Hugues Panassié

Hugues Panassié was an influential French critic, record producer, and impresario of traditional jazz.

Roger Rocher

Roger Rocher was a French businessman.

Luc Recordon

Luc Recordon is a Swiss politician, member of the Green Party of Switzerland, representing Vaud in the Swiss National Council and then in the Swiss Council of States.

Luc Recordon was educated as an engineer at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne and lawyer at the University of Lausanne. He holds a doctorate in jurisprudence.

Recordon was elected to the local council of Jouxtens-Mézery in 1975, to the local government in 1989, and in 1990 to the Grand Council of Vaud. He was also cantonal co-president of the Greens 1997 to 2001. From 2003 to 2007, he was a member of the National Council of Switzerland. In the 2007 elections, he won one of the first two seats of the Green Party in the Council of States, the other belonging to Robert Cramer of Geneva.

Luc Recordon is affected by a severe congenital disease. The 16 June 2005, during a debate about preimplantation genetic diagnosis, he made a very emotional and applauded speech in front of the National Council.

Luc Recordon is the official Green candidate for the Swiss Federal Council in the December 2007 elections, claiming the seat of Christoph Blocher. This candidacy was purely tactical, aiming to demonstrate opposition to the Swiss People's Party's right-wing populism and to encourage other counter-candidates. Recordon played no role in the election itself, and Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf was elected to replace Blocher. Recordon is also the official Green candidate in the Swiss Federal Council election, 2008.

Herbert Leupin

Herbert Leupin was a Swiss graphic designer known primarily for his poster art.

Maurice Bardèche

Maurice Bardèche was a French essayist, literary and art critic, journalist, and one of the leading exponents of neo-fascism in post–World War II Europe.

Bardèche was born in a modest family of Dun-sur-Auron in the Cher department on October 1, 1907. A product of the educational opportunities of the Third Republic, Bardèche had received a scholarship, and completed hypokhâgne at the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. There, he met Thierry Maulnier and his future brother-in-law Robert Brasillach, establishing lifelong connections. In 1928, he entered the École normale supérieure (ENS), where he met with the philosopher Simone Weil (whom he nicknamed the "Red Virgin", after Louise Michel), Claude Jamet, Jacques Soustelle, Roger Vailland and Georges Pompidou, future President of France. He was received at the Agrégation (literary section) in 1932, and started teaching at the Sorbonne University. A year later, he described himself as "a snail withdrawn into its shell."

He was heavily influenced by the nationalist intellectual Maurice Barrès and the leader of the monarchist Action française (AF), Charles Maurras. Bardèche initially came to prominence as an associate of Brasillach and Maulnier, writing in their journals (1933, 1934, 1935), essentially as a literary chroniquer. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), he traveled several times to the country and wrote with Brasillach a History of the Spanish War, in which he called for the violent defense of "order" and of Francoism in front of "paralysing democracy, one like malaria". Seduced by José Antonio Primo de Rivera's Falange, his support of Fascism may be dated to this period. Bardèche also co-authored with Brasillach a History of Cinema (1935), a work that influenced cinema history for years.

Bardèche completed his thesis on Balzac in 1940, titled La formation de l’art du roman chez Balzac jusqu’à la publication du Père Goriot, from which he would publish a biography, Balzac romancier. He continued to teach at the Sorbonne, moving to the Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille from 1942-4. He then became recognized for his critical works. Bardèche began to write for the fascist journal Je suis partout in 1938. During the German occupation, he didn't take a position. After the execution of Brasillach, he claimed that the Resistance's "excesses", the bombing of Dresden and post-liberation atrocities were war crimes.

After the liberation, he was briefly arrested for collaborationism but quickly released, while his brother-in-law, Robert Brasillach, was executed. He denounced Brasillach's death as "criminal." Bardèche was expelled from the National Education, proscribed from giving courses in the public education system. He then founded his own literary publishing house, Les Sept Couleurs (The Seven Colors), and also founded a right-wing journal titled Défense de l'Occident in 1952, dedicating himself to rehabilitating Brasillach's works and ideology. He wrote a Lettre à François Mauriac in 1947, in which he attacked the épuration légale (legal purge) of Vichy supporters, defended collaborationism and criticized Resistance members whom he called "rebels against legality". His 1948 follow-up, Nuremberg ou la Terre Promise, which was an attack on the Nuremberg Trials and one of the earliest expression of Holocaust denial, saw him sentenced to a year's imprisonment for apology of war crimes, while the book was censored. This feat saw him become recognized as one of the leading thinkers of neo-fascism. However, Bardèche never served his prison term, as his sentence was commuted by President René Coty, and he was only imprisoned for a few weeks in Fresnes.

He was a founder of the European Social Movement (MSE) in 1951 and became its vice-president, which brought him together with leaders such as Oswald Mosley, Karl-Heinz Priester and Per Engdahl. He continued publishing his journal Défense de l'Occident from 1952 to 1982, in which ideas of a European nationalism were espoused. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Bardèche made no secret of his fascism and famously wrote in the introduction to his 1961 work Qu'est-ce que le fascisme? "I am a fascist writer." He was particularly attracted to the Italian Social Republic and sought to use that model as the basis for a more contemporary ideology that he termed fascisme amélioré ("improved fascism"). Bardèche also became a leading Holocaust denier and wrote extensively on the subject in his later life.

He died in Paris on July 30, 1998.

Eric Berne

Eric Berne was a Canadian-born psychiatrist who, in the middle of the 20th century, created the theory of transactional analysis as a way of explaining human behavior. Berne’s theory of transactional analysis was based on the ideas of Freud but were distinctly different. Freudian psychotherapists focused on talk therapy as a way of gaining insight to their patient’s personalities. Berne believed that insight could be better discovered by analyzing patients’ social transactions. Berne was among the first psychiatrists to apply game theory to the field of psychiatry, along with the famed psychiatrist-psychoanalyst Thomas Szasz.

Eero Saarinen

Eero Saarinen was a 20th-century Finnish American architect and industrial designer noted for his neo-futuristic style. Saarinen is known for designing the TWA Flight Center in New York City and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri.

Maurice Zermatten

Maurice Zermatten was a French-speaking Swiss writer.

He was born in Saint-Martin, Valais, a small village situated in the Val d'Hérens, in the canton of Valais. He was first educated at the Ecole normale and then at the University of Fribourg. He published his first novel Le Coeur inutile in 1936 at the age of 26. He taught at the College of Sion where he stayed until retirement. In 1952 he became Lecturer (French Literature) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich. Maurice Zermatten also performs a military career leading him to the rank of colonel.

Augustin Chaboseau

Augustin Chaboseau is the original organizer and promulgation officer of the Traditional Martinist Order (TMO), Occultist and Historian.

Notably, his founding was in partnership with Papus in 1888. In his early years, he had the necessary talents, skills and abilities that led him to become a medical doctor and it was with the knowledge gained from working with the responsibility of saving people's lives that he was able to successful transition into his work with the TMO.

He has contributed to numerous journals and is the author of an essay on Buddhist philosophy (1891) and a History of Brittany before the thirteenth century (1926), World War I interior ministry.

Sir Ernest Benn

Sir Ernest John Pickstone Benn, 2nd Baronet was a British publisher, writer and political publicist. His father, John Benn, was a politician, who had been made a baronet in 1914. He was an uncle of the Labour politician Tony Benn.

Benn was born in Oxted, Surrey. He attended the Central Foundation Boys' School.

As a civil servant in the Ministry of Munitions and Reconstruction during the First World War he came to believe in the benefits of state intervention in the economy. In the mid-1920s, however, he changed his mind and adopted "the principles of undiluted laissez-faire."

From his conversion to classical liberalism in the mid-1920s until his death in 1954 Benn published over twenty books and an equivalent amount of pamphlets propagating his ideas. 

Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich Hayek was an Austrian-British economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for his "pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and ... penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena".

Hayek was a major social theorist and political philosopher of the twentieth century, and his account of how changing prices communicate information that helps individuals co-ordinate their plans is widely regarded as an important achievement in economics, leading to his Nobel Prize.

Hayek served in World War I and said that his experience in the war and his desire to help avoid the mistakes that had led to the war drew him into economics. Hayek lived in Austria, Great Britain, the United States, and Germany and became a British subject in 1938. He spent most of his academic life at the London School of Economics (LSE), the University of Chicago, and the University of Freiburg.

In 1984, he was appointed a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour by Queen Elizabeth II on the advice of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for his "services to the study of economics." He was the first recipient of the Hanns Martin Schleyer Prize in 1984. He also received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 from President George H. W. Bush.

Eric Shipton

Eric Earle Shipton was a distinguished English Himalayan mountaineer.

Shipton was born in Ceylon (now called "Sri Lanka") in 1907 where his father, a tea planter, died before he was three years old. When he was eight his mother brought him to London so that he could be educated. When he failed the entrance exam to Harrow School his mother sent him to Pyt House School in Wiltshire. His first real encounter with mountains was at 15, when he visited the Pyrenees with his family. The next summer he spent travelling in Norway with a school friend and within a year he had begun climbing seriously.

In 1928 he went to Kenya as a coffee grower, and first climbed Nelion, a peak of Mount Kenya in 1929. It was also in Kenya's community of Europeans that he met his future climbing partners Bill Tilman and Percy Wyn-Harris. Together with Wyn-Harris he climbed the twin peaks of Mount Kenya. With Frank Smythe, Shipton was amongst the first climbers to stand on the summit of Kamet, 7756 metres, in 1931, the highest peak climbed at that time. Shipton was involved with most of the Mount Everest expeditions during the 1930s and later, including Hugh Ruttledge's 1933 expedition and the follow-up in 1936, the 1935 Mount Everest expedition which was Shipton's first as leader and the first for Tenzing Norgay, and the pioneering 1951 expedition which chalked out the now famous route over the Khumbu Glacier. Shipton and Tilman also discovered the access route to the Nanda Devi sanctuary through the Rishi Ganga gorge in 1934. Their shoe-string budget expedition operated in the Kumaon-Garhwal mountains continuously from pre-monsoon to post-monsoon, and set a record for single-expedition achievement that has never been equalled.

During the Second World War Shipton was appointed as HM Consul at Kashgar in western China, where he remained from 1940 to 1942, then after a brief spell in England was assigned to work in Persia as a "Cereal Liaison Officer" for 20 months during 1943–44. Next he was posted as an attache to the British Military Mission in Hungary as an "agricultural adviser" which position saw him through until the end of the War.


In 1946 Shipton returned to Kashgar as Consul General and during a visit from Bill Tilman they tried to climb Muztagh Ata, 7546 metres, reaching the broad summit dome. In 1947 Shipton explored and named Shipton's Arch. He took the opportunity of his Kashgar posting to explore other Central Asian mountains. The first western exploration of the Rolwaling Himal was made by Shipton in 1951 during the reconnaissance of Mount Everest. While exploring the Barun gorge he named Island Peak. In the 1951 Everest expedition, Shipton and Dr Michael Ward also took photographs of the footprints of what may have been the Yeti (Abominable Snowman), an ice axe being included in the photographs to show scale. Because of his belief in the efficacy of small expeditions as compared to military-style 'sieges', Eric Shipton was stepped down from the leadership of the 1953 Everest expedition, along with Andrew Croft, in favour of Major John Hunt--"I leave London absolutely shattered" he would write. Yet Shipton's quiet and spare climbing style, and his spirit of exploration, have kept alive the memory of this climber's climber in the world of mountaineering. Between the years 1953 and 1957 he worked at a variety of jobs. Shipton worked as Warden of the Outward Bound Mountain school at Eskdale until the failure of his marriage with his wife, Diana. He worked on farms, collected his CBE, and in 1957 led a group of students from the Imperial College of Science to the Karakoram.

For the last decade of his life, Eric Shipton continued to travel extensively, supporting himself by lecturing and acting as a celebrity guide. He completed the second volume of his autobiography, That Untravelled World in 1969. He visited the Galapagos Islands, Alaska, Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia, Kenya, Chile, Bhutan and Nepal. Whilst staying in Bhutan in 1976 he fell ill, on his return to England he was diagnosed with cancer to which he succumbed in March 1977. He was cremated in Salisbury and his ashes were scattered on Fonthill Lake.

Frank Smythe

Francis Sydney Smythe, better known as Frank Smythe was an English mountaineer, author, photographer and botanist.

 He is best remembered for his mountaineering in the Alps and in the Himalayas, where he identified a region that he named the "Valley of Flowers", now a protected park. His ascents include two new routes on the Brenva Face of Mont Blanc, Kamet, and attempts on Kangchenjunga and Mount Everest in the 1930s. It was said that he had a tendency for irascibility, something some of his mountaineering contemporaries said "decreased with altitude".

Smythe was educated in Switzerland after an initial period at Berkhamsted School, trained as an electrical engineer and worked for brief periods with the Royal Air Force and Kodak before devoting himself to writing and public lecturing. Smythe enjoyed mountaineering, photography, collecting plants, and gardening; he toured as a lecturer; and he wrote a total of twenty seven books. Smythe's focused approach is well documented, not only through his own writings, but by his contemporaries and later works.

Among his many public lectures, Smythe gave at least several to the Royal Geographical Society, his first being in 1931 titled "Explorations in Garhwal around Kamet", his second in 1947 titled "An Expedition to the Lloyd George Mountains, North-East British Columbia".

Smythe was a prodigious writer and produced many popular books. However his book "The Kangchenjunga Adventure" launched Smythe as a legitimate and respected author.

During the Second World War he served in the Canadian Rockies as a mountaineer training officer for the Lovat Scouts. He went on to write two books about climbing in the Rockies, Rocky Mountains (1948) and Climbs in the Canadian Rockies (1951). Mount Smythe (10,650 ft) was named in his honour.

In 1949, in Delhi, he was taken ill with food poisoning; then a succession of malaria attacks took their toll and he died on 27 June 1949, two weeks before his 49th birthday.

Johnny Smith

John Henry Smith II was an American cool jazz and mainstream jazz guitarist. He wrote "Walk, Don't Run" in 1954. In 1984, Smith was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.

Leopoldo Marechal

Leopoldo Marechal was one of the most important Argentine writers of the twentieth century.

Born in Buenos Aires into a family of French and Spanish descent, Marechal became a primary school teacher and a high school professor after obtaining his degree despite enormous economic difficulties. During the 1920s he was among the poets who rallied around the movement represented by the literary journal Martín Fierro. While his first published works of poetry, Los aguiluchos (1922) and Días como flechas (1926), tended towards vanguardism, his Odas para el hombre y la mujer showed a blend of novelty and a more classical style. It is with this collection of poems that Marechal obtained his first official recognition as a poet in 1929, the Premio Municipal de Poesía of the city of Buenos Aires.

He traveled to Europe for the first time in 1926 and in Paris met important intellectuals and artists such as Picasso, Basaldúa and Antonio Berni. On his second visit to Paris in 1929, he settled in Montparnasse and widened his circle of friends, which now included artists Aquiles Badi, Alfredo Bigatti, Horacio Butler, Juan del Prete, Raquel Forner, Victor Pissarro and the sculptor José Fioravanti, who later sculpted the poet's bust in bronze. It is during this second Parisian experience that Marechal wrote the first two chapters of his novel Adam Buenosayres, which he did not publish until 1948. Some of its protagonists are based on his friends of the Martin Fierro group, including artist Xul Solar (as the astrologer Schultze), poet Jacobo Fijman (as the philosopher Samuel Tesler), Jorge Luis Borges (as Luis Pereda) and Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz (as "el petiso" Bernini).

Back in Buenos Aires, Marechal married María Zoraida Barreiro in 1934. Their two daughters, María de los Ángeles and María Magdalena, were born some years after. Marechal again obtained the First Prize of the prestigious Premio Municipal de Poesía in 1940 for his poetry book entitled Sonetos a Sophia. The poet's wife died in 1947, leaving him with two small children.

The publication of the writer's Adam Buenosayres, considered by many as the fundamental novel of Argentine literature, did not have the expected repercussion, possibly due to the poet's open sympathies for the government of Juan Domingo Perón, the controversial populist leader greatly influenced by his radical wife Evita. Among the novel's most ardent admirers was Julio Cortázar, who wrote a long critical study in the literary magazine Realidad in 1949. Despite his and other writers' support, Marechal's novel and the rest of his monumental work remained widely ignored by many colleagues of the literary world, including Jorge Luis Borges, whose mother and sister had been imprisoned during Peron´s presidency.

Although the seminal influence of his first and subsequent novels has tended to classify him mainly as a novelist, Marechal is first and foremost a poet of primary importance. In fact, even his first novel, which is mainly autobiographical, is in his own words an extension of poetry: "When I wrote Adán Buenosayres I never intended it to be other than poetry. Ever since my early youth, and taking Aristotle's Poetics as my starting point, I have always believed that all literary genres are and should be types of poetry, whether epic, dramatic or lyrical."

Marechal was not a widely recognized figure in Argentine literature until the 1965 reprint of Adam Buenosayres, which ignited a resurgence of interest in his work. 

A.S. Neill

Alexander Sutherland Neill was a Scottish educator and author known for his school, Summerhill, and its philosophies of freedom from adult coercion and community self-governance. Neill was raised in Scotland, where he was a poor student but became a schoolteacher. He taught in several schools across the country before attending the University of Edinburgh from 1908 to 1912. He took two jobs in journalism before World War I, and taught at Gretna Green Village School during the first year of the war, writing his first book, A Dominie's Log (1915), as a diary of his life as headteacher. He joined the staff of a school in Dresden in 1921, founding Summerhill upon his return to England in 1924. Summerhill received widespread renown in the 1920s to 1930s and then in the 1960s to 1970s, due to progressive and counter-culture interest. Neill wrote 20 books in his lifetime, and his best seller was the 1960 Summerhill, a compilation of four previous books about his school. The book was a common ancestor to activists in the 1960s free school movement.

Matthieu Wiegman

Matthew John Maria (Matthieu) Wiegman was a Dutch artist. He was a painter, artist, wall painter and glassier, and his hand posters and book bands are also known.

Wiegman visited the Crafts School in Alkmaar. He arrived in Bergen in 1911 when he completed his studies at the Amsterdam Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam between 1905 and 1909. He was together with Leo Gestel and Arnout Colnot one of the most important figures in the Bergens School. He had a lot of admiration for Paul Cézanne's work.

In 1909 he made the design of his first religious painting, the preaching of Saint Willibrordus. During his career he made many religious performances. The Bergen painters pointed to him on the new possibilities. Wiegman went on heartfelt. He mostly succumbed to the luminous work. He also regularly traveled to France to work there. He was a member of the Dutch Artist Circle. In 1918, at the age of 32, he was polled for the professorship at the Amsterdam Academy.

Eventually, the optimistic element in Wiegman's work is increasingly dominating, until the last 20 years of his life, using the brightest and hardest colors, colors that are very unusual. Important to Wiegman's work were his still life inspired by his friend De Zarate. Most preferably, Wiegman used to paint objects for background filling.

Jean-Claude Germain

Jean-Claude Germain is a Canadian playwright, author, journalist and historian.

He contributed to Le Petit Journal, to Victor-Lévy Beaulieu's Dimensions magazine and to Maclean's Magazine, and has been the senior editor to Le Québec littéraire. He writes a monthly column in l'aut'journal.

In 1969 he founded the company Le Théâtre du Même Nom of which he became the director in 1972. He has also taught at the National Theatre School of Canada.

George Kaczender

George Kaczender was a Hungarian-born Canadian film director. He directed 26 films between 1963 and 2001.

Bill Vander Zalm

William Nicholas "Bill" Vander Zalm is a politician and entrepreneur in British Columbia, Canada. He was the 28th Premier of British Columbia from 1986 to 1991.

Fereydoun Hoveyda

Fereydoon Hoveyda was an Iranian diplomat, writer and thinker. He was the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations from 1971 until 1979.


Hoveyda was born in Damascus on September 23, 1924 where his father, Habibollah Hoveyda, was the Consul-General of Persia. His mother was Afsar-ol-Molouk Fatmeh, a Qajar princess. Upon marriage his father was given the title of Ayn al-Molk (Eye of the Kingdom) by the Qajar ruler of the country.

His brother, Amir Abbas Hoveyda, a former prime minister of Iran under the Shah, was executed after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. They were nephews of Abdol Hossein Sardari, who is known for saving many Jews in Paris during World War II.

Fereydoun Hoveyda was raised in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. He completed a Ph.D. in international law and economics at the Sorbonne, Paris, France in 1948.

Hoveyda joined the foreign ministry in the early 1940s. A participant in the final drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he worked in UNESCO from 1951 to 1966. In the late 1960s, he returned to Iran and worked in the Iranian Foreign Ministry as the undersecretary for international and economic affairs. He was also deputy foreign minister. From 1971 to 1979 he represented Iran at the United Nations.

Having been forced out of the Iranian Foreign Ministry following the 1979 revolution, Hoveyda became a senior fellow and member of the Executive Committee of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy (NCAFP).

Apart from politics, he was active in the field of cinema and was a founding member of the editorial board of the celebrated film magazine Cahiers du cinéma.

Hoveyda was a well-known author of 18 novels and non-fiction books in French, English, and German. He was also the cowriter of the screenplay for Roberto Rossellini's 1959 film India.

Hoveyda wed twice. His first spouse, Touran Mansour, with whom he married in the 1940s was the daughter of Ali Mansour, one of the prime ministers of Iran.

Hoveyda died in Clifton on November 3, 2006 at age 82.

Charles Allen Winter

Charles Allen Winter was a American artist.

Winter was born in 1896 in Cincinnati, OH. He was known for his Impressionist paintings and beautiful use of light. He studied at the Cincinnati art Academy with Nobel and Nowottny then traveled to Paris to study at the Adademie Julian with Bouguereau. From 1894-1896 he studied in Rome. He exhibited in the prestigious Paris Salon of 1896 and 898, as well as in America at the Annual Exhibition fo the Art Institute of Chicago. His most famous publicly seen works today may be viewed in the City Hall and High School of Gloucester, MA. He also illustrated many covers for Colliers and Hearst’s Magazines. He died in 1942.

Frits Thaulow

Frits Thaulow was a Norwegian Impressionist painter, best known for his naturalistic depictions of landscape.

Jesse Stuart

Jesse Hilton Stuart was an American writer, school teacher, and school administrator who is known for his short stories, poetry, and novels as well as non-fiction autobiographical works set in central Appalachia. Born and raised in Greenup County, Kentucky, Stuart relied heavily on the rural locale of northeastern Kentucky for his writings. Stuart was named the poet laureate of Kentucky in 1954.

Stuart was born near Riverton, Greenup County, Kentucky, to Mitchell and Martha (Hilton) Stuart on August 8, 1907. Stuart served in the US Navy during World War II but did not see combat as his mission in his life. In 1939, Stuart married Naomi Deane Norris, a school teacher. They settled in W Hollow and had one daughter, Jessica Jane.

After being denied admission at three colleges, Stuart was finally accepted at and attended Lincoln Memorial University, near Harrogate, Tennessee. After graduating he returned to his home area and taught at Warnock High School in Greenup, Kentucky. Later he was appointed principal at McKell High School, but resigned after one year to attend graduate school at Vanderbilt University, where Edwin Mims was one of his professors. He then served as superintendent of the Greenup County Schools before ending his career as an English teacher at Portsmouth High School in Portsmouth, Ohio.

One day while Stuart was plowing in the field, he stopped and wrote the first line of a sonnet: "I am a farmer singing at the plow," the first line of the 703 sonnets he would collect in Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow (1934). The book was described by Irish poet George William Russell (who wrote poetry under the name of AE) as the greatest work of poetry to come out of America since Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass. Stuart was named poet laureate for the Commonwelath of Kentucky in 1954, and in 1961 he received the annual award from the American Academy of Poets.

Stuart's first novel was Trees of Heaven (1940). Set in rural Kentucky, the novel tells the story of Anse Bushman, who loves working the land and wants more land. Stuart's style is simple and sparse. Taps for Private Tussie (1943) is perhaps his most popular novel, selling more than a million copies in only two years. The novel also received critical praise and won the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Award for the best Southern book of the year. In 1974, Gale Research (in American Fiction, 1900-1950) identified Jesse Stuart as one of the forty-four novelists in the first half of the 20th century with high critical acclaim. Jesse Stuart was the second youngest of that group (William Saroyan was one year younger).

Stuart published about 460 short stories. He wrote his first short story "Nest Egg" when he was a sophomore in high school in 1923. The story is of a rooster at his farm, whose behavior was so dominant that it began attracting hens from other farms, leading to conflict with the neighbors. Twenty years later, he submitted the story unchanged to the Atlantic Monthly, which accepted the story and published it in February 1943; it was later collected in Tales from Plum Grove Hills.

One of his most anthologized stories is "Split Cherry Tree," first published in Esquire, January 1939. In this story, a high school teacher in a one-room schoolhouse keeps a boy after school to work and pay for damage he did to a cherry tree. The boy's uneducated father comes to school to argue with the teacher, but comes to appreciate the value of higher education.

The theme of education appears often in Stuart's books. He described the role that teaching played in his life in The Thread that Runs So True (1949), though he changed the names of places and people. He first taught school in rural Kentucky at the age of 16 at Cane Creek Elementary School, which became Lonesome Valley in his book. The Thread that Runs So True (1949) has become a classic of American education. Ruel Foster, a professor at West Virginia University, noted in 1968 that the book had good sales in its first year. At the time, he wrote, sales for the book had gone up in each successive year, an astonishing feat for any book. The book has remained continuously in print for more than 50 years.

Stuart died February 17, 1984 at Jo-Lin Nursing Home, near his boyhood home, in Ironton, Ohio. He was 77 years old.

René Henoumont

René Henoumont was a Belgian journalist and writer.

After studying art and archeology, he joined the Resistance. It is thanks to Hubert Rassart, a socialist and resistant politician who would play a role in the constitution of a Walloon separatist Government, that he began to work as a journalist at the World of Work, a left-wing daily; born of the Resistance. He also wrote for Wallonia Free a story illustrated by Victor Hubinon, the draftsman of Buck Danny.

From 1950 to 1953, he worked as a journalist at La Meuse. 1950 is the year of the Royal Question, the assassination of Julien Lahaut, the invasion of South Korea by North Korea and the reaction of the United Nations which sends troops, mainly American, under the command of MacArthur . In May 1952, he did an interview with Georges Simenon returning from America. After having worked also at the INR and RTBF, to the modernization of which he participates at the time of the World Expo of 1958, he would commit himself to the Pourquoi Pas? (hebdo) in 1965 until the disappearance of it in 1988. He would work at the Mosquito where he will be the editor and at Soir Mag.

In December 2007, he inaugurated the new central library René Henoumont in Herstal, his native town. It will have a Fonds René Henoumont, since the author has decided to leave all his archives.

He dies on September 9 , 2009 after a heart attack.

August Macke

August Macke was a German Expressionist painter. He was one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). He lived during a particularly innovative time for German art: he saw the development of the main German Expressionist movements as well as the arrival of the successive avant-garde movements which were forming in the rest of Europe. Like a true artist of his time, Macke knew how to integrate into his painting the elements of the avant-garde which most interested him.

José Bové

Joseph (José) Bové is a French farmer, politician and syndicalist, member of the alter-globalization movement, and spokesman for Via Campesina. He was one of the twelve official candidates in the 2007 French presidential election. He served as a member of the European Greens between 2009 and 2014.

George Vernon Russell

George Vernon Russell was an award-winning American architect. He designed many residential properties and commercial buildings in Los Angeles, California. He also designed the masterplans and a library unit for the University of California, Riverside as well as the 1976 expansion of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Ralph Rapson

Ralph Rapson was the head of architecture at the University of Minnesota for many years. He was one of the world's oldest practicing architects at his death at age 93, and also one of the most prolific.

Maurice Druon

Maurice Druon was a French novelist and a member of the Académie française, of which he served as "Perpetual Secretary" (chairman) between 1985 and 1999.

Born in Paris, France, Druon was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrant Lazare Kessel (1899–1920) and was brought up at La Croix-Saint-Leufroy in Normandy and educated at the lycée Michelet de Vanves. His father committed suicide in 1920 and his mother remarried in 1926; Maurice subsequently took the name of his adoptive father, the lawyer René Druon (1874–1961).

He was the nephew of the writer Joseph Kessel, with whom he translated the Chant des Partisans, a French Resistance anthem of World War II, with music and words (in Russian) originally by Anna Marly. Druon was a member of the Resistance and came to London in 1943 to participate in the BBC's "Honneur et Patrie" programme.

Druon began writing for literary journals at the age of 18. In September 1939, having been called up for military service, he wrote an article for Paris-Soir entitled "J'ai vingt ans et je pars (I am twenty years old and I am leaving)". Following the fall of France in 1940, he was demobilized and remained in the unoccupied zone of France, and his first play, Mégarée, was produced in Monte Carlo in February 1942. He left the same year to join the forces of Charles de Gaulle. Druon became aide de camp to General François d'Astier de La Vigerie.

In 1948 Druon received the Prix Goncourt for his novel Les Grandes Familles (fr), and later published two sequels.

Druon was elected to the 30th seat of the Académie française on 8 December 1966, succeeding Georges Duhamel. He was elected as “Perpetual Secretary” in 1985, but chose to resign the office in late 1999 due to old age; he successfully pushed for Hélène Carrère d'Encausse to succeed him, the first woman to hold the post, and was styled Honorary Perpetual Secretary after 2000. On the death of Henri Troyat on 2 March 2007, he became the Dean of the Académie, its longest-serving member.

While his scholarly writing earned him a seat at the Académie, Druon is best known for a series of seven historical novels published in the 1950s under the title Les Rois maudits (The Accursed Kings). The novels were adapted for French television in 1972, gaining a wider audience through overseas sales, and again in 2005, starring Jeanne Moreau. Fantasy writer George R. R. Martin stated that the novels had been an inspiration for his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, and called Druon "France's best historical novelist since Alexandre Dumas, père."

Druon's only work for children – Tistou les pouces verts – was published in 1957 and translated into English in 1958 (as Tistou of the Green Thumbs) and 2012 (as Tistou: The Boy With Green Thumbs).

Druon was Minister of Cultural Affairs (1973–1974) in Pierre Messmer's cabinet, and a deputy of Paris (1978–1981). He was survived by his second wife, Madeleine Marignac, whom he married in 1968. Druon was a descendant of Brazilian author Odorico Mendes.

Jacques Antoine

Jacques Antoine was a French creator and producer of game shows. His most famous creations include Treasure Hunt, Interceptor, Fort Boyard and The Crystal Maze.


Jacques Antoine was born March 14, 1924 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb to the west of Paris, France. His father was writer and director André-Paul Antoine and his grandfather was theatre director André Antoine.

At the age of 24, Jacques Antoine made his first steps in radio with Pierre Bellemare. From the 1950s to 1990s, he created and produced many programs, including more than 150 television and radio games among the most famous in French speaking countries such as La Tête et les Jambes, Le Schmilblick, Les Jeux de 20 heures, La Chasse aux trésors, L'Académie des neuf, Tournez manège and Fort Boyard.

Antoine died on 14 September 2012 of a cardiac arrest.

Vassilis Alexakis

Vassilis Alexakis is a Greek-French writer and self-translator of numerous novels in Greek, his mother tongue, and French.


Alexakis, the son of actor Giannis Alexakis, was born in Greece. He first came to France in 1961 to study journalism at the university in Lille and returned to Greece in 1964 to perform his military service. Because of the military junta he went into exile to Paris in 1968 and stayed. Today he spends most of his time in Paris but also travels regularly to Greece. Part of his experiences of his military service in the experimental Armed Forces Television (TED) was depicted in the cult Greek 1984 film Loafing and Camouflage, directed by Nikos Perakis, who served alongside Alexakis in TED. Alexakis' analogue is Pvt. Savidis, played by Giannis Chatziyannis.

In his literary work he continues to draw from both Greek and French culture. In 1974 he published his first book Le Sandwich, written in French. The first book directly written in Greek was Talgo, published in 1981. By writing Talgo and later on La langue maternelle directly in Greek, he wanted to prove himself that he was still able to write in his mother tongue. He self-translated Talgo into French and since then he writes each book in French and Greek. In darkly humorous prose, he combines autobiography, history, fantasy, and suspense. In 2006, Les mots étrangers was translated by Alyson Waters and published under the title Foreign Words; this was the first of his novels to be translated into English. In 1995, he received the prestigious Prix Médicis for La langue maternelle. In 2007, he received the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française for Ap. J.-C.

Sigvard Bernadotte

Sigvard Oscar Fredrik Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg was a Swedish prince and industrial designer.

He was the second son of King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden and his first wife, Margaret, Duchess of Scania, a granddaughter of Britain's Queen Victoria. He was born a Swedish prince and was originally titled Duke of Uppland, but was no longer authorized to use his royal titles from 1934 when he married a commoner. He was a paternal uncle of King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden and a maternal uncle of Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and Queen Anne-Marie of Greece.

Jacques Hétu

Jacques Hétu was a Canadian composer and music educator.

Hétu was born in Trois-Rivières, Quebec; he began his professional training at the University of Ottawa where he was a pupil of Jules Martel from 1955 to 1956. In 1956 he entered the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal and studied there for five years with Melvin Berman (oboe), Isabelle Delorme (harmony), Jean Papineau-Couture (fugue), Clermont Pépin (composition and counterpoint), and Georges Savaria (piano); he also studied at the Tanglewood Music Center during the summer of 1959 with Lukas Foss. In 1961 he won several important awards, including the first prize at the Quebec Music Festivals composition competition, a grant from the Canada Council, and the Prix d'Europe. The latter two awards enabled him to pursue studies in France at the École Normale de Musique de Paris from 1961 to 1963 with Henri Dutilleux and at the Paris Conservatory with Olivier Messiaen in 1962–1963.

Hétu joined the music faculty at Laval University in 1963, remaining there through 1977. He taught music composition at the University of Montreal in 1972–1973 and 1978–1979. From 1979 to 2000, he was a professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal, notably serving as the director of that school's Music Department from 1980 to 1982 and from 1986 to 1988.

He was nominated for a 1989 Juno Award in the Best Classical Composition category. In 1989, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and in 2001 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Hétu died at his home in Saint-Hippolyte on February 9, 2010.

Mahfoudh Romdhani

Mahfoudh Romdhani is a Belgian politician Brussels, member of the Socialist Party (PS).

He is an industrial engineer in nuclear sciences and a candidate in mathematics.

Gérard Pierre-Charles

Gérard Pierre-Charles was a Haitian politician and former leader of the Unified Party of Haitian Communists. Pierre-Charles was also an economist and author.

In his youth, he worked at a cement plant in Port-au-Prince and organized a union there. In 1959, he helped found an underground Marxist party and went into exile in Mexico the following year. He studied economics there and subsequently taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Pierre-Charles helped organize the Unified Party of Haitian Communists. After the overthrow of Jean-Claude Duvalier, he returned to Haiti in 1986. He supported Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was elected president of Haiti in 1991 but then went into exile after he was deposed by the military. Soon after Aristide's return in 1994, Pierre-Charles became one of his most vocal critics. Aristide's supporter's burnt Pierre-Charles' house down. Pierre-Charles married Suzy Castor; the couple had three sons and one daughter.

He died of heart failure in Havana where he had come to receive medical treatment.

Erich von Däniken

Erich Anton Paul von Dänikenis a Swiss author of several books which make claims about extraterrestrial influences on early human culture, including the best-selling Chariots of the Gods?, published in 1968. Von Däniken is one of the main figures responsible for popularizing the "paleo-contact" and ancient astronauts hypotheses. The ideas put forth in his books are rejected by a majority of scientists and academics, who categorize his work as pseudohistory, pseudoarchaeology, and pseudoscience.

Michel Peyramaure

Michel Peyramaure is a French novelist, often described as a regional writer or regionalist writer, author of a hundred novels, mostly historical. In 1979, he received the grand prize of literature from the SGDL for all of his work. He is considered by many to be one of the "greatest historical novelists."

After graduating from high school, he worked in his father's printing house, where he composed his first poems, then became a journalist at La Montagne, before devoting himself to literary writing. In 1954, he published his first novel, Paradis entre quatre murs , published by Robert Laffont. The following year appeared his first historical work, The Bal des ribauds, regularly reissued.

A prolific author, Michel Peyramaure is dedicated to the history of France, particularly through the history of his provinces, which inscribes his work in the literature of the soil . With Claude Michelet and Denis Tillinac , he founded in the 1980s the School of Brive , writers movement of Corrèze , in the tradition of the nineteenth century popular novel.

He is also the author of many biographies of historical figures such as Joan of Arc, Henri IV, Louis XVI or Napoleon, but also artists like Suzanne Valadon or Sarah Bernhardt.

In 1979 , he received the grand prize of literature of the SGDL for all of his work. Other prizes have been awarded, including the Alexandre Dumas Prize, or the Prix du Printemps du Livre.

He is the author of a hundred novels, mostly devoted to the history of France, but also articles, prefaces, books of memories or works of a tourist nature.

Elvis Presley

Elvis Aaron Presley was an American singer and actor. Regarded as one of the most significant cultural icons of the 20th century, he is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King".

Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and relocated to Memphis, Tennessee with his family when he was 13 years old. His music career began there in 1954, when he recorded a song with producer Sam Phillips at Sun Records. Accompanied by guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, Presley was an early popularizer of rockabilly, an uptempo, backbeat-driven fusion of country music and rhythm and blues. RCA Victor acquired his contract in a deal arranged by Colonel Tom Parker, who managed the singer for more than two decades. Presley's first RCA single, "Heartbreak Hotel", was released in January 1956 and became a number-one hit in the United States. After a series of successful network television appearances and chart-topping records, he was regarded as the leading figure of rock and roll. His energized interpretations of songs and sexually provocative performance style, combined with a singularly potent mix of influences across color lines that coincided with the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, made him enormously popular—and controversial.

In November 1956, Presley made his film debut in Love Me Tender. In 1958, he was drafted into military service. He resumed his recording career two years later, producing some of his most commercially successful work before devoting much of the 1960s to making Hollywood films and their accompanying soundtrack albums, most of which were critically derided. In 1968, following a seven-year break from live performances, he returned to the stage in the acclaimed televised comeback special Elvis, which led to an extended Las Vegas concert residency and a string of highly profitable tours. In 1973, Presley featured in the first globally broadcast concert via satellite, Aloha from Hawaii. On August 16, 1977, he suffered a heart attack in his Graceland estate, and died as a result. His death came in the wake of many years of prescription drug abuse.

Louis Bouché

Louis George Bouché was an American artist, muralist, and decorator. He was a 1933 Guggenheim Fellow.

He was born in New York City. He grew up in Paris and studied at the Lysée Calneux, Academy Colorossi, and the Grande Chaumiere. He studied at the Art Students League of New York in 1915, with Dimitri Romanovsky and Frank Vincent DuMond. In 1921 he married Marian. Bouché curated an art gallery in Wanamaker's department store, from 1922 to 1926.

He painted murals for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Radio City Music Hall. He designed club cars for the Pennsylvania Railroad and was a member of the Federal Art Project.

Bouché was commissioned to paint murals at the Eisenhower Presidential Museum, Stewart Lee Udall Department of the Interior Building, Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building and the Ellenville, New York post office. His art is held by the U.S. State Department, the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The Phillips Collection.

He taught at the Art Students League in New York, University of Cincinnati, and Drake University. His papers are held by the Archives of American Art.

Louis Bouché died on August 7, 1969, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Paul Strand

Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa.

G.H. Davis

George Horace Davis was a British artist.

Davis was born on 8 May 1881 in Kensington, London, and educated at Kensington Park College and Ealing School of Art.

He worked as a freelance artist and during the First World War served with distinction with the Royal Flying Corps (later the Royal Air Force), using his experience to create portrayals of aerial combat, a number of which were published in The Sphere.

He is best known as a “special artist” for The Illustrated London News for whom he began to work in 1923. His first drawing, a visual explanation of the use of wireless in small boats, reflected his speciality, which was in creating diagrammatic drawings that educated and informed readers of advances in science, technology, transport and warfare.

Aside from this, he created fascinating cutaway drawings of buildings such as 10 Downing Street, the Savoy Hotel, Westminster Abbey and even the new reptile house at London Zoo. The scope and detail of his work is utterly without peer.

It is estimated that in the 40 years he worked at ILN, his full-page and double-page illustrations occupied around 2,500 pages of the paper, each one painstakingly researched and requiring an informed understanding of his subject, whether it was a V2 rocket during the Second World War, or the interior of the Queen Mary ocean liner.

George Davis continued to work into his eighties. At the time of his death in late 1963, the ILN had a number of his recently completed drawings in the office, awaiting publication.

Edward Steichen

Edward Jean Steichen was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter, and art gallery and museum curator.

Steichen was the most frequently featured photographer in Alfred Stieglitz' groundbreaking magazine Camera Work during its run from 1903 to 1917. Together Stieglitz and Steichen opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, which eventually became known as 291 after its address.

His photos of gowns for the magazine Art et Décoration in 1911 are regarded as the first modern fashion photographs ever published. From 1923 to 1938, Steichen was a photographer for the Condé Nast magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair while also working for many advertising agencies including J. Walter Thompson. During these years, Steichen was regarded as the best known and highest paid photographer in the world. In 1944, he directed the war documentary The Fighting Lady, which won the 1945 Academy Award for Best Documentary.

From 1947 to 1961, Steichen served as Director of the Department of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art. While at MoMA, he curated and assembled the exhibit The Family of Man, which was seen by nine million people.

George Fairweather

George Fairweather was a Scottish architect.

Fairweather was born on 14 July 1906, the son of George Fairweather, a furnituremaker who lived and worked at The Vyne, Dundee. He spent part of his childhood in South Africa but had returned to Dundee by 1922 when he commenced his studies at Dundee School of Art. In July the following year he entered the office of Maclaren Soutar & Salmond as an apprentice, leaving them in August 1927 to spend the final year of his apprenticeship with Mills & Shepherd.

In 1928 or 1929 he came to London to seek further opportunities, and secured a position in the office of Joseph Emberton by sitting at the bottom of the entrance steps every day until Emberton took him on 'if only so that he didn't have to keep walking past me', as he once said. He was one of only two salaried assistants in the office, and when the economic depression hit Emberton's workload, Fairweather volunteered to leave because he was unmarried and therefore without dependents. He was homeless for a time, sleeping on the Embankment, but found employment as a draughtsman with Constantine & Vernon in 1930. The following year he moved to the office of W A Lewis & Partners, and in 1931 returned to Dundee to join the City Architect's Department there. He was admitted ARIBA in early 1932, his proposers being Charles Geddes Soutar, William Salmond and John Donald Mills. His travels for study purposes prior to that time had been limited to two weeks in Southern Germany.

After only eight months in Dundee City Architect's Department, Fairweather left to commence practice on his own account at 49 High Street, Montrose. His practice was almost entirely limited to extensions, alterations and renovations of domestic and farm buildings, his only more substantial works at that time being two houses in St Andrews and a small concert hall for Montrose Town Council. He abandoned his practice in 1935 to join the staff of Sir Walter Tapper as prospective junior partner, but left in 1936 having decided to concentrate on teaching. In that year he ran the Architecture Department of the Bromley School of Art, carried out research into heating of low-cost housing for the Housing Centre, and secured a teaching position in the Architectural Association School, where he later became Senior Master in Construction and Lecturer of Building Construction. He continued to pursue a limited private practice, winning the Industrial Housing Competition in partnership with Miss J Ledeboer and carrying out a certain amount of work in collaboration with Robert Furneaux Jordan and Cecil Handisyde. He also assisted his friend, the sculptor William Lamb, in the design of his studio in Market Street, Montrose.

He contributed articles to a number of journals including the 'Architects' Journal', and a series on Structural Economy for the 'Architect & Building News', which was later published as a book. He was admitted FRIBA on 15 December 1942, his proposers being G A Jellicoe, Charles Lovett Gill and John Grey.

Fairweather's post-war practice played a significant part in the development of modern school design. Fairweather himself was courageous in his opinions, quietly persuasive, and often ran against the grain, buying and refurbishing the vicarage in St Anne's Close, North London in 1949 when such moves were unfashionable, and speaking out against the proposed merger between the Architectural Association Schools and Imperial College in the early 1960s, as well as voicing early concerns about the potential risks of high-rise system building ('One day, one of those blocks will collapse'). He was elected FRIAS in 1965.

He died in Montrose on 13 July 1985.

Camille Pissarro

Camille Pissarro was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas; now in the US Virgin Islands, but then in the Danish West Indies. His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Pissarro studied from great forerunners, including Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of 54.

In 1873 he helped establish a collective society of fifteen aspiring artists, becoming the "pivotal" figure in holding the group together and encouraging the other members. Art historian John Rewald called Pissarro the "dean of the Impressionist painters", not only because he was the oldest of the group, but also "by virtue of his wisdom and his balanced, kind, and warmhearted personality". Cézanne said "he was a father for me. A man to consult and a little like the good Lord," and he was also one of Gauguin's masters. Renoir referred to his work as "revolutionary", through his artistic portrayals of the "common man", as Pissarro insisted on painting individuals in natural settings without "artifice or grandeur".

Pissarro is the only artist to have shown his work at all eight Paris Impressionist exhibitions, from 1874 to 1886.

Carlo-Eduardo Dalgas

Carlo Eduardo Johan Dalgas was a Danish animal fairer.

Both the artist's parents, Jean Antoine Dalgas, the grocery store and Danish consul in Livorno and Johanne Thomine, born de Stibolt, were born in Denmark but lived in Italy, where the Dalgas was born.

He was raised in Copenhagen and visited the Academy of Arts from 1837. After exhibiting in 1843, he won the Neuhausen prize for a party of a zoo in 1848, sold in 1848 a Faareflook to the Royal Painting Collection, and had received the academy's travel support when the war in 1848 called him under the tab as volunteer.

He participated in all three campaign missions and was in premier league at the last battle of the war at Møllhorst, where he was severely injured on December 31, 1850 and died on January 2, 1851.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was a French landscape and portrait painter as well as a printmaker in etching. He is a pivotal figure in landscape painting and his vast output simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.

Brian Donlevy

Waldo Brian Donlevy, known as Brian Donlevy, was an American actor, noted for playing dangerous tough guys from the 1930s to the 1960s. He usually appeared in supporting roles. Among his best-known films are Beau Geste (1939) and The Great McGinty (1940). For his role as Sergeant Markoff in Beau Geste, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Donlevy starred as US special agent Steve Mitchell in the radio/TV series Dangerous Assignment. Mitchell received assignments to exotic locales involving international intrigue from the Commissioner played by Herbert Butterfield.

Guy Gibson

Wing Commander Guy Penrose Gibson was the first Commanding Officer of the Royal Air Force's No. 617 Squadron, which he led in the "Dam Busters" raid (Operation Chastise) in 1943, resulting in the destruction of two large dams in the Ruhr area. He was awarded the Victoria Cross, and in June 1943 became the most highly decorated serviceman in the country, but lost his life later in the war. He had completed over 170 operations at the age of 26.

Ennio Flaiano

Ennio Flaiano was an Italian screenwriter, playwright, novelist, journalist, and drama critic. Best known for his work with Federico Fellini, Flaiano co-wrote ten screenplays with the Italian director, including La Strada (1954), La Dolce Vita (1960), and 8½.

Flaiano wrote for Cineillustrato, Oggi, Il Mondo, Il Corriere della Sera and other prominent Italian newspapers and magazines.

In 1947, he won the Strega Prize for his novel, Tempo di uccidere (variously translated as Miriam, A Time to Kill, and The Short Cut). Set in Ethiopia during the Italian invasion (1935–36), the novel tells the story of an Italian officer who accidentally kills an Ethiopian woman and is ravaged by the memory of his act. The barren landscape around the protagonist hints at an interior emptiness and meaninglessness. This is one of the few Italian literary works dealing with the misdeeds of Italian colonialism in Eastern Africa. The novel has been continually in print for sixty years. A movie adaptation with the same title, directed by Giuliano Montaldo and starring Nicolas Cage, was released in 1989.

In 1971 Flaiano suffered a first heart-attack. "All will have to change", he wrote in his notes. He put his many papers in order and published them, although the major part of his memoirs were published posthumously. In November 1972 he began writing various autobiographical pieces for Corriere della Sera.

On November 20 of the same year, while at a clinic for a check-up, he suffered cardiac arrest and died.