promises, Bhutto did not propose any legislation to improve welfare services for women. During her election campaigns, Bhutto promised to repeal controversial laws (such as Hudood and Zina ordinances) that curtail the rights of women in Pakistan. Her party never did fulfil these promises during her tenures as Prime Minister, due to immense pressure from the opposition.

Only after her stints as Prime Minister did her party initiate legislation to repeal the Zina ordinance, during General Musharraf's regime. These efforts were defeated by the right-wing religious parties that dominated the legislatures at the time.


Policy on Taliban

The Taliban took power in Kabul in September 1996. It was during Bhutto's rule that the Taliban gained prominence in Afghanistan. She viewed the Taliban as a group that could stabilize Afghanistan and enable trade access to the Central Asian republics, according to author Stephen Coll.He claims that her government provided military and financial support for the Taliban, even sending a small unit of the Pakistani army into Afghanistan.

Recently, she has taken an anti-Taliban stance and has condemned terrorist acts committed by the Taliban and their supporters.


Exile

After being dismissed by the then-president of Pakistan on charges of corruption her party lost the October elections. She served as leader of the opposition while Nawaz Sharif became Prime Minister for the next three years. Elections were held again in October 1993 and her PPP coalition was victorious, returning Bhutto to office. In 1996 her government was once again dismissed on corruption charges.


Charges of corruption

French, Polish, Spanish and Swiss documents have fueled the charges of corruption against Bhutto and her husband. Bhutto and her husband faced a number of legal proceedings, including a charge of laundering money through Swiss banks. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, spent eight years in prison on similar corruption charges. Zardari, released from jail in 2004, has suggested that his time in prison involved torture; human rights groups have supported his claim that his rights were violated.

A 1998 New York Times investigative report indicates that Pakistani investigators have documents that uncover a network of bank accounts, all linked to the family's lawyer in Switzerland, with Asif Zardari as the principal shareholder. According to the article, documents released by the French authorities indicated that Zardari offered exclusive rights to Dassault, a French aircraft manufacturer, to replace the air force's fighter jets in exchange for a 5% commission to be paid to a Swiss corporation controlled by Zardari. The article also said a Dubai company received an exclusive license to import gold into Pakistan for which Asif Zardari received payments of more than $10M into his Dubai-based Citibank accounts. The owner of the company denied that he had made payments to Zardari and claims the documents were forged.

Bhutto maintains that the charges leveled against her and her husband are purely political."Most of those documents are fabricated," she said, "and the stories that have been spun around them are absolutely wrong." An Auditor General of Pakistan (AGP) report supports Bhutto's claim. It presents information suggesting that Benazir Bhutto was ousted from power in 1990 as a result of a witch hunt approved by then-president Ghulam Ishaq Khan. The AGP report says Khan illegally paid legal advisers 28 million Rupees to file 19 corruption cases against Bhutto and her husband in 1990-92.

The assets held by Bhutto and her husband have been scrutinized. The prosecutors have alleged that their Swiss bank accounts contain £740 million.[19] Zardari also bought a neo-Tudor mansion and estate worth over £4 million in Surrey, England, UK.[20][21] The Pakistani investigations have tied other overseas properties to Zardari's family. These include a $2.5 million manor in Normandy owned by Zardari's parents, who had modest assets at the time of his marriage.Bhutto denies holding substantive overseas assets.

Bhutto and her husband until recently continued to face wide-ranging charges of official corruption in connection with hundreds of millions of dollars of "commissions" on government contracts and tenders. But because of a power-sharing deal brokered in October 2007 between Bhutto and Musharraf, she and her husband have been granted amnesty. If it stands, this development could trigger a number of Swiss banks to 'unlock' accounts that were frozen in the late 1990s. The executive order could in principle be challenged by the judiciary, although the judiciary's future was uncertain due to the same recent developments.


Switzerland
On 23 July 1998, the Swiss Government handed over documents to the government of Pakistan which relate to corruption allegations against Benazir Bhutto and her husband. The documents included a formal charge of money laundering by Swiss authorities against Zardari. The Pakistani government had been conducting a wide-ranging inquiry to account for more than $13.7 million frozen by Swiss authorities in 1997 that was allegedly stashed in banks by Bhutto and her husband. The Pakistani government recently filed criminal charges against Bhutto in an effort to track down an estimated $1.5 billion she and her husband are alleged to have received in a variety of criminal enterprises. The documents suggest that the money Zardari was alleged to have laundered was accessible to Benazir Bhutto and had been used to buy a diamond necklace for over $175,000.

The PPP has responded by flatly denying the charges, suggesting that Swiss authorities have been misled by false evidence provided by Islamabad.

On 6 August 2003, Swiss magistrates found Benazir and her husband guilty of money laundering. They were given six-month suspended jail terms, fined $50,000 each and were ordered to pay $11 million to the Pakistani government. The six-year trial concluded that Benazir and Zardari deposited in Swiss accounts $10 million given to them by a Swiss company in exchange for a contract in Pakistan. The couple said they would appeal. The Pakistani investigators say Zardari opened a Citibank account in Geneva in 1995 through which they say he passed some $40 million of the $100 million he received in payoffs from foreign companies doing business in Pakistan.

In October 2007, Daniel Zappelli, chief prosecutor of the canton of Geneva, said he received the conclusions of a money laundering investigation against former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on Monday, but it was unclear whether there would be any further legal action against her in Switzerland.


Poland
The Polish Government has given Pakistan 500 pages of documentation relating to corruption allegations against Benazir Bhutto and her husband. These charges are in regard to the purchase of 8,000 tractors in a 1997 deal. According to Pakistani officials, the Polish papers contain details of illegal commissions paid by the tractor company in return for agreeing to their contract. It was alleged that the arrangement "skimmed" Rs 103 mn rupees ($2 million) in kickbacks. "The documentary evidence received from Poland confirms the scheme of kickbacks laid out by Asif Zardari and Benazir Bhutto in the name of (the) launching of Awami tractor scheme," APP said. Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari allegedly received a 7.15 percent commission on the purchase through their front men, Jens Schlegelmilch and Didier Plantin of Dargal S.A., who received about $1.969 million for supplying 5,900 Ursus Tractors.


France
Potentially the most lucrative deal alleged in the documents involved the effort by Dassault Aviation, a French military contractor. French authorities indicated in 1998 that Bhutto's husband, Zardari, offered exclusive rights to Dassault to replace the air force’s fighter jets in exchange for a five percent commission to be paid to a corporation in Switzerland controlled by Zardari.

At the time, French corruption laws forbade bribery of French officials but permitted payoffs to foreign officials, and even made the payoffs tax-deductible in France. However, France changed this law in 2000.


Western Asia
In the largest single payment investigators have discovered, a gold bullion dealer in the Western Asia was alleged to have deposited at least $10 million into one of Zardari's accounts after the Bhutto government gave him a monopoly on gold imports that sustained Pakistan's jewellery industry. The money was allegedly deposited into Zardari's Citibank account in Dubai.

Pakistan's Arabian Sea coast, stretching from Karachi to the border with Iran, has long been a gold smugglers' haven. Until the beginning of Bhutto's second term, the trade, running into hundreds of millions of dollars a year, was unregulated, with slivers of gold called biscuits, and larger weights in bullion, carried on planes and boats that travel between the Persian Gulf and the largely unguarded Pakistani coast.

Shortly after Bhutto returned as prime minister in 1993, a Pakistani bullion trader in Dubai, Abdul Razzak Yaqub, proposed a deal: in return for the exclusive right to import gold, Razzak would help the government regularize the trade. In November 1994, Pakistan's Commerce Ministry wrote to Razzak informing him that he had been granted a license that made him, for at least the next two years, Pakistan's sole authorized gold importer. In an interview in his office in Dubai, Razzak acknowledged that he had used the license to import more than $500 million in gold into Pakistan, and that he had travelled to Islamabad several times to meet with Bhutto and Zardari. But he denied that there had been any corruption or secret deals. "I have not paid a single cent to Zardari," he said.

Razzak claims that someone in Pakistan who wished to destroy his reputation had contrived to have his company wrongly identified as the depositor. "Somebody in the bank has cooperated with my enemies to make false documents," he said.


During exile

2002 election

The Bhutto-led Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) secured the highest number of votes (28.42%) and eighty seats (23.16%) in the national assembly in the October 2002 general elections. Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) managed to win eighteen seats only. Some of the elected candidates of Pakistan Peoples Party formed a faction of their own, calling it PPP-Patriots which was being led by Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat, the former leader of Bhutto led PPP. They later formed a coalition government with Musharraf's party, PML-Q.


Early 2000s
In 2002, Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf amended Pakistan's constitution to ban prime ministers from serving more than two terms. This disqualifies Bhutto from ever holding the office again. This move was widely considered to be a direct attack on former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. On 3 August 2003, Bhutto became a member of Minhaj ul Quran International (An international Muslim educational and welfare organization).

Since September 2004, Bhutto lived in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where she cared for her children and her mother, who was suffering from Alzheimer's disease, travelling to give lectures and keeping in touch with the Pakistan Peoples Party's supporters. She and her three children were reunited with her husband and their father in December 2004 after more than five years.

On 27 January 2007 she was invited by the United States to speak to President Bush and congressional and State Department officials.

Bhutto appeared as a panellist on the BBC TV programme Question Time in the UK in March 2007. She has also appeared on BBC current affairs programme Newsnight on several occasions. She rebuffed comments made by Muhammad Ijaz-ul-Haq in May 2007 regarding the knighthood of Salman Rushdie, citing that he was calling for the assassination of foreign citizens.

Bhutto had declared her intention to return to Pakistan within 2007, which she did, in spite of Musharraf's statements of May 2007 about not allowing her to return ahead of the country's general election, due late 2007 or early 2008. It was speculated that she may be offered the office of Prime Minister again.

Arthur Herman, a U.S. historian, in a controversial letter published in The Wall Street Journal on 14 June 2007, in response to an article by Bhutto highly critical of the president and his policies, has described her as "One of the most incompetent leaders in the history of South Asia", and asserted that she and other elites in Pakistan hate Musharraf because he was a muhajir, the son of one of millions of Indian Muslims who fled to Pakistan during partition in 1947. Herman has claimed, "Although it was muhajirs who agitated for the creation of Pakistan in the first place, many native Pakistanis view them with contempt and treat them as third-class citizens."

Nonetheless, as of mid-2007, the US appeared to be pushing for a deal in which Musharraf would remain as president but step down as military head, and either Bhutto or one of her nominees would become prime minister.

On 11 July 2007, the Associated Press, in an article about the possible aftermath of the Red Mosque incident, wrote:

Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister and opposition leader expected by many to return from exile and join Musharraf in a power-sharing deal after year-end general elections, praised him for taking a tough line on the Red Mosque. I'm glad there was no cease-fire with the militants in the mosque because cease-fires simply embolden the militants," she told Britain's Sky TV on Tuesday. "There will be a backlash, but at some time we have to stop appeasing the militants."

This remark about the Red Mosque was seen with dismay in Pakistan as reportedly hundreds of young students were burned to death and remains are untraceable and cases are being heard in Pakistani supreme court as a missing persons issue. This and subsequent support for Musharaf led Elder Bhutto's comrades like Khar to criticize her publicly.

Bhutto however advised Musharraf in an early phase of the latter's quarrel with the Chief Justice, to restore him. Her PPP did not capitalize on its CEC member, Aitzaz, the chief Barrister for the Chief Justice, in successful restoration. Rather he was seen as a rival and was isolated.


In July 2007, some of Bhutto's frozen funds were released. Bhutto still faces significant charges of corruption. In an 8 August 2007 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Bhutto revealed the meeting focused on her desire to return to Pakistan for the 2008 elections, and of Musharraf retaining the Presidency with Bhutto as Prime Minister. On 29 August 2007, Bhutto announced that Musharraf would step down as chief of the army. On 1 September Bhutto vowed to return to Pakistan "very soon", regardless of whether or not she reached a power-sharing deal with Musharraf before then.

Many observersconsider such a deal improbable. In summer 2002 Musharraf implemented a two-term limit on Prime Ministers. Both Bhutto and Musharraf's other chief rival, Nawaz Sharif, have already served two terms as Prime Minister. Musharraf's allies in parliament, especially the PMLQ, are unlikely to reverse the changes to allow Prime Ministers to seek third terms, nor to make particular exceptions for either Benazir or Sharif.

On 2 October 2007, Gen. Pervez Musharraf named Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, as vice chief of the army starting 8 October with the intent that if Musharraf won the presidency and resigned his military post, Kayani would become chief of the army. Meanwhile, Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed stated that officials agreed to grant Benazir Bhutto amnesty versus pending corruption charges. She has emphasized the smooth transition and return to civilian rule and has asked Pervez Musharaf to shed uniform.

On 5 October 2007 Musharraf signed the National Reconciliation Ordinance, giving amnesty to Bhutto and other political leaders—except exiled former premier Nawaz Sharif—in all court cases against them, including all corruption charges. The Ordinance came a day before Musharraf faced the crucial presidential poll. Both Bhutto's oppsition party, the PPP, and the ruling PMLQ, were involved in negotiations beforehand about the deal. In return, Bhutto and the PPP agreed not to boycott the Presidential election.

On 6 October 2007, Pervez Musharraf won a parliamentary election for President. However, the Supreme Court ruled that no winner can be officially proclaimed until it finishes deciding on whether it was legal for Musharraf to run for President while remaining Army General. Bhutto's PPP party did not join the other opposition parties' boycott of the election, but did abstain from voting. Later Bhutto demanded security coverage on-par with the President's. Bhutto also contracted foreign security firms for her protection.


Return to Pakistan and assassination attempts

After eight years in exile in Dubai and London, Bhutto returned to Karachi on 18 October 2007 to prepare for the 2008 national elections.


En route to a rally in Karachi on 18 October 2007, two explosions occurred shortly after Bhutto had landed and left Jinnah International Airport. She was not injured but the explosions, later found to be a suicide-bomb attack, killed 136 people and injured at least 450. The dead included at least 50 of the security guards from her Pakistan Peoples Party who had formed a human chain around her truck to keep potential bombers away, as well as 6 police officers. A number of senior officials were injured. Bhutto was escorted unharmed from the scene.

Bhutto later claimed that she had warned the Pakistani government that suicide bomb squads would target her upon her return to Pakistan and that the government had failed to act. She was careful not to blame Pervez Musharraf for the attacks, accusing instead "certain individuals [within the government] who abuse their positions, who abuse their powers" to advance the cause of Islamic militants. Shortly after the attempt on her life, Bhutto wrote a letter Musharraf naming four persons whom she suspected of carrying out the attack. Those named included Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, a rival PML-Q politician and chief minister of Pakistan's Punjab province, Hamid Gul, former director of the Inter-Services Intelligence, and Ijaz Shah, the director general of the Intelligence Bureau, another of the country’s intelligence agencies. All those named are close associates of General Musharraf. Bhutto has a long history of accusing parts of the government, particularly Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agencies, of working against her and her party because they oppose her liberal, secular agenda. Benazir claimed that the ISI has for decades backed militant Islamic groups in Kashmir and in Afghanistan.

There are discrepancies between the accounts published in western newspapers, Pakistani tabloids, and eye witness accounts of the assassination attempt. Benazir's husband categorically refused to accept that the suicide bombing was an attack by Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Correspondingly, Pakistani Taliban leader Mehsud denied responsibility and Jamaat Islami, an opponent of Bhutto, announced a three days mourning period for the dead, thus lending credibility to Bhutto's claims that the attack was engineered by close associates in the government of General Musharraf.

Benazir's associates describe an initial small grenade attack, followed twenty seconds later by larger explosives, one right and and one left of the truck carrying Benazir; this was followed by a brief burst of gun fire directed at vehicle's roof. The PPP sources claim that yet another non-exploded bomb was fixed on a bridge which the vehicle had already crossed.

Some witnesses report there was a sizzling sound, apparently an underground wire signal for the explosive devices. Benazir escaped, as she was protected by a 30-inch tall bullet-proof lining on the top of truck and was reportedly descending into the vehicle's interior at the time; hence neither shrapnel nor bullets killed her. She was also protected by a "human cordon" of supporters who had anticipated suicide attacks and formed a chain around her to prevent potential bombers from getting near her. The total number of injured, according to PPP sources, stood at 1000, with at least 160 dead (The New York Times claims 134 dead and about 450 injured). The PPP lodged a complaint and FIR in protest, but was cautious in laying blame.

A few days later, Bhutto's lawyer Senator Farooq H. Naik said he received a letter threatening to kill his client. The letter also claims to have links with al-Qaeda and followers of Usama bin Laden.


Response to 2007 State of Emergency
Main article: 2007 Pakistani state of emergency
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On November 3, 2007 President Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency, citing actions by the Supreme Court of Pakistan and religious extremism in the nation. Bhutto returned to the country, interrupting a visit to family in Dubai. The AP reports that she was greeted by supporters chanting slogans at the airport. After staying in her plane for several hours she was driven to her home in Lahore, accompanied by hundreds of supporters. She made the following comments critical of Musharraf's declaration of emergency:

"Unless General Musharraf reverses the course it will be very difficult to have fair elections." In other telephone comments to Sky News television she said, "I agree with him that we are facing a political crisis, but I believe the problem was dictatorship, I don't believe the solution was dictatorship. She still probably has chances of becoming PME

"The extremists need a dictatorship, and dictatorship needs extremists.".


House arrest
Wikinews has related news:
Pakistan lifts house arrest of former PM Benazir BhuttoOn November 8, 2007, Bhutto was placed under house arrest just a few hours before she was due to lead and address a rally against the state of emergency. She made some attempts to come out of house arrest but police stopped her. All roads to her house were closed. The following day, the Pakistani government announced that Bhutto's arrest warrant had been withdrawn and that she would be free to travel and to appear at public rallies. However, leaders of other opposition political parties remained prohibited from speaking in public.


Preparation for 2008 elections
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On November 24th 2007, Benazir filed her nominations papers for January's Parliamentary elections, on Monday she filed papers in the Larkana constituency for two regular seats, this comes as former Pakistani Prime Minster Nawaz Sharif made his return to Pakistan after 8 years of deportation in Saudi Arabia

On November 30th 2007, after President Pervez Musharraf gave up his uniform on Wednesday 27th November 2007, and then was sworn in as a civilian president. And announced that he would lift the state of emergency placed on the country on 3 November 2007, on December 16th. Benazir welcomed the announcement and launched a manifesto outlining her party's domestic issues. Bhutto told journalists in Islamabad that her party the Pakistan People's Party was focusing on the five E's which were employment, education, energy, environment, equality.

On December 2, 2007 it was announced that Ms Bhutto would meet former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to discuss a possible boycott of the January 8 elections. Speaking in Peshawar Ms Bhutto said an boycott of the elections would only help legitimize President Pervez Musharraf declaration of Emergency Rule which he imposed on 3 November 2007. On November 30th, Musharraf announced that he would end the month long emergency rule on December 16th in time for the January elections.

On December 4th 2007, in a meeting between former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Ms Bhutto meet to discuss a possible boycott for the elections. They said that a committee would be set up to reveal their demands, if they were to take part in the elections. Mr Sharif was informed that he was banned from contesting in the elections on December 3rd. Mr Sharif has until Friday to appeal against the ban. Ms Bhutto said that agreeing the demands would be a "major confidence-building measure" between the two leaders. Mr Sharif was to boycott the election, but Ms Bhutto has stated that a boycott would fall into the hands of President Pervez Musharraf.

On December 8th 2007 it was reported that three unidentified gunmen stormed in Ms Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party office in the southern western province of Baluchistan the shooting occurred in the capital of the city Quetta it was confirmed by the local police that three men have been killed with one injured.


Assassination

Main article: 27 December 2007 Benazir Bhutto assassination
On December 27, 2007, Benazir Bhutto was killed by a fatal gunshot wound to the head, with secondary wounds to the neck and chest (http://www.ecanadanow.com/news/world/breaking--benazir-bhutto-assassinated-20071227.html), as she was entering her vehicle to leave a political rally for the Pakistan People's Party in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.[63] The assassin then detonated his explosives, killing about 20 people and wounding others. The attack occurred just after Ms. Bhutto left the rally, where she was giving a campaign address to party supporters in the run-up to the January 2008 parliamentary elections.[64] She died at 6:16 pm local time.


Benazir Bhutto's books
Benazir Bhutto, (1983), Pakistan: The gathering storm, Vikas Pub. House, ISBN 0706924959
Benazir Bhutto, (1988), Hija de Oriente Seix Barral, ISBN 8432246336

Benazir Bhutto (1989). Daughter of the East. Hamish Hamilton. ISBN 0-241-12398-4.
Benazir Bhutto (1989). Daughter of Destiny: An Autobiography. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-66983-4.

Books about Benazir Bhutto
W.F.Pepper, (1983), Benazir Bhutto, WF Pepper, ISBN 0946781001
Rafiq Zakaria (1990). The Trial of Benazir. Sangam Books. ISBN 0-861-32265-7.
Katherine M. Doherty, Caraig A. Doherty , (1990), Benazir Bhutto (Impact Biographies Series), Franklin Watts, ISBN 0531109364
Rafiq Zakaria, (1991), The Trial of Benazir Bhutto: An Insight into the Status of Women in Islam, Eureka Pubns, ISBN 9679783200
Diane Sansevere-Dreher, (1991), Benazir Bhutto (Changing Our World Series), Bantam Books (Mm), ISBN 0553158570
Christina Lamb, (1992), Waiting for Allah, Penguin Books Ltd, ISBN 0140143343
M FATHERS, (1992), Biography of Benazir Bhutto, W.H. Allen / Virgin Books, ISBN 024554965X
Elizabeth Bouchard, (1994), Benazir Bhutto: Prime Minister (Library of Famous Women), Blackbirch Pr Inc, ISBN 1567110274
Iqbal Akhund, (2000), Trial and Error: The Advent and Eclipse of Benazir Bhutto, OUP Pakistan, ISBN 0195791606
Libby Hughes, (2000), Benazir Bhutto: From Prison to Prime Minister, Backinprint.Com, ISBN 0595003885
Iqbal Akhund, (2002), Benazir Hukoomat: Phela Daur, Kia Khoya, Kia Paya?, OUP Pakistan, ISBN 0195794214
Mercedes Anderson, (2004), Benazir Bhutto (Women in Politics), Chelsea House Publishers, ISBN 0791077322
Mary Englar, (2007), Benazir Bhutto: Pakistani Prime Minister and Activist, Compass Point Books, ISBN 0756517982
Ayesha Siddiqa Agha, (2007), Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan's Military Economy, Pluto Press, ISBN 0745325459

Other related publications
Abdullah Malik, (1988), Bhutto se Benazir tak: Siyasi tajziye, Maktabah-yi Fikr o Danish, ASIN B0000CRQJH
Bashir Riaz, (2000), Blind justice, Fiction House, ASIN B0000CPHP8
Khatm-i Nabuvat, ASIN B0000CRQ4A
Mujahid Husain, ((1999)), Kaun bara bad unvan: Benazir aur Navaz Sharif ki bad °unvaniyon par tahqiqati dastavez, Print La'in Pablisharz, ASIN B0000CRPC3
Ahmad Ejaz, (1993), Benazir Bhutto's foreign policy: A study of Pakistan's relations with major powers, Classic, ASIN B0000CQV0Y
Lubna Rafique, (1994), Benazir & British press, 1986-1990, Gautam, ASIN B0000CP41S
Sayyid Afzal Haidar, (1996), Bhutto trial, National Commission on History & Culture, ASIN B0000CPBFX
Mumtaz Husain Bazmi, (1996), Zindanon se aivanon tak, al-Hamd Pablikeshanz, ASIN B0000CRPOT
Unknown author, (1996), Napak sazish: Tauhin-i risalat ki saza ko khatm karne ka benazir sarkari mansubah, Intarnaishnal Institiyut af Tahaffuz-i


Quotes
"I find that whenever I am in power, or my father was in power, somehow good things happen. The economy picks up, we have good rains, water comes, people have crops. I think the reason this happens was that we want to give love and we receive love."

To participate in quiz related to Benazir Bhutto Visit this quiz site

Christopher Marlowe


Christopher "Kit" Marlowe (baptised 26 February 1564 – 30 May 1593) was an English dramatist, poet, and translator of the Elizabethan era. The foremost Elizabethan tragedian before William Shakespeare, he is known for his magnificent blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his own untimely death.

Early life

Marlowe was christened at St George's Church tower, CanterburyChristopher Marlowe was christened at St George's Church, Canterbury, on 26 February 1564. He was born to a shoemaker in Canterbury named John Marlowe and his wife Katherine. Marlowe attended The King's School, Canterbury (where a house is now named after him) and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge on a scholarship and received his bachelor of arts degree in 1584. In 1587 the university hesitated to award him his master's degree because of a rumour that he had converted to Roman Catholicism and intended to go to the English college at Rheims to prepare for the priesthood. However, his degree was awarded on schedule when the Privy Council intervened on his behalf, commending him for his "faithful dealing" and "good service" to the queen.[2] The nature of Marlowe's service was not specified by the Council, but their letter to the Cambridge authorities has provoked much speculation, notably the theory that Marlowe was operating as a secret agent working for Sir Francis Walsingham's intelligence service. No direct evidence supports this theory, although Marlowe obviously did serve the government in some capacity.


Literary career
Dido, Queen of Carthage seems to be Marlowe's first extant dramatic work, possibly written at Cambridge with Thomas Nashe.

Marlowe's first known play to be performed on the London stage was Tamburlaine (1587), a story of the conqueror Timur, who rises from a lowly shepherd to wage war on the kings of the world. It was one of the first popular English plays to use blank verse, and, with Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, it is generally considered the beginning of the mature phase of the Elizabethan theatre. Tamburlaine was a success, and Tamburlaine Part II soon followed.

The sequence of his remaining plays is unknown. All were written on controversial themes.

The Jew of Malta, depicting a Maltese Jew's barbarous revenge against the city authorities, features a prologue delivered by a character representing Machiavelli. It is also a complex play in that the Jew, Barabas, is consistently portrayed sympathetically (whilst the Christians are shown to be highly unsympathetic) and in his constant plotting and 'script writing' Barabas is often linked to the author himself.

Edward the Second is an English history play about the dethronement of the homosexual Edward II by his dissatisfied barons and French queen.

The Massacre at Paris is a short, sketchy play (believed to be a memorial construction made by actors) portraying the events surrounding the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572, an event that English Protestants frequently invoked as the blackest example of Catholic treachery. It also features a character, the silent "English Agent", rumoured to have been portraying, and possibly even played by, Marlowe himself (see below for links of Marlowe with the Elizabethan secret service). This play, along with Faustus, is believed to have been Marlowe's last play and is regarded as his most dangerous, dealing as it does with living monarchs and politicians, (at the time a treasonable act) and indeed addressing Elizabeth I herself in the last scene.

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, based on the recently published German Faustbuch, was the first dramatic version of the Faust legend of a scholar's dealing with the devil. Whilst versions of "The Devil's Pact" can be traced back to the 4th century, Marlowe deviates significantly by having his hero unable to "burn his books" or have his contract repudiated by a merciful god at the end of the play. Marlowe's protagonist is instead torn apart by demons and dragged off screaming to hell. Dr Faustus is a textual problem for scholars as it was highly edited (and possibly censored) and rewritten after Marlowe's death. Two versions of the play exist: the 1604 quarto, also known as the A text, and the 1616 quarto or B text. It seems that the A text is the most representative of Marlowe's work and is believed to be taken from "foul papers", uncorrected and jumbled manuscript copies, thus suggesting that it was incomplete at the time of Marlowe's killing.

Marlowe's plays were enormously successful, thanks in part, no doubt, to the imposing stage presence of Edward Alleyn. He was unusually tall for the time, and the haughty roles of Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas were probably written especially for him. Marlowe's plays were the foundation of the repertoire of Alleyn's company, the Admiral's Men, throughout the 1590s.

Marlowe also wrote poetry, including a, possibly, unfinished minor epic, Hero and Leander (published with a continuation by George Chapman in 1598), the popular lyric The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, and translations of Ovid's Amores and the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia.

The two parts of Tamburlaine were published in 1590; all Marlowe's other works were published posthumously. In 1599, his translation of Ovid was banned and copies publicly burned as part of Archbishop Whitgift's crackdown on offensive material.


The Marlowe legend

Marlowe Theatre, CanterburyAs with other writers of the period, such as Shakespeare, little is known about Marlowe. Most of the evidence is legal records and other official documents that tell us little about him. This has not stopped writers of both fiction and non-fiction from speculating about his activities and character. Marlowe has often been regarded as a spy, a brawler, a heretic, and a homosexual, as well as a "magician", "duellist", "tobacco-user", "counterfeiter", and "rakehell". The evidence for most of these claims is slight. The bare facts of Marlowe's life have been embellished by many writers into colourful, and often fanciful, narratives of the Elizabethan underworld.


Spying
Marlowe is often alleged to have been a government spy.


Possible evidence of spying
As noted above, in 1587 the Privy Council ordered Cambridge University to award Marlowe his MA, denying rumours that he intended to go to the English Catholic college in Rheims, saying instead that he had been engaged in unspecified "affaires" in the Queen's service. This from a document dated June 29th, 1587, from the Public Records Office - Acts of Privy Council.

It has sometimes been theorized that Marlowe was the "Morley" who was tutor to Arbella Stuart in 1589, described by Arbella's guardian, the Countess of Shrewsbury, as having hoped for an annuity of some £40 from Arbella, his being "so much damnified (i.e. having lost this much) by leaving the University".[3] This possibility was first raised in a TLS letter by E. St John Brooks in 1937; in a letter to Notes and Queries, John Baker has added that only Marlowe could be Arbella's tutor due to the absence of any other known "Morley" from the period with an MA and not otherwise occupied.Some biographers think that the "Morley" in question may have been a brother of the musician Thomas Morley. If Marlowe was Arbella's tutor, it might indicate that he was a spy, since Arbella, niece of Mary Queen of Scots and cousin of James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, was at the time a strong candidate for the succession of Elizabeth's throne.

In 1592, Marlowe was arrested in the Dutch town of Flushing for attempting to counterfeit coins. He was sent to be dealt with by the Lord Treasurer (Burghley) but no charge or imprisonment seems to have resulted.


Arrest and death
In early May 1593 several bills were posted about London threatening Protestant refugees from France and the Netherlands who had settled in the city. One of these, the "Dutch church libel", written in blank verse, contained allusions to several of Marlowe's plays and was signed "Tamburlaine." On 11 May the Privy Council ordered the arrest of those responsible for the libels. The next day, Marlowe's colleague Thomas Kyd was arrested. Kyd's lodgings were searched and a fragment of a heretical tract was found. Kyd asserted, possibly under torture, that it had belonged to Marlowe. Two years earlier they had both been working for an aristocratic patron, probably Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, and Kyd suggested that at this time, when they were sharing a workroom, the document had found its way among his papers. Marlowe's arrest was ordered on 18 May. Marlowe was not in London, but was staying with Thomas Walsingham, the cousin of the late Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's principal secretary in the 1580s and a man deeply involved in state espionage. However, he duly appeared before the Privy Council on 20 May and was instructed to "give his daily attendance on their Lordships, until he shall be licensed to the contrary." On 30 May, Marlowe was murdered.

Various versions of Marlowe's death were current at the time. Francis Meres says Marlowe was "stabbed to death by a bawdy serving-man, a rival of his in his lewd love" as punishment for his "epicurism and atheism". In 1917, in the Dictionary of National Biography, Sir Sidney Lee wrote that Marlowe was killed in a drunken fight, and this is still often stated as fact today.

The facts only came to light in 1925 when the scholar Leslie Hotson discovered the coroner's report on Marlowe's death in the Public Record Office. Marlowe had spent all day in a house (not a tavern, as is widely claimed, even in some biographies) in Deptford, owned by the widow Eleanor Bull, along with three men, Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley. All three had been employed by the Walsinghams. Skeres and Poley had helped snare the conspirators in the Babington plot. Frizer was a servant of Thomas Walsingham. Witnesses testified that Frizer and Marlowe had earlier argued over the bill, exchanging "divers malicious words." Later, while Frizer was sitting at a table between the other two and Marlowe was lying behind him on a couch, Marlowe snatched Frizer's dagger and began attacking him. In the ensuing struggle, according to the coroner's report, Marlowe was accidentally stabbed above the right eye, killing him instantly. The jury concluded that Frizer acted in self-defence, and within a month he was pardoned. Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St. Nicholas, Deptford, on 1 June 1593.

Marlowe's death is alleged by some to be an assassination for the following reasons:

The three men who were in the room with him when he died were all connected both to the state secret service and to the London underworld. Frizer and Skeres also had a long record as loan sharks and con-men, as shown by court records. Bull's house also had "links to the government's spy network."
Their story that they were on a day's pleasure outing to Deptford is considered implausible. In fact, they spent the whole day closeted together, deep in discussion. Also, Robert Poley was carrying confidential despatches to the Queen, who was at her palace of Nonsuch in Surrey, but instead of delivering them, he spent the day with Marlowe and the other two.
It seems too much of a coincidence that Marlowe's death occurred only a few days after his arrest for heresy.
The manner of Marlowe's arrest suggests causes more tangled than a simple charge of heresy would generally indicate. He was released in spite of prima facie evidence, and even though the charges implicitly connected Sir Walter Raleigh and the Earl of Northumberland with the heresy. Thus, it seems probable that the investigation was meant primarily as a warning to the politicians in the "School of Night," and/or that it was connected with a power struggle within the Privy Council itself.
The various incidents that hint at a relationship with the Privy Council (see above), and by the fact that his patron was Thomas Walsingham, Sir Francis' second cousin, who was actively involved in intelligence work.
For these reasons and others, some believe there was more to Marlowe's death than emerged at the inquest. It is also possible that he was not murdered at all, and that his death was faked. However, on the basis of our current knowledge, it is not possible to draw any firm conclusions about what happened or why. There are many different theories, of varying degrees of probability, but no solid evidence. Since there are only written documents on which to base any conclusions, and since it is probable that the most crucial information about his death was never committed to writing at all, it is unlikely that the full circumstances of Marlowe's death will ever be known.


Atheism
Marlowe had a reputation for atheism. The only contemporary evidence for this is from Marlowe's accuser in Flushing, an informer called Richard Baines. The governor of Flushing had reported that both men had accused one another of instigating the counterfeiting and of intention to go over to the Catholic side (considered atheism by Protestants), "both as they say of malice one to another". Following Marlowe's arrest on a charge of atheism in 1593, Baines submitted to the authorities a "note containing the opinion of one Christopher Marly concerning his damnable judgment of religion, and scorn of God's word". Baines attributes to Marlowe ideas such as, "Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest [unchaste]", "the woman
of Samaria and her sister were whores and that Christ knew them dishonestly" and, "St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom" (cf. John 13:23-25) and "that he used him as the sinners of Sodom". He also claims that Marlowe had Catholic sympathies. Other passages are merely sceptical in tone: "he persuades men to atheism, willing them not to be afraid of bugbears and hobgoblins". Similar statements were made by Thomas Kyd after his imprisonment and possible torture (see below); both Kyd and Baines connect Marlowe with the mathematician Thomas Harriot and Walter Raleigh's circle. Another document claims that Marlowe had read an "atheist lecture" before Raleigh. Baines ends his "note" with the ominous statement: "I think all men in Christianity ought to endeavour that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped".

Some critics believe that Marlowe sought to disseminate these views in his work and that he identified with his rebellious and iconoclastic protagonists. However, plays had to be approved by the Master of the Revels before they could be performed, and the censorship of publications was under the control of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Presumably these authorities did not consider any of Marlowe's works to be unacceptable (apart from the Amores).


Sexuality
Marlowe is often described today as homosexual. Some believe that the question of whether an Elizabethan was "gay" or "homosexual" in a modern sense is anachronistic; for the Elizabethans, what is often today termed homosexual or bisexual was more likely to be recognised as simply a sexual act, rather than an exclusive sexual orientation and identity (see History of homosexuality).


Documentary evidence
Two documents suggest that Marlowe was homosexual.

The most graphic is the testimony of Richard Baines, an informer who made a long list of allegations against Marlowe after his arrest in Flushing (see above). Most of these allegations concern Marlowe's atheism, but Baines also claimed that Marlowe said "all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools" and that "St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, that he used him as the sinners of Sodom".
In 1593, Marlowe's one-time room-mate and fellow dramatist, Thomas Kyd was imprisoned and interrogated after atheistic papers were found in his room. Claiming the papers belonged to Marlowe, Kyd later produced a list detailing some of Marlowe's "monstrous opinions," which included the claim that Marlowe "would report St. John to be our saviour Christ's Alexis ... that is, that Christ did love him with an extraordinary love."
In addition, it has been pointed out that there is no evidence of any marriage or female companionship for Marlowe.

Some scholars argue that the evidence is inconclusive and that the reports of Marlowe's homosexuality may simply be exaggerated rumours produced after his death. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen describe Baines's evidence as "unreliable testimony" and make the comment: "These and other testimonials need to be discounted for their exaggeration and for their having been produced under legal circumstances we would regard as a witch-hunt". It has also been noted that Kyd's evidence was given after torture, and thus may have little connection to reality.


Literary evidence
Marlowe's writing is also notable for its homosexual themes.

Edward II (c.1592) is one of the very few English Renaissance plays to be concerned with homosexuality, since Edward II of England had that reputation. The portrayal of Edward and his love, Piers Gaveston, is unflattering, but so too is the portrayal of the barons who usurp him, and the play's numerous modern revivals have demonstrated that Edward's tragic decline and death can elicit sympathetic responses; it is thus conceivable that some contemporary audience members might have responded similarly.
In Dido, Queen of Carthage, he opens with a scene of Jupiter "dandling Ganymede upon his knee" and says "what is't, sweet wag, I should deny thy youth?, whose face reflects such pleasure to mine eyes." Venus complains during the play that Jupiter is playing "with that female wanton boy."
In Hero and Leander, Marlowe writes of the male youth Leander, "in his looks were all that men desire" and that when the youth swims to visit Hero at Sestos, the sea god Neptune becomes sexually excited, "imagining that Ganymede, displeas'd... the lusty god embrac'd him, call'd him love... and steal a kiss... upon his breast, his thighs, and every limb", while the boy naive and unaware of Greek love practices said that, "You are deceiv'd, I am no woman, I... Thereat smil'd Neptune."
The mere inclusion of same-sex love themes in Marlowe's works has been seen as signifying a biographical interest. Diligent classicists often mimicked the homosexual themes they found in Greek and Roman texts (as Edmund Spenser did in The Shepheard's Calendar), but Marlowe accords these themes more prominence than almost any other writer besides Richard Barnfield. In conjunction with the rumours preserved in the historical record, the prominence of homosexual themes in Marlowe's work has led, especially in the twentieth century, to a presumption of interest in same-sex love (although not necessarily of homosexual activity).

For debates of a somewhat similar nature, compare Sexuality of William Shakespeare.


Marlowe's reputation among contemporary writers
Whatever the particular focus of modern critics, biographers and novelists, for his contemporaries in the literary world, Marlowe was above all an admired and influential artist. Within weeks of his death, George Peele remembered him as "Marley, the Muses' darling"; Michael Drayton noted that he "Had in him those brave translunary things/That the first poets had", and Ben Jonson wrote of "Marlowe's mighty line". Thomas Nashe wrote warmly of his friend, "poor deceased Kit Marlowe". So too did the publisher Edward Blount, in the dedication of Hero and Leander to Sir Thomas Walsingham.

Among the few contemporary dramatists to say anything negative about Marlowe was the anonymous author of the Cambridge University play The Return From Parnassus (1598) who wrote, "Pity it is that wit so ill should dwell, Wit lent from heaven, but vices sent from hell."

The most famous tribute to Marlowe was paid by Shakespeare in As You Like It, where he not only quotes a line from Hero and Leander (Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might, "Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?") but also gives to the clown Touchstone the words "When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room." This appears to be a reference to Marlowe's murder (which involved a fight over the "reckoning" – the bill).

Shakespeare was indeed very influenced by Marlowe in his early work as can be seen in the re-using of Marlowe themes in Anthony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, and Macbeth (Dido, Jew of Malta, Edward II and Dr Faustus respectively). Indeed in Hamlet, after meeting with the travelling actors, Hamlet starts discussing Dido, Queen of Carthage and quoting from it. As this was Marlowe's only play not to have been played in the public theatre we can see that Shakespeare was quite the Marlovian scholar. Indeed in Love's Labour's Lost, echoing Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris, Shakespeare brings on a character called Marcade (French for Mercury – the messenger of the Gods – a nickname Marlowe bestowed upon himself) who arrives to "interrupt'st" the "merriment" with news of the King's death. A fitting tribute for one who delighted in destruction in his plays.


Marlowe as Shakespeare
Main articles: Shakespearean authorship question and Marlovian theory
Given the murky inconsistencies concerning the account of Marlowe's death, an ongoing conspiracy theory has arisen centred on the notion that Marlowe may have faked his death and then continued to write under the assumed name of William Shakespeare. Authors who have propounded this theory include:

Wilbur Gleason Zeigler It Was Marlowe (1895)
Calvin Hoffman, The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare (1955)
Louis Ule, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1607): A Biography
AD Wraight, The Story that the Sonnets Tell (1994)
Roderick L Eagle, The Mystery of Marlowe's Death, N&Q (1952)

Works
The dates of composition are approximate.


Plays
Dido, Queen of Carthage (c.1586) (possibly co-written with Thomas Nashe)
Tamburlaine, part 1 (c.1587)
Tamburlaine, part 2 (c.1587-1588)
The Jew of Malta (c.1589)
Doctor Faustus (c.1589, or, c.1593)
Edward II (c.1592)
The Massacre at Paris (c.1593)
The play Lust's Dominion was attributed to Marlowe upon its initial publication in 1657, though scholars and critics have almost unanimously rejected the attribution.


Poetry
Translation of Lucan's Pharsalia (date unknown)
Translation of Ovid's Elegies (c. 1580s?)
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (pre 1593, but due to being constantly referenced through to in his own plays we can presume an early date of mid-1580s)
Hero and Leander (c. 1593, unfinished; completed by George Chapman, 1598)

Marlowe in fiction
The upcoming play 'Upstart Crows' written by Mike Punter centres around the life of Marlowe, Edward Alleyn, Jack Alleyn and other characters that centre around their lives. Its first performance is at the Edward Alleyn theatre in Dulwich College in November 2007, and it goes on the be performed in the 2008 Edinburgh fringe festival.
Marlowe was the title character of a 1981 stage musical that had a brief Broadway run. It was rather unsuccessful.
Marlowe features heavily in the Harry Turtledove alternative history novel Ruled Britannia (2002), about an England ruled by Catholics. He is depicted as a contemporary and friend of Shakespeare.
Marlowe is played by Rupert Everett in the film Shakespeare in Love (1998), in which he helps Shakespeare to write Romeo and Juliet. His last line is a cheery "Well, I'm off to Deptford!" After Marlowe's murder, screenwriters Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard have Shakespeare say, "I would change all my plays to come for one of his that will never come".
Marlowe had survived his assassination in the tangentially alternative history novel Armor of Light by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett, rescued by Sir Philip Sidney, who in reality died before then, and plays a major role in the story.
In Neil Gaiman's comic The Sandman, Marlowe makes a brief appearance in a pub. He and Shakespeare are discussing the content of "Faustus" while Morpheus and an immortal human have their own conversation. Marlowe is represented as a great playwright with the young and inexperienced Shakespeare in awe of his friend. Marlowe is also referenced in a later Shakespeare-centric Sandman comic, in which Morpheus tells Shakespeare of his friend's assassination.
Marlowe is a central character in Lisa Goldstein's fantasy novel Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon
Connie Willis's "Winter's tale" features Marlowe as a major character.
Louise Welsh's Tamburlaine Must Die is a novel based on a fictitious theory about the last two weeks of Marlowe's life.
Leslie Silbert's The Intelligencer, a novel, intertwines Marlowe as a possible spy in his time and events in the present, Washington Square Press, 2004. ISBN 0-7434-3292-4
Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford is an account of Marlowe and his death; according to Burgess, it is fictionalized but does not depart from any known historical facts.
The School of Night (ISBN 0-312-28778-X), by Alan Wall, features a protagonist/narrator who constructs a theory identifying a not-really-dead Marlowe as the author of Shakespeare's works, with the Stratfordian merely a cat's-paw enlisted to pass them off as his own for money and/or because Marlowe's espionage on the continent discovered that Shakespeare was a crypto-Catholic.
Marlowe is the central character in One Dagger for Two by Philip Lindsay, which includes some speculation about his death.
Marlowe is one of the guest characters, having allegedly survived his murder sixteen years previously, in Andy Lane's The Empire of Glass, a Doctor Who Missing Adventure featuring the First Doctor and set in Venice.
Marlowe appears in four chapters of The Player's Boy, a children's book by Antonia Forest. He gives the fictional character Nicholas Marlow a ride to London in May 1593; Nicholas witnesses Marlowe's death in the house in Deptford, and later becomes a boy actor in the same company as William Shakespeare.
Marlowe is the central character in The Christopher Marlowe Mysteries written by Ged Parsons for BBC Radio 4 (1993). This was a series of comedy adventures revolving around Marlowe's work as a spy. The four stories were: The Curious Case of the Curs'd Quayside, The Turbulent Tale of the Troubl'd Tragedy, The Perplex'd Plot of the Perilous Plague and The Murky Mystery of Murder at St Mark's. The series is repeated on digital radio station BBC 7.
Marlowe is referenced in Tom Holt's Faust Among Equals (ISBN 1-85723-265-8) to great comic effect.
Marlowe is one of several main characters in Rosemary Laurey's vampire series. He explains at one point that if his friend, Thomas Kyd had not turned him, he would have died.
Marlowe is a major protagonist in Elizabeth Bear's Promethean Age books, specifically Whiskey & WaterNotes
^ This is commemorated by the name of the town's main theatre, the Marlowe Theatre, and by the town museums. However St George's, the church in which he was christened, was gutted by fire in the Baedeker raids and was demolished in the post-war period - only the tower is left, at the south end of Canterbury's High Street http://www.digiserve.com/peter/cant-sgm1.htm
^ For a full transcript, see Peter Farey's Marlowe page
^ BL Lansdowne MS 71,f.3.and Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning (1992), pp. 340-2.
^ John Baker, letter to Notes and Queries 44.3 (1997), pp. 367-8
^ Constance Kuriyama, Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (2002), p. 89. Also in Handover's biography of Arbella, and Nicholl, The Reckoning, p. 342.
^ Elizabeth I and James VI and I, History in Focus.
^ For a full transcript, see Peter Farey's Marlowe page
^ http://www.prst17z1.demon.co.uk/libell.htm
^ Mulryne, J. H. "Thomas Kyd." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
^ Haynes, Alan. The Elizabethan Secret Service. London: Sutton, 2005.
^ Palladis Tamia. London, 1598: 286v-287r.
^ http://www.prst17z1.demon.co.uk/inquis~2.htm
^ E. de Kalb, Robert Poley’s Movements as a Messenger of the Court, 1588 to 1601 Review of English Studies, Vol. 9, No. 33
^ Seaton, Ethel. "Marlowe, Robert Poley, and the Tippings." Review of English Studies 5 (1929): 273.
^ Greenblatt, Stephen Will in the World. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2004: 268.
^ Nicholl, Charles. The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995: 32.
^ Gray, Austin. "Some Observations on Christopher Marlowe, Government Agent." PMLA 43 (1928): 692-4.
^ http://www.prst17z1.demon.co.uk/baines1.htm
^ http://www.prst17z1.demon.co.uk/kyd1.htm
^ http://www.prst17z1.demon.co.uk/kyd2.htm
^ Waith, Eugene. The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare, and Dryden. London: Chatto and Windus, 1962. The idea is commonplace, though by no means universally accepted.
^ Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, pp. viii - ix
^ Boas, F. S. Christopher Marlowe: A Biographical and Critical Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940: 242.
^ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/muchado/readings/hoffman.html

Additional reading
Brooke, C.F. Tucker. The Life of Marlowe and "The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage." London: Methuen, 1930. (pp. 107, 114, 99, 98)
Marlow, Christopher. Complete Works. Vol. 3: Edward II. Ed. R. Rowland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (pp. xxii-xxiii)
Louis Ule Christopher Marlowe (1564-1607): A Biography, Carlton Press, 1996. ISBN 0-8062-5028-3
David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, OUP, 1998; ISBN 0-19-283445-2
J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell, eds., Constructing Christopher Marlowe, Cambridge 2000. ISBN 0-521-57255-X
Constance Kuriyama,Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life. Cornell University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-8014-3978-7
Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, Vintage, 2002 (revised edition) ISBN 0-09-943747-3
Alan Shepard, "Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada", Ashgate, 2002. ISBN 0-7546-0229-X
M. J. Trow, Who Killed Kit Marlowe?, Sutton, 2002; ISBN 0-7509-2963-4
Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford, Carroll & Graf, 2003. (novel about Marlowe based on the version of events in The Reckoning) ISBN 0-7867-1152-3
David Riggs, "The World of Christopher Marlowe", Henry Holt and Co., 2005 ISBN 0-8050-8036-8
Louise Walsh "Tamburlaine Must Die", novella based around the build up to Marlowe's death.
John Passfield, Water Lane: The Pilgrimage of Christopher Marlowe (novel) Authorhouse, 2005 ISBN 1-4208-1558-X
John Passfield, The Making of Water Lane (journal) Authorhouse, 2005 ISBN 1-4208-2020-6
David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe A John Macrae book, 2005 ISBN-13: 0-8050-7755-3
Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe Poet and Spy Oxford University Press, 2005 ISBN 0-19-818695-9

Andrew Mango

Andrew Mango (born 1926) is a British author who was born in Constantinople,Turkey, one of three sons of a prosperous Anglo-Russian family. He is the brother of the distinguished Oxford historian and Byzantinist, Professor Cyril Mango. Mango's early years were passed in Istanbul but in the mid-1940s he left for Ankara and a job as a press officer in the British Embassy. He moved to the United Kingdom in 1947 and has lived in London ever since. He holds degrees from London University, including a doctorate on Persian literature. He joined BBC's Turkish section while still a student and spent his entire career in the External Services, rising to be Turkish Programme Organiser and then Head of the South European Service. He retired in 1986.


[edit] Writings on Turkey and Atatürk
Mango abandoned his early intention of becoming an academic, finding his career at the BBC congenial, but he also wrote copiously in his spare time, publishing books and pamphlets on Turkey of which "Turkey" (1968) and "Discovering Turkey" (1971) are the most important. In addition he wrote a large number of shorter articles and working papers for British and American thinktanks on Turkey and its strategic role. He has also written for many years an annual review of major western studies of Turkey for the academic journal, "Middle East Studies."

The high point of Mango's career as an author, however, came after he retired from the BBC in 1986 when he was commissioned by the British publishers, John Murray, to write a new biography of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The aim was to replace the earlier biography written by Lord Kinross who, though enthusiastic about Atatürk, had not actually been able to read Turkish sources himself.

Mango spent five years on the biography, using Turkish printed sources though not archival material.[citation needed] It has been claimed that his biography of Kemal Ataturk constitutes the definitive account among many other works and "reveals the long suppressed darker aspects of its subject, showing us a far more complex personality than we had seen before." [1]

He presents Atatürk's life within the broad framework of the future of the Ottoman lands at the beginning of the twentieth century and the question of what homeland, if any, the Western Powers would leave to the Turks in the coming breakup of the Ottoman Empire. He presents Atatürk's life within the broad framework of the future of the Ottoman lands at the beginning of the twentieth century and the question of the nature of the new Turkish state. Like earlier biographers of Atatürk, Mango gives a highly detailed account of the events of Gallipoli and the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923) and as a result the final decade of Ataturk's life when he was attempting to transform Turkey into a western-style nation is somewhat compressed. The biography has in general been warmly received and is now regarded as the standard life of the founder of the Republic.

Mango's next work, The Turks Today had a more mixed critical reception. He argues that Turkey has now become a modern urban metropolitan industrial society and that the gap with western Europe is closing fast. Mango, in line with a number of economic forecasters, suggests that by the middle of the present century, Turkey will rank in the middle of OECD group in terms of per capita income and because of its size will thus have become a major economic power. Turkey is already the sixth largest external trading partner of the European Union. Mango disagrees with those who believe that political Islamism is a danger in Turkey, comparing its role to that of the Christian church in Victorian England. A number of reviewers also commented that the book contained too many statistics to make an easy read. The reviewer in the British "Spectator" sceptically observed that the book turned Turkey from being 'the sick man of Europe' into the 'cured man of Europe.' However The Turks Today is probably the best single volume account of Turkey at the opening of the 21st century.

In 2005, Mango published Turkey and the War on Terrorism, a medium-length study of terrorist movements in Turkey and their international links, arguing that the problems with which the West is grappling since 9/11 have been faced by the Turks for many years.


[edit] Non-Fiction
Turkey and the War on Terrorism, (2005)
The Turks Today, (2004)
Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey, (2000)
Turkey: The Challenge of a New Role, (1994)
Discovering Turkey, 1971
Turkey, 1968

Thomas Malory

Sir Thomas Malory (c. 1405 – March 14, 1471) was the author or compiler of Le Morte d'Arthur. The antiquary John Leland (1506–1552) believed him to be Welsh, but most modern scholarship assumes that he was Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire. The surname appears in various spellings, including Maillorie, Mallory, Mallery, and Maleore. The name comes from the Old French adjective maleüré (from Latin male auguratus) meaning ill-omened or unfortunate.

Few facts are certain in Malory's history. He was probably born sometime around 1405 (though some scholars have suggested an earlier date). He died in March of 1471, less than two years after completing his great book. Twice elected to a seat in Parliament, he also accrued an impressive list of criminal charges during the 1450s, including burglary, rape, sheep stealing, and attempting to ambush the Duke of Buckingham. He escaped from jail on two occasions, once by fighting his way out with a variety of weapons and by swimming a moat. Malory was imprisoned at several locations in London, but he was occasionally out on bail. He was never brought to trial for the charges that had been levelled against him. In the 1460s he was at least once pardoned by King Henry VI, but more often, he was specifically excluded from pardon by both Henry VI and his rival and successor, Edward IV. It is clear, from comments Malory makes at the ends of sections of his narrative, that he composed at least part of his work while in prison. William Oldys speculates that he may have been a priest,[1] based on Malory's description of himself in the colophon to Le Morte d'Arthur:

I pray you all, gentlemen and gentlewomen that readeth this book of Arthur and his knights, from the beginning to the ending, pray for me while I am alive, that God send me good deliverance, and when I am dead, I pray you all pray for my soul. For this book was ended the ninth year of the reign of King Edward the Fourth, by Sir Thomas Maleore, knight, as Jesu help him for His great might, as he is the servant of Jesu both day and night. (Malory p. 531)

A young Malory appears as a character at the end of T.H. White's book The Once and Future King, which was based on Le Morte d'Arthur; this cameo is included in the Broadway musical Camelot. Many modern takes on the Arthurian legend have their roots in Malory, including John Boorman's 1981 movie Excalibur, which includes selected elements of the book.


[edit] Notes
^ Oldys, William: article on William Caxton, Biographia Britannica, 1747–66.
Further, there is a discussion about whether Malory was a priest at googlebooks

[edit] References
Malory, Thomas, Janet Cowen, and John Lawlor. Le Morte D'Arthur. Volume II. London: Penguin Books, 1969.googlebooks Retrieved December 2, 2007
Eugène Vinaver, "Sir Thomas Malory" in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, Roger S. Loomis (ed.). Clarendon Press: Oxford University. 1959. ISBN 0-19-811588-1
P.J.C. Field, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993. ISBN 0261-9814
Sheila V. Mallory Smith, A History of the Mallory Family, Phillimore, 1985, ISBN 0850335760
Christina Hardyment, Malory: The Life and Times of King Arthur's Chronicler, Harper Collins, 2005, ISBN 0066209811

[edit] External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Thomas MalorySir Thomas Malory Society
Arthuriana: The Journal of Arthurian Studies
Le Morte d'Arthur (Caxton edition, in Middle English) at the University of Michigan
Le Morte d'Arthur, from eBooks@Adelaide
Works by Thomas Malory at Project Gutenberg
Le Mort d'Arthur: Volume 1, available at Project Gutenberg.
Le Mort d'Arthur: Volume 2, available at Project Gutenberg.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Malory"

Colin MacInnes

Colin MacInnes (20 August 1914 – 22 April 1976) was an English novelist.

MacInnes was born in London, the son of singer James Campbell McInnes and novelist Angela Thirkell, and was educated in Australia. He served in the British intelligence corps during World War II.

He was the author of a number of books depicting London youth and black immigrant culture during the 1950s, in particular City of Spades (1957), Absolute Beginners (1959) and Mr. Love and Justice (1960).

Mr Love and Justice follows two characters, Frank Love and Edward Justice, in late 50s London. Mr. Love is a novice ponce (pimp); Mr. Justice is a cop newly transferred to the plainclothes division of the Vice Squad. Gradually their lives intermesh.


[edit] List of Works
To the Victor the Spoils (1950)
June In Her Spring (1952)
City of Spades (1957)
Absolute Beginners (1959)
Mr. Love and Justice (1960)
England, Half English (1961) - a collection of previously published journalism
London, City of Any Dream (1962) - photo essay
Australia and New Zealand (1964) - Time/Life Volume
All Day Saturday (1966)
Sweet Saturday Night (1967) - essays on music
Westward to Laughter (1969)
Three Years to Play (1970)
Loving Them Both: A Study of Bisexuality (1973)
Out of the Garden (1974)
No Novel Reader (1975)
Out of the Way: Later Essays (1980)
Absolute MacInnes: The Best of Colin MacInnes (1985)

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay


Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, PC (25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859) was a nineteenth-century English poet, historian and Whig politician and Member of Parliament for Edinburgh. He wrote extensively as an essayist and reviewer, and on British history.

Life
The son of Zachary Macaulay, a Scottish Highlander who became a colonial governor and abolitionist, Thomas was born in Leicestershire, England, and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Macaulay was noted as a child prodigy. As a toddler, gazing out the window from his cot at the chimneys of a local factory, he is reputed to have put the question to his mother: "Does the smoke from those chimneys come from the fires of hell?" Whilst at Cambridge he wrote much poetry and won several prizes. In 1825 he published a prominent essay on Milton in the Edinburgh Review. In 1826 he was called to the bar but showed more interest in a political than a legal career.


[edit] Macaulay as a politician
In 1830 he became a Member of Parliament for the pocket borough of Calne. He made his name with a series of speeches in favour of parliamentary reform, attacking such inequalities as the exclusion of Jews.[citation needed] After the Great Reform Act was passed, he became MP for Leeds.


[edit] India
Macaulay was Secretary to the Board of Control from 1832 until 1833. After the passing of the Government of India Act 1833, he was appointed as the first Law Member of the Governor-General's Council. He went to India in 1834. Serving on the Supreme Council of India between 1834 and 1838 he was instrumental in creating the foundations of bilingual colonial India, by convincing the Governor-General to adopt English as the medium of instruction in higher education, from the sixth year of schooling onwards, rather than Sanskrit or Arabic then used in the institutions supported by the East India Company.

In the aftermath of the 1857 Great Mutiny, Macaulay's criminal law system was enacted. This code stood for two centuries[citation needed] - in spite of the advances in technology no "new" categories of crime have come into existence. It included the three major codes - The Indian Penal Code, 1860, the Criminal Procedure Code, 1872 and the Civil Procedure Code, 1909. The Indian Penal Code was later reproduced in most other British colonies – and to date many of these laws are still in effect in places as far apart as Singapore, Sri Lanka, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.

The term Macaulay's Children is used to refer to people born of Indian ancestry who adopt Western culture as a lifestyle, or display attitudes influenced by colonisers. The term is usually used in a derogatory fashion, and the connotation is one of disloyalty to one's country and one's heritage. This frame of mind or attitude is also referred to as Macaulayism

The passage to which the term refers is from his Minute on Indian Education, delivered in 1835. It reads,

“ It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.[1] ”


[edit] Later career
Returning to Britain in 1838, he became MP for Edinburgh. He was made Secretary at War in 1839. After the fall of Lord Melbourne's government Macaulay devoted more time to literary work, but returned to office as Paymaster General in Lord John Russell's administration.

In 1841 Macaulay addressed the issue of copyright law. Macaulay's position, slightly modified, became the basis of copyright law in the English-speaking world for many decades. Macaulay argued that copyright is a monopoly and as such has generally negative effects on society.[2]

In the election of 1847 he lost his seat in Edinburgh because of his neglect of local issues. In 1849 he was elected Rector of the University of Glasgow and he also received the freedom of the city. In 1852 his party returned to office. He was offered a seat but suffered a heart attack which seriously weakened him.

Macaulay sat on the committee to decide on subjects from British history to be painted in the new Palace of Westminster. The need to collect reliable portraits of noted figures in British history for this project led to the foundation of the National Portrait Gallery, which was formally established on 2 December 1856. Macaulay was amongst its founder trustees and is honoured as one of only three busts above the main entrance.

He was raised to the Peerage in 1857 as Baron Macaulay, of Rothley in the County of Leicester but seldom attended the House of Lords. His health made work increasingly difficult for him. He died in 1859, leaving his major work, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second incomplete. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

The History is famous for its brilliant ringing prose and for its confident, sometimes dogmatic, emphasis on a progressive model of British history, according to which the country threw off superstition, autocracy and confusion to create a balanced constitution and a forward-looking culture combined with freedom of belief and expression. This model of human progress has been called the Whig interpretation of history. Macaulay's approach has been criticised by later historians for its one-sidedness and its complacency. His tendency to see history as a drama led him to treat figures whose views he opposed as if they were villains, while characters he approved of were presented as heroes. Macaulay goes to considerable length, for example, to absolve his main hero William III of any responsibility for the Glencoe massacre.

Macaulay's great-nephew was the historian G. M. Trevelyan.


[edit] Literary works

Lays of Ancient Rome, 1881 editionDuring his first period out of office he composed Lays of Ancient Rome, a series of very popular ballads about heroic episodes in Roman history. The most famous of them, Horatius, concerns the heroism of Horatius Cocles. It contains the oft-quoted lines:

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods

During the 1840s he began work on his most famous work, "The History of England from the Accession of James the Second", publishing the first two volumes in 1848, the next two volumes appearing in 1855. He is said to have completed the final volumes of the history at Greenwood Lodge, Ditton Marsh, Thames Ditton, which he rented in 1854. At his death, he had only got as far as the reign of King William III.


[edit] Quotations
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay"We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation" [1]
"His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar." On John Dryden. 1828.
"I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia."
"Thus then stands the case: it is good that authors should be remunerated and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly, yet monopoly is an evil for the sake of the good. We must submit to the evil, but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good."
"Nine-tenths the calamities of the human race are due to the union of high intelligence with low desires." "Lord Bacon," (1837) in Essays 2:183.
(From Edinburgh Review, 1830) "If any person had told the Parliament which met in terror and perplexity after the crash of 1720 that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams, that the annual revenue would equal the principal of that debt which they considered an intolerable burden, that for one man of £10,000 then living there would be five men of £50,000, that London would be twice as large and twice as populous, and that nevertheless the rate of mortality would have diminished to one half of what it then was, that the post-office would bring more into the exchequer than the excise and customs had brought in together under Charles II, that stage coaches would run from London to York in 24 hours, that men would be in the habit of sailing without wind, and would be beginning to ride without horses, our ancestors would have given as much credit to the prediction as they gave to Gulliver's Travels."
"It would be, on the most selfish view of the case, far better for us that the people of India were well governed and independent of us, than ill governed and subject to us; that they were ruled by their own kings, but wearing our broadcloth, and working with our cutlery, than that they were performing their salams to English collectors and English magistrates, but were too ignorant to value, or too poor to buy, English manufactures. To trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages." [2]
"Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly. [...] Monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good."[3]
(Review of a life of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley by Edward Nares, Edinburgh Review, 1832) "The work of Dr. Nares has filled us with astonishment similar to that which Captain Lemuel Gulliver felt when first he landed in Brobdingnag, and saw corn as high as the oaks in the New Forest, thimbles as large as buckets, and wrens of the bulk of turkeys. The whole book, and every component part of it, is on a gigantic scale. The title is as long as an ordinary preface: the prefatory matter would furnish out an ordinary book; and the book contains as much reading as an ordinary library. We cannot sum up the merits of the stupendous mass of paper which lies before us better than by saying that it consists of about two thousand closely printed quarto pages, that it occupies fifteen hundred inches cubic measure, and that it weighs sixty pounds avoirdupois. Such a book might, before the deluge, have been considered as light reading by Hilpa and Shallum. But unhappily the life of man is now three-score years and ten; and we cannot but think it somewhat unfair in Dr. Nares to demand from us so large a portion of so short an existence. Compared with the labour of reading through these volumes, all other labour, the labour of thieves on the treadmill, of children in factories, of negroes in sugar plantations, is an agreeable recreation."
"To punish public outrages on morals and religion is unquestionably within the competence of rulers. But when a government, not content with requiring decency, requires sanctity, it oversteps the bounds which mark its proper functions. And it may be laid down as a universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less." "Leigh Hunt" (1841), in Critical...Essays 2:509.
"The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out"
"There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's."

[edit] Notes
^ Macaulay's "minute on education" arguing for the use of English in India
^ Macaulay's speeches on copyright law

[edit] Works

Thomas MacaulayWorks by Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay at Project Gutenberg
Lays of Ancient Rome
The History of England from the Accession of James II, 5 vols. (1848) [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]
Critical and Historical Essays, 2 vols., edited by Alexander James Grieve. [9],[10]
The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, 4 vols. [11], [12], [13], [14]
Machiavelli

[edit] See also
Whig history Further explains the Whig interpretation of history that Macaulay espoused.
Thomas Sturge was an intimate friend of Lord Macaulay.

[edit] External links
Wikisource has original works written by or about:
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron MacaulayThomas Babington Macaulay Quotes at Liberty-Tree.ca
Short biography on Spartacus UK
Thomas Macaulay, "Lord Clive," Edinburgh Review, January 1840.
Thomas Macaulay, "Warren Hastings." Edinburgh Review, October, 1841.
Macaulay on Copyright
Minute on Indian Education
Lord Macaulay's Habit of Exaggeration
Macaulay on copyright law
The Merits of Lord Macaulay - an essay by Koenraad Elst
Macaulay's Minute revisited: An article in The Hindu, an Indian newspaper

Taare Zameen Par

Taare Zameen Par (Hindi: तारे जमीन पर, English translation: Stars on Earth) directed by debutant director Aamir Khan. The film was written by creative director and writer Amole Gupte. It stars Aamir Khan in the main lead who plays the teacher to a dyslexic child played by Darsheel Safary.[1][2][3] Also produced by Aamir, the film will have music by the trio, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy with lyrics by Prasoon Joshi. A major part of the film was recently shot near the New Era High School in Panchgani. The film was released worldwide on December 21, 2007.



[edit] Trivia
Aamir Khan Productions had first approached music maestro and long time favourite, A.R.Rehman, for the score of the movie, however it was eventually given to Shankar Ehsaan Loy due to reasons unknown. The title of the movie was reportedly given by scriptwriter Saleem Khan, when he and Aamir met at party held at Salman's residence. The title was immediately finalised by Aamir Khan Productions and credited to Saleem Khan. Salman Khan is credited as one of the many for an "inspirational factor to Taare...", in the beginning of the film.


[edit] Synopsis
Ishaan Awasthi is an eight-year-old whose world is filled with wonders that no one else seems to appreciate; colours, fish, dogs and kites are just not important in the world of adults, who are much more interested in things like homework, marks and neatness. And Ishaan just cannot seem to get anything right in class.

When he gets into far more trouble than his parents can handle, he is packed off to a boarding school to ‘be disciplined’. Things are no different at his new school, and Ishaan has to contend with the added trauma of separation from his family.

One day a new art teacher bursts onto the scene, Ram Shankar Nikumbh, who infects the students with joy and optimism. He breaks all the rules of ‘how things are done’ by asking them to think, dream and imagine, and all the children respond with enthusiasm, all except Ishaan. Nikumbh soon realizes that Ishaan is very unhappy, and he sets out to discover why. He meets his parents and comes to know about Ishaan's problems of dyslexia and his wonderful world of imagination. He sets out to help Ishaan at any cost. Finally his dreams comes true when Ishaan stands out as an Art Scholar and also passes out his annual exams in school. At last Ishaan thanks his teacher Ram for helping him out to create his own world.


[edit] Cast
Darsheel Safary as Ishaan Nandkishore Awasthi

Ishaan is 8 years old. He loves colours, fish, shiny things, dogs, golas, spaceships and kites. He loves to draw and paint and be a bindaas boy. He does not want to go to boarding school.Finally it was revealed that he is dyslexic.

Vipin Sharma as Nandkishore Awasthi

Nandkishore Awasthi is Ishaan’s father. He gets very angry when Ishaan’s teachers from school complain. Nandkishore is of the view that only Boarding school can teach discipline to Ishaan. He simply opposes the fact that his son is dyslexic. He thinks that his son is lazy and does not do the work of his own will.

Tisca Chopra as Maya Awasthi

Maya is Ishaan’s mother. She makes good food and looks after Ishaan when he gets hurt. She is very sad that Ishaan has to go to boarding school but she thinks it will be for the best.

Sachet Engineer as Yohaan Awasthi

Yohaan is Ishaan’s Dada (elder brother). Dada is a very good student and also plays tennis and cricket. He also looks after Ishaan and loves him.

Aamir Khan as Ram Shankar Nikumbh

Nikumbh sir doesn't scold Ishaan like the other teachers. He sports a very nice smile and he likes colours and fish and dogs and painting too. He comes to know about Ishaan's dyslexic nature and comes to help him. He is also said to be dyslexic in childhood.

Tanay Chheda as Rajan Damodaran

Rajan is Ishaan’s best friend. He is very smart and intelligent and a good student and always knows the answers to all the questions. He always tries to be helpful to Ishaan.[4]


[edit] Music
The soundtrack of the film was released on November 5, 2007.Composed by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, the film's music was well received. Joginder Tuteja from Indiafm.com gave the music 3 ½ out of 5 stars saying, "Aamir Khan, Shankar, Ehsaan, Loy and Prasoon Joshi make a zero compromise album which stays honest to the film's theme and bring in as much variety as one possibly can in the music for a film belonging to a genre different from regular romance, action or drama.Taare Zameen Par boasts of a soundtrack that stays true to the film's spirit and promises to thoroughly involve a viewer while the music is on in theaters."[5]

The song listing is as follows.

Song Singer(s) Lyrics
Bum Bum Bole Shaan & Aamir Khan Prasoon Joshi
Ishaan'S - Theme Instrumental
Jame Raho Vishal Dadlani Prasoon Joshi
Kholo Kholo Raman Mahadevan Prasoon Joshi
Maa Shankar Mahadevan Prasoon Joshi
Mera Jahan Adnan Sami, Auriel Cordo & Ananya Wadkar Prasoon Joshi
Taare Zameen Par Shankar Mahadevan, Bugs Bhargava & Vivinenne Pocha Prasoon Joshi


[edit] Review
Taare Zameen Par may prove to be the best movie of 2007. It has received an overwhelming critical response. Initial box office reports are low, but popularity rapidly spreading through word-of-mouth. Aamir posted in his official website, that PVR owners have informed him that it may well be the biggest grosser of the year[6]. Child actor Darsheel Safary has acted marvelously and is the protagonist.

Indiafm has awarded the movie 4 out of 5 reels saying "TAARE ZAMEEN PAR isn't one of those films that merely entertains, but also enlightens." and "On the whole, TAARE ZAMEEN PAR is an outstanding work of cinema. To miss it would be sacrilege. It has everything it takes to win awards and box-office rewards!"[7]


[edit] References
^ Aamir's "Taare Zamen Par". Hum Online. Retrieved on 15 January 2007.
^ Arjun Rampal's son to work with Aamir. IndiaFM. Retrieved on 16 March 2007.
^ Taare Zameen Par promo released. NiTS. Retrieved on 13 Oct 2007.
^ Taare Zameen Par. Characters: Taare Zameen Par. Retrieved on 18 November, 2007.
^ Taare Zameen Par. Music Review: Taare Zameen Par. Retrieved on 5 November, 2007.
^ http://www.indiafm.com/features/2007/12/24/3387/index.html
^ http://www.indiafm.com/movies/review/13306/index.html
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