Katherine Austen

Katherine Austen (1629-ca.1683) was a British diarist and poet best known for Book M, her manuscript collection of meditations, journal entries, and verse.

Austen was born in London, one of seven children, to Katherine Wilson (d. 1648) and her husband Robert (d. 1639), a draper. She married Thomas Austen (1622–1658), a barrister, in 1645. After his death at the age of 36, she entered into an involved legal battle with his family in order to retain his manor in Middlesex for her three children, Thomas, Robert, and Anne.

Her manuscript of 114 folios, Book M (BL, Add. MS 4454), was written over six or seven years during her period of mourning — her “Most saddest Yeares” (60r) — and includes material on her lawsuit, interpretations of dreams (her own and others), historical commentary, prayers, letters, financial materials, and 34 verse meditations in rhyming couplets.

She declined to remarry, citing her regard for her late husband and her fears for the financial interests of her children. The date of her death is unknown but her will was proved in 1683.

W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) who signed his works W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.

Auden grew up in Birmingham in a professional middle class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, alternated between telegraphic modern styles and fluent traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939, where he became an American citizen in 1946. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined traditional forms and styles with new forms devised by Auden himself. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings.

He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably “Funeral Blues” (“Stop all the clocks”) and “September 1, 1939″, became widely known through films, broadcasts and popular media.

Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them book-length). His poetry was encyclopedic in scope and method, ranging in style from obscure twentieth-century modernism to the lucid traditional forms such as ballads and limericks, from doggerel through haiku and villanelles to a “Christmas Oratorio” and a baroque eclogue in Anglo-Saxon meters. The tone and content of his poems ranged from pop-song clichés to complex philosophical meditations, from the corns on his toes to atoms and stars, from contemporary crises to the evolution of society.

He also wrote more than four hundred essays and reviews about literature, history, politics, music, religion, and many other subjects. He collaborated on plays with Christopher Isherwood and on opera libretti with Chester Kallman, worked with a group of artists and filmmakers on documentary films in the 1930s and with the New York Pro Musica early music group in the 1950s and 1960s. About collaboration he wrote in 1964: “collaboration has brought me greater erotic joy . . . than any sexual relations I have had.”

Auden controversially rewrote or discarded some of his most famous poems when he prepared his later collected editions. He wrote that he rejected poems that he found “boring” or “dishonest” in the sense that they expressed views that he had never held but had used only because he felt they would be rhetorically effective. His rejected poems include “Spain” and “September 1, 1939.” His literary executor, Edward Mendelson, argues in his introduction to Auden’s Selected Poems that Auden’s practice reflected his sense of the persuasive power of poetry and his reluctance to misuse it. (Selected Poems includes some poems that Auden rejected and early texts of poems that he revised.)

Auden’s stature in modern literature has been disputed, with opinions ranging from that of Hugh MacDiarmid, who called him “a complete wash-out”, to the obituarist in The Times (London), who wrote: “W. H. Auden, for long the enfant terrible of English poetry . . . emerges as its undisputed master.”

In his enfant terrible stage in the 1930s he was both praised and dismissed as a progressive and accessible voice, in contrast to the politically nostalgic and poetically obscure voice of T. S. Eliot. His departure for America in 1939 was hotly debated in Britain (once even in Parliament), with some critics treating it as a betrayal, and the role of influential young poet passed to Dylan Thomas, although defenders such as Geoffrey Grigson, in an introduction to a 1949 anthology of modern poetry, wrote that Auden “arches over all.” His stature was suggested by book titles such as Auden and After by Francis Scarfe (1942) and The Auden Generation by Samuel Hynes (1972).

In the US, starting in the late 1930s, the detached, ironic tone of Auden’s regular stanzas set the style for a whole generation of poets; John Ashbery recalled that in the 1940s Auden “was the modern poet.” His manner was so pervasive in American poetry that the ecstatic style of the Beat Generation was partly a reaction against his influence. In the 1950s and 1960s, some writers (notably Philip Larkin and Randall Jarrell) lamented that Auden’s work had declined from its earlier promise.

By the time of Auden’s death in 1973 he had attained the status of a respected elder statesman. The Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that “by the time of Eliot’s death in 1965 … a convincing case could be made for the assertion that Auden was indeed Eliot’s successor, as Eliot had inherited sole claim to supremacy when Yeats died in 1939.” With some exceptions, British critics tended to treat his early work as his best, while American critics tended to favor his middle and later work. Unlike other modern poets, his reputation did not decline after his death, and Joseph Brodsky wrote that his was “the greatest mind of the twentieth century.”

Auden’s popularity and familiarity suddenly increased after his “Funeral Blues” (“Stop all the clocks”) was read aloud in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994); subsequently, a pamphlet edition of ten of his poems, Tell Me the Truth About Love, sold more than 275,000 copies. After September 11, 2001, his poem “September 1, 1939″ was widely circulated and frequently broadcast. Public readings and broadcast tributes in the UK and US in 2007 marked his centenary year.

Attila the Stockbroker

Attila the Stockbroker (born John Baine, 21 October 1957 in Southwick, West Sussex, England) is a punk poet, and a folk punk musician and songwriter. He performs solo and as the leader of the band Barnstormer. He describes himself as a “sharp tongued, high energy social surrealist poet and songwriter.” He has performed over 2500 concerts, published five books of poems, and released 29 recordings (CDs,LPs and singles). His latest book of poems, ‘My Poetic Licence’ was published in May 2008.

Baine started performing in 1980 after being inspired by the spirit and do it yourself ethos of the punk subculture, particularly The Clash’s overtly socialist stance. At first he performed poems and songs in between bands at punk rock concerts, accompanying himself on the phased electric mandolin. After this was smashed over his head by fascists during a fight at a performance in North London in May 1982, he got a mandola (a fifth lower) and has played this ever since. He has performed in 19 countries, playing venues ranging from the Oxford Union in England to squatted punk clubs in Germany, and has performed over 100 shows every year. He toured East Germany four times before the Berlin Wall came down, and once did an illegal performance in a hotel basement in Stalinist Albania.

In the 1980s, he was often the support act for punk bands, including The Jam, The Alarm, Newtown Neurotics, New Model Army and performed extensively with fellow punk-inspired ranting poets Swift Nick, Kool Knotes, Phill Jupitus and Seething Wells. Manic Street Preachers once supported him at a performance at Swansea University. In the 1990s, he toured with John Otway as Headbutts and Halibuts, and together they wrote a surreal rock opera called Cheryl. It was an everyday tale of Satanism, trainspotting, drug abuse and unrequited love. He has performed at every Glastonbury Festival since 1982, and continues to write topical, satirical material on all kinds of subjects.

Notable works from his 1980s heyday include the biting poem Contributory Negligence; various Russians-themed poems, satirizing the alleged Cold War Russian threat in the context of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain (such as “Russians in the DHSS” and “Russians in McDonald’s”); and the surreal Nigel series, such as Nigel wants to go to C&A (with the lines “…but I don’t understand why / ‘cos they don’t sell nerve gas in C&A / not even to SDP members in cashmere sweaters”). He recently wrote the poem “Asylum Seeking Daleks”, which satirises the right wing press’s attitudes to immigration, and the song “Hey Celebrity”, which rejects the need for the concept of celebrity.

Attila the Stockbroker formed the band Barnstormer in 1994. Their music combines punk rock and medieval music. The band released its debut album The Siege of Shoreham in 1996. They perform regularly all over Europe. The band features Attila the Stockbroker on vocals, violin, crumhorn and recorders; Dan Woods on guitar (also a member of The Fish Brothers); M. M. McGhee on drums (also a member of The Fish Brothers); and Dave Beaken on bass (also a member of The Fish Brothers).

Anne Askew

Anne Askew (also spelled Anne Ayscough) (1521 – 16 July 1546) was an English poet and Protestant who was persecuted as a heretic. She is the only woman on record to have been tortured in the Tower of London before being burnt at the stake.

Born at Stallingborough into a notable family of Lincolnshire, she was forced by her father, Sir William Askew (1490-1541), to marry Thomas Kyme when she was fifteen, as a substitute for her sister Martha who had recently died. Anne rebelled against her husband by refusing to adopt his surname. It is also speculated that Anne had two children, their sex and names being unknown. The Dictionary of National Biography says no more than that she left her children to go “gospelling”. Her marriage did not go well, not least because of her strong Protestant beliefs. When she returned from London, where she had gone to preach against the doctrine of transubstantiation, her husband turned her out of the house. She then went again to London to ask for a divorce, justifying it from scripture (1 Corinthians, 7.15), on the grounds that her husband was not a believer.

Eventually, Anne left her husband and went to London where she gave sermons and distributed Protestant books. These books had been banned and so she was arrested. Her husband was sent for and ordered to take her home to Lincolnshire. Anne soon escaped and it was not long before she was back preaching in London.

Anne was arrested again. This time, Sir Anthony Kingston, the Constable of the Tower of London, was ordered to torture Anne in an attempt to force her to name other Protestants, and so Anne was put on the rack. Kingston refused to carry on torturing her, left the Tower, and sought a meeting with the King at his earliest convenience to explain his position and also to seek his pardon. Henry VIII pardoned Kingston but did not put an end to the torture. It was now left to Thomas Wriothesley and Richard Rich to take over.

According to Anne’s own account–and also that of gaolers within the Tower–she was tortured only once. It was usual to take a prisoner to see someone being put to the question before their turn came, and that often resulted in an immediate confession. In Anne’s case, however, it was not thought decent for her to see a man naked on the rack, so her first visit to the chamber involved the actual application of the torture. She was taken from her cell, at about ten o’clock in the morning, to the lower room of the White Tower to where the torture chamber was situated. Then, she was shown the rack and asked if she would name those who believed as she did. Although she never said so, she might have realized that the intention of her interrogators was to implicate Catherine Parr, the Queen Consort. Anne declined to name anyone at all, so she was asked to remove all her clothing except her shift, which she did. Anne then climbed onto the rack and lay quite still as she was spreadeagled and her wrists and ankles fastened. Again, she was asked for names, but she would say nothing. The wheel of the rack was turned, pulling Anne along the device and lifting her so that she was held taut about 5 inches above its bed and slowly stretched. In her own account written from prison, Anne said that she fainted with the pain. It was then that she was lowered and revived. This procedure was repeated twice more before the Lieutenant of the Tower stopped it and went to complain to the king.

Wriothesley and Rich were unable to persuade the professional torturers to carry on, so they set to work themselves. The rack was worked by a wheel at the head, and, in the first stage, that was turned and held taught by hand. For more reluctant prisoners, a ratchet could be applied, which stopped the rack from going slack between turns. Wriothesley and Rich put the ratchet on, and went to work stretching Anne. Apart from the pain of stretching muscles and cracking joints, the rack constricted the wrists and ankles, causing blood to flow from the finger nails. Anne’s cries could be heard in the garden next to the White Tower where the Lieutenant’s wife and daughter were walking. So piteous were the cries that they turned indoors and shut the windows. Anne gave no names, and her ordeal was finally ended when the Lieutenant ordered her to be returned to her cell.

She wrote a first-person account of her ordeal and her beliefs, which was published as the Examinations by John Bale, and later in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of 1563 which proclaims her as a Protestant martyr. Several ballads were written about her in the 17th century. She was burnt at Smithfield, London aged 25, on 16 July 1546. As Fuller described it, “she went to heaven in a chariot of fire.”

Anne Askew was carried to execution in a chair as she could not walk after her torture. She was dragged from the chair to the stake which had a small seat attached to it, which she sat astride. Those who witnessed her execution (including Lady Jane Grey) were impressed by her bravery, and many witnesses reported that throughout the long execution she did not scream until the flames reached her chest whereas the 3 men burned with her cried out from the first touch of the fire.

There was a resurgence of interest in her story during Victorian times, and the Bleets company produced an Anne Askew doll complete with rack and stake. One is on show at the Leeds Toy Museum.

Kingsley Amis

Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE (16 April 1922 – 22 October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more than twenty novels, three collections of poetry, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism. According to his biographer, Zachary Leader, Amis was ‘the finest British comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century’. He is the father of the English novelist Martin Amis.

Kingsley Amis was born in Clapham, south London, the son of William Robert Amis, a mustard manufacturer’s clerk. He was educated at the City of London School, and in April 1941 was admitted to St. John’s College, Oxford, where he read English. It was there that he met Philip Larkin, with whom he formed the most important friendship of his life. After only a year, he was called up for Army service in July 1942. After serving in the Royal Corps of Signals in the Second World War, Amis returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree. Although he worked hard and got a first in English in 1947, he had by then decided to give much of his time to writing. In 1946, he became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

In 1946 he met Hilary Bardwell, and they married in 1948. He became a lecturer in English at the University of Wales Swansea (1949–61). Amis achieved popular success with his first novel Lucky Jim, which was considered to have ‘caught the temper’ of Britain in the 1950s and ushered in a new style of fiction. By 1972, in addition to impressive sales in Britain, one and a quarter million paperback copies had been sold in the United States, and it was eventually translated into twenty languages, including Czech, Hebrew, Korean, and Serbo-Croat. The novel won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction and Amis was associated with the writers labelled the Angry Young Men. Lucky Jim was the first British campus novel, setting a precedent for later generations of writers such as Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Tom Sharpe and Howard Jacobson. As a poet, Amis was associated with The Movement.

During 1958-59 he made the first of two visits to the United States, where he was Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing at Princeton University and a visiting lecturer in other northeastern universities. On returning to Britain, he felt in a rut, and he began looking for another post; after thirteen years at Swansea, Amis became a fellow of Peterhouse at Cambridge (1961–63). He regretted the move within a year, finding Cambridge an academic and social disappointment and resigned in 1963, intent on moving to Majorca; he went no further than London.

In 1963, Hilary discovered Kingsley’s love affair with novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Hilary and Kingsley separated in August; he went to live with Jane. He divorced Hilary in 1965, and then married Jane the same year; Jane and Kingsley divorced in 1983. In his last years, Amis shared a house with his first wife Hilary and her third husband, Alastair Boyd, 7th Baron Kilmarnock. Hilary and Kingsley Amis had three children, among them novelist Martin Amis, who wrote the memoir Experience about the life and decline of his father.

Kingsley Amis was knighted in 1990. In August 1995 he fell, suffering a suspected stroke. After apparently recovering, he worsened, was re-admitted to hospital, and died on 22 October 1995 at St Pancras Hospital, London. He was cremated; his ashes are at Golders Green Crematorium.

Amis is chiefly known as a comedic novelist of mid- to late-20th century British life, but his literary work extended into many genres — poetry, essays and criticism, short stories, food and drink writing, anthologies and a number of novels in genres such as science fiction and mystery. His career initially developed in a pattern which was, ironically, the inverse of that followed by his close friend Philip Larkin. Before becoming known as a poet, Larkin had published two novels; Amis, on the other hand, originally wished to be a poet, and turned to writing novels only after publishing several volumes of verse. He continued throughout his career to write poetry which is known for its typically straightforward and accessible style, which yet often, e. g. in “Bookshop Idyll” or “Against Romanticism”, masks a nuance of thought, just as it does in his novels.

Amis’s first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), is perhaps his most famous. Taking its germ from Amis’s observation of the common room at the University of Leicester, where his friend Larkin held a post, the novel satirizes the high-brow academic set of a redbrick university, seen through the eyes of its protagonist, Jim Dixon, as he tries to make his way as a young lecturer of history. The novel was perceived by many as part of the Angry Young Men movement of the 1950s which reacted against the stultifications of conventional British life, though Amis never encouraged this interpretation. Amis’s other novels of the 1950s and early 1960s similarly depict situations from contemporary British life, often drawn from Amis’s own experiences. That Uncertain Feeling (1955) centres on a young provincial librarian (again perhaps with reference to Larkin, librarian at Hull) and his temptation towards adultery; I Like It Here (1958) presents Amis’s contemptuous view of “abroad” and followed upon his own travels on the Continent with a young family; Take a Girl Like You (1960), perhaps Amis’s second best-known novel, steps away from the immediately autobiographical, but remains grounded in the concerns of sex and love in ordinary modern life, tracing the courtship and ultimate seduction of the heroine Jenny Bunn by a young schoolmaster, Patrick Standish.

With The Anti-Death League (1966), Amis begins to show some of the experimentation — with content, if not with style — which would mark much of his work in the 1960s and 70s. Amis’s departure from the strict realism of his early comedic novels is not so abrupt as might first appear. He had avidly read science fiction since a boy, and had developed that interest into the Christian Gauss Lectures of 1958, while visiting Princeton University. The lectures were published in that year as New Maps of Hell: a Survey of Science Fiction, a serious but light-handed treatment of what the genre had to say about man and society. Amis was particularly enthusiastic about the dystopian works of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, and in New Maps of Hell coined the term “comic inferno” to describe a type of humorous dystopia, particularly as exemplified in the works of Robert Sheckley. Amis further displayed his devotion to the genre in editing, with the Sovietologist Robert Conquest, the science fiction anthology series Spectrum I–V, which drew heavily upon 1950s numbers of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction.

Though not explicitly science fiction, The Anti-Death League takes liberties with reality not found in Amis’s earlier novels, and introduces a speculative bent into his fiction, one which would continue to develop in other of his genre novels, such as The Green Man (1969) (mystery/horror) and The Alteration (1976) (alternate history). Much of this speculation was about the improbable existence of any benevolent deity involved in human affairs. In The Anti-Death League, The Green Man, The Alteration and elsewhere, including poems such as “The Huge Artifice: an interim assessment” and “New Approach Needed,” Amis showed frustration with a God who could lace the world with such cruelty and injustice, and championed the preservation of ordinary human happiness — in family, in friendships, in physical pleasure — against the demands of any cosmological scheme. The matter of Amis’s religious views is perhaps ultimately summed up in his response, reported in his Memoirs, to the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s question, in his broken English: “You atheist?” Amis replied, “It’s more that I hate Him.”

During this time, Amis had not turned completely away from the comedic realism of Lucky Jim and Take a Girl Like You. I Want It Now (1968) and Girl, 20 (1971) both depict the “swinging” atmosphere of London in the late ’60s, in which Amis certainly participated, though neither book is strictly autobiographical. Girl, 20, for instance, is framed in the world of classical (and pop) music, of which Amis was not a part — the book’s relatively impressive command of musical terminology and opinion shows both Amis’s amateur devotion to music and the almost journalistic capacity of his intelligence to take hold of a subject which interested him. That intelligence is similarly on display in, for instance, the presentation of ecclesiastical matters in The Alteration, when Amis was neither a Roman Catholic nor, for that matter, a devotee of any Church.

Throughout the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, Amis was regularly producing essays and criticism, principally for journalistic publication. Some of these pieces were collected in 1968’s What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Essays, in which Amis’s wit and literary and social opinions were on display ranging over books such as Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (panned), Iris Murdoch’s debut novel Under the Net (praised), or William Empson’s Milton’s God (inclined to agree with). Amis’s opinions on books and people tended to appear (and often, be) conservative, and yet, as the title essay of the collection shows, he was not merely reverent of “the classics” and of traditional morals, but was more disposed to exercise his own rather independent judgment in all things.

Amis became associated with Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, which he greatly admired, in the late 1960s, when he began composing critical works connected with the fictional spy, either under a pseudonym or uncredited. In 1965, he wrote the popular The James Bond Dossier under his own name. That same year, he wrote The Book of Bond, or, Every Man His Own 007, a tongue-in-cheek how-to manual about being a sophisticated spy, under the pseudonym “Lt Col. William (‘Bill’) Tanner”, Tanner being M’s Chief of Staff in many of Fleming’s Bond novels. In 1968 the owners of the James Bond franchise attempted to continue the series by hiring different novelists, all of whom were to publish under the pseudonym “Robert Markham”. In the event, Amis’s Colonel Sun was the only Bond novel to be published under that name.

With the possible exception of The Old Devils, a Booker Prize winner, Amis’s literary style and tone changed significantly after 1970; several critics accused him of being old fashioned and misogynistic, while others said his output lacked the humanity, wit and compassion of earlier efforts.

This period also saw Amis the anthologist, a role in which his wide knowledge of all kinds of English poetry was on display. The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978), which he edited, was a revision of the original volume done by W. H. Auden. Amis took the anthology in a markedly new direction; where Auden had interpreted light verse to include “low” verse of working-class or lower-class origin, regardless of subject matter, Amis defined light verse as essentially light in tone, though not necessarily simple in composition. The Amis Anthology (1988), a personal selection of his favourite poems, grew out of his work for a London newspaper, in which he selected a poem daily and presented it with a brief introduction.

As a young man at Oxford, Amis briefly joined the Communist Party. He later described this stage of his political life as “the callow Marxist phase that seemed almost compulsory in Oxford”. Amis remained nominally on the Left for some time after the war, declaring in the 1950s that he would always vote for the Labour Party. But he eventually moved further right, a development he discussed in the essay “Why Lucky Jim Turned Right” (1967); his conservativism and anti-communism can be seen in such later works of his as the dystopian novel Russian Hide and Seek (1980).

Amis was by his own admission and as revealed by his biographers a serial adulterer for much of his life. Not surprisingly, this was one of the main contributory factors in the breakdown of his first marriage. A famous photograph of a sleeping Amis on a Yugoslav beach shows the slogan (written by wife Hilly) on his back “1 Fat Englishman – I fuck anything”.

In one of his memoirs, Amis wrote: “Now and then I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time”. He suggests that this is due to a naive tendency on the part of his readers to apply the behaviour of his characters to himself. This was disingenuous; the fact was that he enjoyed drink, and spent a good deal of his time in pubs. Hilary Rubinstein, who commissioned Lucky Jim, commented: “I doubted whether Jim Dixon would have gone to the pub and drunk ten pints of beer … I didn’t know Kingsley very well, you see.” Clive James comments: “All on his own, he had the weekly drinks bill of a whole table at the Garrick Club even before he was elected. After he was, he would get so tight there that he could barely make it to the taxi.” Amis was, however, adamant in his belief that inspiration did not come from a bottle: “Whatever part drink may play in the writer’s life, it must play none in his or her work.” That this was certainly the case is attested to by Amis’s highly disciplined approach to writing. For ‘many years’, Amis imposed a rigorous daily schedule upon himself in which writing and drinking were strictly segregated. Mornings were devoted to writing with a minimum daily output of 500 words. The drinking would only begin around lunchtime when this output had been achieved. Amis’s prodigious output would not have been possible without this kind of self discipline. Nevertheless, according to Clive James, Amis reached a turning point when his drinking ceased to be social, and became a way of dulling his remorse and regret at his behaviour toward Hilly. “Amis had turned against himself deliberately … it seems fair to guess that the troubled grandee came to disapprove of his own conduct.” His friend Christopher Hitchens said: “The booze got to him in the end, and robbed him of his wit and charm as well as of his health.”

Karen Alkalay-Gut

Karen Alkalay-Gut (born 1945) is an award-winning poet, professor, and editor who lives in Israel and writes in English.

Born in London on the last night of the Blitz buzz bombs, Alkalay-Gut moved with her parents and brother Joseph Rosenstein to Rochester, New York in 1948. She studied at the University of Rochester, receiving her BA with honors and her MA in English literature in 1967. From 1967-70 she taught at the State University of New York at Geneseo before returning to complete her doctorate. In 1972 she moved to Israel, and began teaching at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev (1972-6). In 1977 she moved to Tel Aviv University, where she continues to teach.

In 1980 her first collection, Making Love:Poems appeared with the aid and editorial assistance of poet David Avidan, and she has published over twenty books since. Her latest book, So Far, So Good (2004) focuses on life in Tel Aviv. Her poetry has also appeared in Hebrew, French, Arabic, Yiddish, Rumanian, Polish, Russian, German, Turkish, Persian and Italian.

As a critic, Alkalay-Gut is the author of a biography of Adelaide Crapsey as well as numerous articles on Victorian and contemporary literature. She has participated in numerous anthologies, encyclopedias and edited volumes. She has also translated poetry and drama from Hebrew and other languages, including Yehuda Amichai, Raquel Chalfi, and Hanoch Levin. In 1980 Alkalay-Gut helped found the Israel Association of Writers in English, and has been the chair since 1995. She also serves as vice-chair of the Federation of Writers’ Unions, and is editor of the Jerusalem Review.

Joseph Addison

Joseph Addison (1 May 1672 – 17 June 1719) was an English essayist, poet and politician. He was a man of letters, eldest son of Lancelot Addison, and later the dean of Lichfield. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend, Richard Steele, with whom he founded The Spectator magazine.

Addison was born in Milston, Wiltshire, but soon after his birth his father, Lancelot Addison, was appointed Dean of Lichfield and the Addison family moved into the Cathedral Close. He was educated at Lambertown University and Charterhouse School, where he first met Richard Steele, and at The Queen’s College, Oxford. He excelled in classics, being specially noted for his Latin verse, and became a Fellow of Magdalen College. In 1693, he addressed a poem to John Dryden, and his first major work, a book about the lives of English poets, was published in 1694. His translation of Virgil’s Georgics was published the same year. Dryden, Lord Somers and Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax took an interest in Addison’s work and obtained for him a pension of £300 to enable him to travel Europe with a view to diplomatic employment, all the time writing and studying politics. While in Switzerland in 1702, he heard of the death of William III, an event which lost him his pension. (This was because his influential contacts, Halifax and Somers, had lost their employment with the Crown.)

He returned to England at the end of 1703. For a short time his circumstances were somewhat straitened, but the Battle of Blenheim in 1704 gave him a fresh opportunity of distinguishing himself. The government commissioned Addison to write a commemorative poem, and he produced The Campaign, which gave such satisfaction that he was forthwith appointed a Commissioner of Appeals in Halifax’s government. His next literary venture was an account of his travels in Italy, which was followed by an opera libretto titled Rosamund. In 1705, with the Whigs in political power, Addison was made Under-Secretary of State and accompanied Halifax on a mission to Hanover. From 1708 to 1709 he was MP for the rotten borough of Lostwithiel. Addison was shortly afterwards appointed secretary to the new Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Wharton, and Keeper of the Records of that country. Under the influence of Wharton, he was Member of Parliament (MP) in the Irish House of Commons for Cavan Borough from 1709 until 1713. From 1710, he represented Malmesbury, in his home county of Wiltshire, holding the seat until his death.

He encountered Jonathan Swift in Ireland, and remained there for a year. Subsequently, he helped found the Kitcat Club, and renewed his association with Richard Steele. In 1709 Steele began to bring out Tatler, to which Addison became almost immediately a contributor: thereafter he (with Steele) started The Spectator, the first number of which appeared on 1 March 1711. This paper, which at first appeared daily, was kept up (with a break of about a year and a half when the Guardian took its place) until 20 December 1714. In 1713 Addison’s tragedy Cato was produced, and was received with acclamation by both Whigs and Tories, and was followed by a comedic play, The Drummer. His last undertaking was The Freeholder, a party paper (1715-16).

The later events in the life of Addison did not contribute to his happiness. In 1716, he married the Dowager Countess of Warwick to whose son he had been tutor, and his political career continued to flourish, as he served Secretary of State for the Southern Department from 1717 to 1718. However, his political newspaper, The Freeholder, was much criticised, and Alexander Pope was among those who made him an object of derision, christening him “Atticus”. His wife appears to have been arrogant and imperious; his stepson the Earl was a rake and unfriendly to him; while in his public capacity his invincible shyness made him of little use in Parliament. He eventually fell out with Wilson over the Peerage Bill of 1719. In 1718, Addison was forced to resign as secretary of state because of his poor health, but remained an MP until his death at Holland House on 17 June 1719, in his 48th year, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Besides the works above mentioned, he wrote a Dialogue on Medals, and left unfinished a work on the Evidences of Christianity.

Valentine Ackland

Valentine Ackland (20 May 1906 – 9 November 1969) was an English poet, an important figure in the emergence of modernism in twentieth-century British poetry. Born Mary Kathleen Valentine Ackland and nicknamed Molly by her family, Ackland was the child of privilege and of emotional abuse and neglect. With no sons born to the family, Valentine’s father Robert, a West End London dentist, worked at making a symbolic son of Molly, teaching her to shoot rifles and to box. This attention to Molly made her sister Joan immensely jealous. Older by eight years, Joan psychologically tormented and physically abused Molly as a way of unleashing her jealousy and anger.

Molly received an Anglo-Catholic upbringing in Norfolk and a convent school education in London. In 1925 at the age of nineteen, she impetuously married Richard Turpin, a homosexual youth who was unable to consummate their marriage. Upon her marriage, she was also received into the Catholic church, a religion that she later abandoned, returned to, and then abandoned again in the last decade of her life. In less than a year, she had her marriage to Turpin annulled, and, despite numerous pleas from her family and much psychological pressure from them, never returned to a serious relationship with a man again.

Alert to social mores of her day, she became aware of societal patterns of male privilege and female submission set about challenging the female gender identifications expected of her. She took to wearing men’s clothing, cut her hair in a short style called the Eton crop, and was at times mistaken for a handsome young boy. She changed her name to the androgynous Valentine Ackland when she decided to become a serious poet in the late 1920s. Her poetry appeared in British and American literary journals during the 1920s to the 1940s, but Valentine deeply regretted that she never became a noted and widely read poet. In this regard, a good deal of her poetry was published posthumously, and she received little attention from critics until a revival of interest in her work in the 1970s.

In 1930, Valentine was introduced to the short story writer and novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner with whom she had a lifelong relationship, albeit tumultuous at times given Valentine’s increasing alcoholism and infidelities. Sylvia was twelve years older than Valentine, and the two lived together until Valentine’s death from breast cancer in 1969. Warner went on to outlive Ackland by nineteen years, dying in 1978. The pair were together for thirty-nine years. Valentine’s reflections upon her relationship with Sylvia and the latter’s long affair with the American heiress and writer Elizabeth Wade White (1908-1994) were posthumously published in “For Sylvia: An Honest Account” (1985).

Valentine was a highly emotional woman prone to numerous self-doubts and shifts in emotions and intellectual interests. She was responsible for involving Sylvia in membership in the Communist Party in the 1930s and in the Spanish civil war as well as numerous socialist and pacifist activities. The two women’s involvement in the Communist Party came under investigation by the British government in the late 1930s and remained an open file until 1957, when the investigation was halted

After World War II, Valentine turned her attention to confessional poetry and a memoir concerning her relationship with Warner and its many emotional issues as Valentine pursued involvements with other women. At first, Warner was tolerant with her younger lover’s dalliances, but the seriousness and length of Ackland’s relationship with Elizabeth Wade White was distressing to Warner and also pushed her relationship with Ackland to the edge. Ackland’s distresses at loving two women simultaneously and of endeavoring to balance her feelings for each woman with the responsibilities and commitments of her primary relationship with Warner are presented openly in Ackland’s poetry and in her memoir of this period.

Ackland was struggling with additional doubts and conflicts during this period as well. She continued to battle her alcoholism, and she was undergoing shifts in her political and religious alliances. Doubts about her sexual identity and her identity as a poet as well as about her Christian faith and her political convictions are evident in her poetry.

In 1934, Ackland and Warner produced a volume of poetry, “Whether a Dove or a Seagull” that was an unusual and democratic experiment in writing as none of the poems are ascribed to either author. The volume was also an attempt by Warner to introduce Ackland to publication as Warner had an already established reputation as a novelist, and her work was widely read in the 1930s. The volume was controversial for its frank discussion of lesbianism at a time and in a society in which lesbianism was regarded as deviant and immoral behaviour.

In 1937, Ackland and Warner moved from Dorset to a house near Dorchester. Both became involved with Communist ideals and issues, with Ackland writing a column called “Country Dealings” concerning rural poverty for the “Daily Worker” and the “Left Review.” In 1939, the two women attended the American Writers Congress in New York City to consider the loss of democracy in Europe and returned when World War II broke out. Ackland’s poetry of this period attempted to capture the political dynamics she saw at work, but she had a difficult time as a poetry mastering the craft of combining political polemics with her natural tendency toward lyrical expression. In a similar vein, her distress over the loss of democracy in Europe became a broader identification with Existentialism and the sense that the human condition itself was hopeless.

Ackland died on 9 November 1969 from breast cancer that had metastasised to her lungs. She was buried in a churchyard at Chaldon Herring with the inscription Non omnis moriar (“Death is not the end”) on her gravestone.

J. R. Ackerley

J. R. Ackerley (November 4, 1896 – June 4, 1967; his full registered name was Joe Ackerley; Randolph was added later as a tribute to an uncle) was arts editor of The Listener, the weekly magazine of the BBC. He was also openly gay, a rarity in his time.

Ackerley’s memoir My Father and Myself, begins: “I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919.” His father, Roger Ackerley, was a fruit merchant, known as the “Banana King” of London. Roger had been previously married to an actress named Louise Burckhardt who died young and childless, probably of tuberculosis, in 1892.

Shortly afterward, he met another actress named Janetta Aylward (known as Netta) in Paris, and the two of them moved in together in London. Three years later she gave birth to a boy, Peter, then Joe a year later, and Nancy in 1899. Peter’s birth, and possibly Joe’s and Nancy’s as well, was the result of an “accident” according to Joe’s Aunt Bunny, Netta’s sister: “Your father happened to have run out of French letters that day,” she said. Roger Ackerley had “a cavalier attitude towards contraception.”

Failing his entrance examinations for Cambridge University, Ackerley applied for a commission in the Army, and as World War I was in full swing, he was accepted immediately as a Second Lieutenant and assigned to the 8th Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment, part of the 18th Division, then stationed in East Anglia. In June 1915 he was sent over to France. The following summer he was wounded at the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916. He was shot in the arm and an explosion caused shards of a whiskey bottle in his bag to be imbedded in his side. He lay wounded in a shell-hole for six hours but was eventually rescued by British troops and sent home for a period of sick-leave.

He soon volunteered to go back to the front. He had been promoted to captain by now and so, in December 1916, when his older brother Peter arrived in France, Ackerley was his superior officer. Reportedly the cheerful and kind-hearted Peter was not resentful and saluted his brother “gladly and conscientiously.” In February, 1917, Peter was wounded in action on a dangerous assignment, heading into No man’s land from a dangerous ditch (where Ackerley said goodbye to him) ominously called the “Boom Ravine.” Though Peter managed to get back to the British lines, Ackerley never saw him again.

In May 1917 Ackerley led an attack in the Arras region where he was again wounded, this time in the buttock and thigh. Again he was obliged to wait for help in a shell-hole, but this time the Germans arrived first and he was taken prisoner. Being an officer, his internment camp was located in neutral Switzerland and was rather comfortable. Here he began his play, The Prisoners of War, which deals with the cabin fever of captivity and the frustrated longings he experienced for another English prisoner. He was not repatriated to England until after the war ended.

On August 7, 1918, two months before the end of hostilities, Peter Ackerley was killed in battle Peter’s death haunted Ackerley his entire life. Ackerley suffered from survivor’s guilt and thought his father might have preferred his death to his brother’s. One result of Peter’s death was that Roger and Netta got married in 1919, reportedly because Peter had died “a bastard”.

After the war Ackerley returned to England and attended Cambridge. Scant evidence remains from this time in his life as Ackerley wrote little about it. He moved to London and continued to write and enjoy the cosmopolitan delights of the capital. He met E. M. Forster and other literary bright lights, but was lonely despite a plenitude of sexual partners. With his play having trouble finding a producer, and feeling generally adrift and distant from his family, Ackerley turned to Forster for guidance.

Forster got him a position as secretary to a Maharaja he knew from writing A Passage to India. Ackerley spent about five months in India, still under British rule, and met a number of Anglo-Indians for whom he developed a strong distaste. The recollections of this time are the basis for his comic memoir Hindoo Holiday. The Maharaja was also a homosexual, and His Majesty’s obsessions and dalliances, along with Ackerley’s observations about Anglo-Indians, account for much of the humor of the work.

Back in England, Prisoners of War was finally produced to some acclaim. Its run began at The Three Hundred Club on July 5, 1925, then transferred to The Playhouse on August 31. Ackerley capitalized on his success, carousing with London’s theatrical crowd, and through Cambridge friends met the actor John Gielgud, and other rising stars of the stage.

In 1928, Ackerley joined the staff of the BBC, then only a year old, in the “Talks” Department, where prominent personalities gave lectures over the radio. Eventually he moved on to edit the BBC’s magazine The Listener, where he worked from 1935 to 1959, discovering and promoting many young writers, including Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood. Ackerley was one of Francis King’s two mentors (the other being C. H. B. Kitchin).

In October 1929 Roger Ackerley died. After his death, his son discovered that his father had a second family with whom he would visit occasionally when supposedly travelling for business, and when walking the family dog. The mother of this second family was Muriel Perry, who served as a nurse during World War I. She had three daughters, Ackerley’s half-sisters, by Roger: Sally, Elizabeth, and Diana. They thought Roger was their uncle, their much-loved “Uncle Bodger” who brought them gifts and money, though they began to suspect he was their father as they grew older. Sally (later to become Duchess of Westminster) and Elizabeth were twins, born in 1909. Diana was born in 1912.

Ackerley spent the last 24 years of his life in a small flat overlooking the Thames, at Putney. Almost all his significant work was produced during this period. He had a stable job at the BBC, and the unsatisfying promiscuity of his younger years faded. What remained was his search for the Ideal Friend with whom he could share his life. Instead he accepted financial responsibility for his unstable sister Nancy and his aging Aunt Bunny. More importantly, in 1946 (the year his mother died) he acquired an Alsatian bitch named Queenie from a sometime-lover, Freddie Doyle, who was going to prison for burglary. This scene, with Ackerley visiting Freddie at the police station, is how Ackerely’s only novel, We Think the World of You, begins. (“Johnny” in the novel is closely modelled on Freddie.)

Over the next decade, Queenie was Ackerley’s primary companion, indeed, almost his Ideal Friend. His reduced social obligations made the Queenie years the most productive of his life, revising Hindoo Holiday (1952), completing My Dog Tulip (1956), We Think the World of You (1960) and working on drafts of My Father and Myself.

Ackerley left the BBC in 1959. He took a long trip to Japan in 1960 to visit his friend Francis King, and was very taken with the beauty of the scenery and even more with the beauty of Japanese men.

On October 30, 1961 Queenie died. Ackerley, who had lost a brother and both parents, described it as “the saddest day of my life.” He said: “I would have immolated myself as a suttee when Queenie died. For no human would I ever have done such a thing, but by my love for Queenie I would have been irresistibly compelled.” In 1962, We Think the World of You won the W. H. Smith Literary Award, which came with a substantial cash prize, but even this did little to stir him from his grief. (He thought Richard Hughes should have won, and also thought little of the award’s previous recipients.)

In the years after Queenie’s death, Ackerly worked on his memoir about his father and drank oceanic quantities of gin. His sister Nancy found him dead in his bed on the morning of June 4, 1967. Ackerley’s biographer Peter Parker gives the cause of death as coronary thrombosis.

Toward the end of his life, Ackerley sold 1075 letters that Forster had sent him since 1922, receiving some £6000, “a sum of money which will enable Nancy and me to drink ourselves carelessly into our graves,” as he put it. Ackerley did not live long enough to enjoy the money from these letters, but the sum, plus the royalties from Ackerley’s existing works and several published posthumously, allowed Nancy to live on in relative comfort until her death in 1979. The annual J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography was endowed by funds from Nancy, starting in 1982.

History of science in the Renaissance

During the Renaissance, great advances occurred in geography, astronomy, chemistry, physics, math, manufacturing, and engineering. The rediscovery of ancient scientific texts was accelerated after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the invention of printing which would democratize learning and allow a faster propagation of new ideas. But, at least in its initial period, some see the Renaissance as one of scientific backwardness. Historians like George Sarton and Lynn Thorndike have criticized how the Renaissance affected science, arguing that progress was slowed for some amount of time. Humanists favored human-centered subjects like politics and history over study of natural philosophy or applied mathematics. Others have focused on the positive influence of the Renaissance, pointing to factors like the rediscovery of lost or obscure texts and the increased emphasis on the study of language and the correct reading of texts.

Marie Boas Hall coined the term Scientific Renaissance to designate the early phase of the Scientific Revolution. More recently, Peter Dear has argued for a two-phase model of early modern science: a Scientific Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries, focused on the restoration of the natural knowledge of the ancients; and a Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, when scientists shifted from recovery to innovation.

During and after the Renaissance of the 12th century, Europe experienced an intellectual revitalization, especially with regard to the investigation of the natural world. In the 14th century, however, a series of events that would come to be known as the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages was underway. When the Black Death came, it brought a sudden end to the previous period of massive scientific change. The plague killed 25–50% of the people in Europe, especially in the crowded conditions of the towns, where the heart of innovations lay. Recurrences of the plague and other disasters caused a continuing decline of population for a century.

The 14th century saw the beginning of the cultural movement of the Renaissance. The rediscovery of ancient texts was accelerated after the Fall of Constantinople, in 1453, when many Byzantine scholars had to seek refuge in the West, particularly Italy. Also, the invention of printing was to have great effect on European society: the facilitated dissemination of the printed word democratized learning and allowed a faster propagation of new ideas.

But this initial period is usually seen as one of scientific backwardness. There were no new developments in physics or astronomy, and the reverence for classical sources further enshrined the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic views of the universe. Philosophy lost much of its rigour as the rules of logic and deduction were seen as secondary to intuition and emotion. At the same time, Humanism stressed that nature came to be viewed as an animate spiritual creation that was not governed by laws or mathematics. Science would only be revived later, with such figures as Copernicus, Francis Bacon, and Descartes.