6. Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) was elected chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1969. Though originally an advocate of all-out guerrilla war, from 1974 on he, and the PLO, sometimes seemed to be seeking a negotiated resolution of the Palestinian problem. He was awarded the Joliot-Curie Gold Medal by the World Peace Council in 1975.
7. Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (1931-2007) was the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999. Yeltsin came to power on a wave of high expectations. On 12 June 1991 he was elected president of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic with 57% of the vote, becoming the first popularly elected president in Russian history. But Yeltsin never recovered his popularity after a series of economic and political crises in Russia in the 1990s. The Yeltsin era was a traumatic period in Russian history; a period marked by widespread corruption, economic collapse, and enormous political and social problems. By the time he left office, Yeltsin was a deeply unpopular figure in Russia, with an approval rating as low as two percent by some estimates.
Morning Boa. 4 is Yul Brynner. I saw him in ‘The King and I’ with Virginia McKenna in the early 80s.
And 10 is YSL aka Yves St Laurent.
Morning Sipu!
It was very hard trying to find a picture of Yul with hair!
4. Yul Brynner (1920 –1985) was a Russian-born actor of stage and film. He was also a photographer and the author of two books. Yul Brynner was born Yuliy Borisovich Bryner. He exaggerated his background and early life for the press, claiming that he was born Taidje Khan of part-Mongol-Tatar parentage, on the Russian island of Sakhalin. In reality, his grandfather was Swiss whose mother was a native of Irkutsk and was partly of Buryat Mongol ancestry. Brynner’s mother was the daughter of a doctor who had converted from Judaism to the Russian Orthodox Church and was also of Romani descent. In 1977, he was named Honorary President of the International Romani Union, an office that he kept until his death. After Brynner’s father abandoned his family, his mother took Yul and his sister to Harbin, China, where they attended a school run by the YMCA, and in 1934 she took them to Paris. During World War II, Brynner worked as a French-speaking radio announcer and commentator for the U.S. Office of War Information, broadcasting propaganda to occupied France.
10. Ives Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent, known as Yves Saint Laurent (1936 –2008), was a French fashion designer, one of the greatest names in French fashion in the 20th century. He can be credited with both spurring the couture’s rise from its sixties ashes and with finally rendering ready-to-wear reputable”. He is also credited with having introduced the tuxedo suit for women, being the first designer to use ethnic models in his runway shows, and referencing other cultures in his work.
He was born in Oran, French Algeria and left for Paris after secondary school to pursue a fashion career. At 17 he was hired as Christian Dior’s assistant. When Dior died four years later, he was named head of the House of Dior. In 1960, Saint Laurent was conscripted to serve in the French Army during the Algerian War of Independence. He lasted twenty days in the military before the stress of hazing by fellow soldiers led him to be sent to a military hospital, where he received the news that he had been fired by Dior. This merely added fuel to the fire, and he ended up in Val-de-Grâce, a French military hospital, where he was given large doses of sedatives and other psychoactive drugs and subjected to electroshock therapy. Saint Laurent himself traced the history of both his mental problems and his drug addictions to this time in hospital. After his release from the hospital in November 1960, Saint Laurent sued Dior for breach of contract and won and in 1962, he opened his own fashion house and quickly emerged as one of the world’s most influential designers.
Wow, that was interesting. I was vaguely aware of Bryner’s Romanian connection, but knew nothing of YSL’s background or his mental illness.
Number 8 is a very young Yoko Ono.
Well done Christopher! I thought I might fool everyone with that one!
8. Yoko Ono (born 1933) is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon. Ono brought feminism to the forefront through her music which prefigured New Wave music (whether she was a direct influence is still debated). She is a supporter of gay rights and is known for her philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace and AIDS outreach programs.
Happy New Year Boa – yes Christopher has done very well there. An easy one is 3 – Yehudi Menuhin and my guess for number 2 is Yeats the Irish poet.
Morning Boa
What a nice surprise to surface to from Old Year’s Night excesses.
No 3. is Yehudi Menuhin
Boadicea will be back soon (dinner and other duties have intervened). But, yes, and yes – sorry JM, PG beat you to #3. 🙂
No worries Bearsy
No 9 Yuri Gagarin
That’s a yes, too! 😉
Papaguinea
3. Yehudi Menuhin, Baron Menuhin, OM, KBE (1916 – 1999) was a Russian Jewish American violinist and conductor who spent most of his performing career in the United Kingdom. He was born to Russian Jewish parents in the United States, but became a citizen of Switzerland in 1970, and of the United Kingdom in 1985. He is often considered to have been one of the twentieth century’s greatest violin virtuosi. Yehudi Menuhin was born in New York City, New York, to Bielorussian Jewish parents from what is now Belarus. His sisters were the concert pianist and human rights worker Hephzibah Menuhin and the pianist, painter, and poet Yaltah Menuhin. Through his father Moshe Menuhin, a former rabbinical student and anti-Zionist writer, Menuhin was descended from a distinguished rabbinical dynasty. Menuhin began violin instruction at age four. He displayed extraordinary talents at an early age. His first solo violin performance was at the age of seven with the San Francisco Symphony in 1923.
Yehudi Menuhin performed for allied soldiers during World War II, and went with the composer Benjamin Britten to perform for inmates of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, after its liberation in April 1945. He returned to Germany in 1947 to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler as an act of reconciliation, becoming the first Jewish musician to do so following the Holocaust. He said to critics within the Jewish community that he wanted to rehabilitate Germany’s music and spirit. After building early success on richly romantic and tonally opulent performances, he experienced considerable physical and artistic difficulties caused by overwork during the war as well as unfocused and unstructured early training. Menuhin continued to perform to an advanced age, becoming known for profound interpretations of an austere quality, as well as for his explorations of music outside the classical realm.
2. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, mystic and civil servant. Yeats was one of the driving forces behind the Irish Literary Revival and was co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. His early work tended towards romantic lushness best described by the title of his 1893 collection The Celtic Twilight, but in his 40s, inspired by his relationships with modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and his involvement in Irish nationalist politics, he moved towards a harder, more modern style. Yeats also served as an Irish Senator. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923 for what the Nobel Committee described as “his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”. In 1934 he shared the Gothenburg Prize for Poetry with Rudyard Kipling.
Well done!
John!
9. Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968) was the first human to travel in space. The son of a carpenter, Gagarin grew up on a collective farm in Saratov (later renamed Gagarin City), west of Moscow. After graduating with honours from the Soviet Air Force in 1957, he was selected as one of 20 fighter pilots to begin cosmonaut training. Immediately before his historic flight, the 27-year-old was promoted from senior lieutenant to major. The flight itself aboard Vostok 1, took place on April 12, 1959, lasted 108 minutes, and concluded with Gagarin ejecting from his capsule after re-entry and descending by parachute to the ground near the village of Uzmoriye on the Volga. In his orange flight-suit he approached a woman and a little girl with a calf, who began to run away (it was only a year since U-2 spy plane pilot Gary Powers had been shot down over Russia). Gagarin called out: “Mother, where are you running? I am not a foreigner.” Asked then if he had come from space, he replied, “As a matter of fact, I have!”
5 is Yitzhak Rabin, I think.
5. Mr Y Rabin
Sheona, I was typing when suddenly you appeared! 🙂
Sheona
5. Yitzhak Rabin (1922 –1995) was an Israeli politician and general. He was the fifth Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms in office, 1974–1977 and 1992 until his assassination in 1995. In 1994, Rabin won the Nobel Peace Prize together with Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat. He was assassinated by right-wing Israeli radical Yigal Amir, who was opposed to Rabin’s signing of the Oslo Accords. Rabin was the first native-born prime minister of Israel, the only prime minister to be assassinated and the second to die in office after Levi Eshkol.
Rabin was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Tel Aviv, where the family relocated when he was one year old. In 1940, he graduated with distinction from the Kadoori Agricultural High School and hoped to be an irrigation engineer. However, apart from several courses in military strategy in the United Kingdom later on, he never pursued a degree.
You’ve got it, FEEG. Well done! Boadicea will be back in an hour or so. 🙂
FEEG
1. Brigham Young was a leader in the Latter Day Saint movement and was the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1847 until his death. Young was also the first governor of the Utah Territory.
Young had a variety of nicknames, among the most popular of which is the “American Moses,”(alternatively the “Modern Moses” or the “Mormon Moses”) because, like the biblical figure, Young led his followers, the Mormon pioneers, in an exodus through a desert, to what they saw as a promised land. Young was also dubbed the “Lion of the Lord” for his bold personality, and was commonly called “Brother Brigham” by Latter-day Saints. Young’s legacy is controversial, however. While having helped to organize a large religion, as well as the accession of Utah Territory to the United States, concerns persist about his role in the Utah War against the United States government and his beliefs about black people.
Young was perhaps the most famous polygamist of the early church. He stated that upon being taught about plural marriage, “it was the first time in my life that I desired the grave.” By the time of his death, Young had 56 children by 16 of his wives. In 1856, Young built the Lion House to accommodate his sizable family. This building remains a Salt Lake City landmark, together with the Beehive House, another Brigham Young family home.
Salt Lake City is seriously one of the most boring places on earth. I used to go there fairly regularly on business. Contrary to popular belief, you can buy alcohol there, but the bar man will not touch the bottle and you must open it yourself. Or at least that is the way it was in the early 90s. The girls are pretty, though.
“The girls are pretty, though.” Scandinavian imports, methinks! 🙂
When Yoko Ono was young she spent a great deal of time in both Japan and California. Since ships were the dominant form of long-distance travel at that time the life-saver gave it away. Okey… I also saw that picture several times before because I studied Japanese art and Japanese women’s history and because of her fame I sat through two student presentations on her life.
Well done Christopher! I thought I might fool everyone with that one!
8.Yoko Ono (born 1933) is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon. Ono brought feminism to the forefront through her music which prefigured New Wave music (whether she was a direct influence is still debated). She is a supporter of gay rights and is known for her philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace and AIDS outreach programs.
You obviously know far more than I do about her, Christopher!
It is always amazes me how hard it is sometimes to find ‘off-beat’ pictures of some of my subjects. Most of those for Yoko includes Lennon, or were so obviously her that no one would have to think twice. It was the same for Yul Brynner.
Yul Brynner and John Lennon in the same photo? Seems a tad unlikely. 😕
It is first thing in the morning… It was hard to find a picture of Yul Brynner with hair!
Yul Brynner never appeared in “Hair”! OK, I’ll get my coat.
Boadicea's Chariot 
Good morning Boa
I’ll take the easy ones 😉
6 Yassar Arafat
7 Boris Yeltsin
🙂
Hi Soutie! I thought this way you might get a go!
6. Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) was elected chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1969. Though originally an advocate of all-out guerrilla war, from 1974 on he, and the PLO, sometimes seemed to be seeking a negotiated resolution of the Palestinian problem. He was awarded the Joliot-Curie Gold Medal by the World Peace Council in 1975.
7. Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (1931-2007) was the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999. Yeltsin came to power on a wave of high expectations. On 12 June 1991 he was elected president of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic with 57% of the vote, becoming the first popularly elected president in Russian history. But Yeltsin never recovered his popularity after a series of economic and political crises in Russia in the 1990s. The Yeltsin era was a traumatic period in Russian history; a period marked by widespread corruption, economic collapse, and enormous political and social problems. By the time he left office, Yeltsin was a deeply unpopular figure in Russia, with an approval rating as low as two percent by some estimates.
Morning Boa. 4 is Yul Brynner. I saw him in ‘The King and I’ with Virginia McKenna in the early 80s.
And 10 is YSL aka Yves St Laurent.
Morning Sipu!
It was very hard trying to find a picture of Yul with hair!
4. Yul Brynner (1920 –1985) was a Russian-born actor of stage and film. He was also a photographer and the author of two books. Yul Brynner was born Yuliy Borisovich Bryner. He exaggerated his background and early life for the press, claiming that he was born Taidje Khan of part-Mongol-Tatar parentage, on the Russian island of Sakhalin. In reality, his grandfather was Swiss whose mother was a native of Irkutsk and was partly of Buryat Mongol ancestry. Brynner’s mother was the daughter of a doctor who had converted from Judaism to the Russian Orthodox Church and was also of Romani descent. In 1977, he was named Honorary President of the International Romani Union, an office that he kept until his death. After Brynner’s father abandoned his family, his mother took Yul and his sister to Harbin, China, where they attended a school run by the YMCA, and in 1934 she took them to Paris. During World War II, Brynner worked as a French-speaking radio announcer and commentator for the U.S. Office of War Information, broadcasting propaganda to occupied France.
10. Ives Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent, known as Yves Saint Laurent (1936 –2008), was a French fashion designer, one of the greatest names in French fashion in the 20th century. He can be credited with both spurring the couture’s rise from its sixties ashes and with finally rendering ready-to-wear reputable”. He is also credited with having introduced the tuxedo suit for women, being the first designer to use ethnic models in his runway shows, and referencing other cultures in his work.
He was born in Oran, French Algeria and left for Paris after secondary school to pursue a fashion career. At 17 he was hired as Christian Dior’s assistant. When Dior died four years later, he was named head of the House of Dior. In 1960, Saint Laurent was conscripted to serve in the French Army during the Algerian War of Independence. He lasted twenty days in the military before the stress of hazing by fellow soldiers led him to be sent to a military hospital, where he received the news that he had been fired by Dior. This merely added fuel to the fire, and he ended up in Val-de-Grâce, a French military hospital, where he was given large doses of sedatives and other psychoactive drugs and subjected to electroshock therapy. Saint Laurent himself traced the history of both his mental problems and his drug addictions to this time in hospital. After his release from the hospital in November 1960, Saint Laurent sued Dior for breach of contract and won and in 1962, he opened his own fashion house and quickly emerged as one of the world’s most influential designers.
Wow, that was interesting. I was vaguely aware of Bryner’s Romanian connection, but knew nothing of YSL’s background or his mental illness.
Number 8 is a very young Yoko Ono.
Well done Christopher! I thought I might fool everyone with that one!
8. Yoko Ono (born 1933) is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon. Ono brought feminism to the forefront through her music which prefigured New Wave music (whether she was a direct influence is still debated). She is a supporter of gay rights and is known for her philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace and AIDS outreach programs.
Happy New Year Boa – yes Christopher has done very well there. An easy one is 3 – Yehudi Menuhin and my guess for number 2 is Yeats the Irish poet.
Morning Boa
What a nice surprise to surface to from Old Year’s Night excesses.
No 3. is Yehudi Menuhin
Boadicea will be back soon (dinner and other duties have intervened). But, yes, and yes – sorry JM, PG beat you to #3. 🙂
No worries Bearsy
No 9 Yuri Gagarin
That’s a yes, too! 😉
Papaguinea
3. Yehudi Menuhin, Baron Menuhin, OM, KBE (1916 – 1999) was a Russian Jewish American violinist and conductor who spent most of his performing career in the United Kingdom. He was born to Russian Jewish parents in the United States, but became a citizen of Switzerland in 1970, and of the United Kingdom in 1985. He is often considered to have been one of the twentieth century’s greatest violin virtuosi. Yehudi Menuhin was born in New York City, New York, to Bielorussian Jewish parents from what is now Belarus. His sisters were the concert pianist and human rights worker Hephzibah Menuhin and the pianist, painter, and poet Yaltah Menuhin. Through his father Moshe Menuhin, a former rabbinical student and anti-Zionist writer, Menuhin was descended from a distinguished rabbinical dynasty. Menuhin began violin instruction at age four. He displayed extraordinary talents at an early age. His first solo violin performance was at the age of seven with the San Francisco Symphony in 1923.
Yehudi Menuhin performed for allied soldiers during World War II, and went with the composer Benjamin Britten to perform for inmates of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, after its liberation in April 1945. He returned to Germany in 1947 to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler as an act of reconciliation, becoming the first Jewish musician to do so following the Holocaust. He said to critics within the Jewish community that he wanted to rehabilitate Germany’s music and spirit. After building early success on richly romantic and tonally opulent performances, he experienced considerable physical and artistic difficulties caused by overwork during the war as well as unfocused and unstructured early training. Menuhin continued to perform to an advanced age, becoming known for profound interpretations of an austere quality, as well as for his explorations of music outside the classical realm.
2. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, mystic and civil servant. Yeats was one of the driving forces behind the Irish Literary Revival and was co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. His early work tended towards romantic lushness best described by the title of his 1893 collection The Celtic Twilight, but in his 40s, inspired by his relationships with modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and his involvement in Irish nationalist politics, he moved towards a harder, more modern style. Yeats also served as an Irish Senator. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923 for what the Nobel Committee described as “his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”. In 1934 he shared the Gothenburg Prize for Poetry with Rudyard Kipling.
Well done!
John!
9. Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968) was the first human to travel in space. The son of a carpenter, Gagarin grew up on a collective farm in Saratov (later renamed Gagarin City), west of Moscow. After graduating with honours from the Soviet Air Force in 1957, he was selected as one of 20 fighter pilots to begin cosmonaut training. Immediately before his historic flight, the 27-year-old was promoted from senior lieutenant to major. The flight itself aboard Vostok 1, took place on April 12, 1959, lasted 108 minutes, and concluded with Gagarin ejecting from his capsule after re-entry and descending by parachute to the ground near the village of Uzmoriye on the Volga. In his orange flight-suit he approached a woman and a little girl with a calf, who began to run away (it was only a year since U-2 spy plane pilot Gary Powers had been shot down over Russia). Gagarin called out: “Mother, where are you running? I am not a foreigner.” Asked then if he had come from space, he replied, “As a matter of fact, I have!”
5 is Yitzhak Rabin, I think.
5. Mr Y Rabin
Sheona, I was typing when suddenly you appeared! 🙂
Sheona
5. Yitzhak Rabin (1922 –1995) was an Israeli politician and general. He was the fifth Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms in office, 1974–1977 and 1992 until his assassination in 1995. In 1994, Rabin won the Nobel Peace Prize together with Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat. He was assassinated by right-wing Israeli radical Yigal Amir, who was opposed to Rabin’s signing of the Oslo Accords. Rabin was the first native-born prime minister of Israel, the only prime minister to be assassinated and the second to die in office after Levi Eshkol.
Rabin was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Tel Aviv, where the family relocated when he was one year old. In 1940, he graduated with distinction from the Kadoori Agricultural High School and hoped to be an irrigation engineer. However, apart from several courses in military strategy in the United Kingdom later on, he never pursued a degree.
Sorry Janus – pipped at the post!
Sorry, Janus. Shall we try no. 1 now?
Do you want a clue?
1. Eugene Ysaÿe?
Nope.
Yep.
Is #1 Brigham Young, the founder of the Mormons?
You’ve got it, FEEG. Well done! Boadicea will be back in an hour or so. 🙂
FEEG
1. Brigham Young was a leader in the Latter Day Saint movement and was the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1847 until his death. Young was also the first governor of the Utah Territory.
Young had a variety of nicknames, among the most popular of which is the “American Moses,”(alternatively the “Modern Moses” or the “Mormon Moses”) because, like the biblical figure, Young led his followers, the Mormon pioneers, in an exodus through a desert, to what they saw as a promised land. Young was also dubbed the “Lion of the Lord” for his bold personality, and was commonly called “Brother Brigham” by Latter-day Saints. Young’s legacy is controversial, however. While having helped to organize a large religion, as well as the accession of Utah Territory to the United States, concerns persist about his role in the Utah War against the United States government and his beliefs about black people.
Young was perhaps the most famous polygamist of the early church. He stated that upon being taught about plural marriage, “it was the first time in my life that I desired the grave.” By the time of his death, Young had 56 children by 16 of his wives. In 1856, Young built the Lion House to accommodate his sizable family. This building remains a Salt Lake City landmark, together with the Beehive House, another Brigham Young family home.
Salt Lake City is seriously one of the most boring places on earth. I used to go there fairly regularly on business. Contrary to popular belief, you can buy alcohol there, but the bar man will not touch the bottle and you must open it yourself. Or at least that is the way it was in the early 90s. The girls are pretty, though.
“The girls are pretty, though.” Scandinavian imports, methinks! 🙂
When Yoko Ono was young she spent a great deal of time in both Japan and California. Since ships were the dominant form of long-distance travel at that time the life-saver gave it away. Okey… I also saw that picture several times before because I studied Japanese art and Japanese women’s history and because of her fame I sat through two student presentations on her life.
You obviously know far more than I do about her, Christopher!
It is always amazes me how hard it is sometimes to find ‘off-beat’ pictures of some of my subjects. Most of those for Yoko includes Lennon, or were so obviously her that no one would have to think twice. It was the same for Yul Brynner.
Yul Brynner and John Lennon in the same photo? Seems a tad unlikely. 😕
It is first thing in the morning… It was hard to find a picture of Yul Brynner with hair!
Yul Brynner never appeared in “Hair”! OK, I’ll get my coat.