Okay, just researched my answer, not Shakespeare, but your guy has borrowed from the Bard’s wardrobe 😦
Just a little earlier than the Bard, Soutie – only a bit!
Good mornig Boadicea
No 1 Kingsley Amis
John
Good Evening!
1. Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism. According to his biographer, Zachary Leader, Amis was “the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century.” In 2008, The Times ranked Kingsley Amis ninth on their list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
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, in July 1942, he was called up for national service. 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 earned a first in English, he had, by then, decided to devote most of his time to writing.
In 1946, he became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
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.
8.Is Virginia Woolf!
Boadicea @ 3. Right, I shall go and sulk then. 🙂
OZ
6. Could be Spenser, but I’m not sure!
Araminta
8. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), British novelist, was also a distinguished feminist essayist, critic, and central figure of the Bloomsbury group. During the inter-war period Woolf was at the centre of literary Society. The Bloomsbury group was initially based at the Gordon Square residence of Virginia and her sister Vanessa. Virginia Woolf’s concern with feminist thematics are dominant in A Room Of One’s Own (1929), which deals with the obstacles and prejudices that have hindered women writers, and explores in the last chapter the possibility of an androgynous mind. She was also prolific as an essayist, publishing some 500 essays in periodicals and collections, beginning 1905.
Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882. Her mother, a renowned beauty, was Julia Prinsep Stephen (born Jackson) and her father was Sir Leslie Stephen, was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer.
Woolf was educated by her parents. The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia’s several nervous breakdowns. The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised.
Virginia married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912. The two also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press.
After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work. On 28 March 1941, she put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, and walked into the River Ouse near her home and drowned. Woolf’s body was not found until 18 April 1941.
In her last note to her husband she wrote:
“ Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier ’til this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”
No to number 6 🙂
Before I go and sulk, is #1 Ian Fleming?
OZ
No OZ – don’t sulk for too long!! 🙂
🙂
OZ
3. Is Huxley.
Araminta
3. Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963) was an English writer who emigrated to the United States, living in Los Angeles until his death in 1963. He was a member of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels and wide-ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. Through his novels and essays Huxley functioned as an examiner and sometimes critic of social mores, societal norms and ideals. While his earlier concerns might be called humanist, ultimately, he became quite interested in spiritual subjects like parapsychology and philosophical mysticism, about which he also wrote. By the end of his life, Huxley was considered, in many academic circles, a ‘leader of modern thought’ and an intellectual of the highest rank.
Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, UK in 1894. He was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster Leonard Huxley and his first wife, Julia Arnold who founded Prior’s Field School. Julia was the niece of educator Matthew Arnold and the sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic and controversialist (“Darwin’s Bulldog”). His brother Julian Huxley and half-brother Andrew Huxley also became outstanding biologists.
During the First World War, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, working as a farm labourer. Here he met several Bloomsbury figures including Bertrand Russell and Clive Bell.
After the Second World War, Huxley applied for United States citizenship. His application was continuously deferred on the grounds that he would not say he would take up arms to defend the U.S. He claimed a philosophical, rather than a religious objection, and therefore was not exempt under the McCarran Act. So, he withdrew his application. Nevertheless, he remained in the country.
In October 1930, the English occultist Aleister Crowley dined with Huxley in Berlin, and to this day rumours persist that Crowley introduced Huxley to peyote on that occasion. He was introduced to mescaline (considered to be the key active ingredient of peyote) by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1953. Through Dr. Osmond, Huxley met millionaire Alfred Matthew Hubbard who would deal with LSD on a wholesale basis.
He married Maria Nys (10 September 1899 – 12 February 1955), a Belgian he met at Garsington, in 1919. They had one child, Matthew Huxley (19 April 1920 – 10 February 2005), who had a career as an author, anthropologist, and prominent epidemiologist.[20] In 1955, Maria died of breast cancer.
In 1956 he married Laura Archera (1911–2007), also an author.
On his deathbed, unable to speak, Huxley made a written request to his wife for “LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular”. According to her account of his death in This Timeless Moment, she obliged with an injection at 11:45 am and another a couple of hours later. He died, aged 69, at 5:20 pm on 22 November 1963, several hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Huxley’s ashes were interred in the family grave at the Watts Cemetery, home of the Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton, a village near Guildford, Surrey, England.
5 Is Hemingway.
Blimey this is quite difficult.
4 = Balzac
Is 10 Daphne du Maurier?
Aha, I know no.2 but I’ll wait a while.
6. Is Cervantes.
I have to go out now, so I’ll check back later, Boadicea.
Sorry, I’ve possibly exceeded my quota. 😦
Araminta
5. Ernest Hemmingway (1899-1961) was an American author and journalist. His distinctive writing style, characterized by economy and understatement, influenced 20th-century fiction, as did his life of adventure and public image. He produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Hemingway’s fiction was successful because the characters he presented exhibited authenticity that resonated with his audience. Many of his works are classics of American literature. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works during his lifetime; a further three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction works were published posthumously.
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father Clarence Edmonds Hemingway was a physician, and his mother, Grace Hall-Hemingway, was a musician. Both were well educated and well respected in the conservative community of Oak Park.
Early in 1918 Hemingway responded to a Red Cross recruitment effort and signed on to be an ambulance driver in Italy. Hemingway returned home early in 1919 – in Chicago he worked as an associate editor of the monthly journal Cooperative Commonwealth. In 1921, shortly after Hemmingawy married for the first time, he was hired as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star; and the couple left for Paris.
In 1923, the couple returned to Toronto, where their son was born. But he missed Paris, considered Toronto boring, and wanted to return to the life of a writer, rather than live the life of a journalist. They returned to Paris, and in 1926 Hemmingway married for the second time.
He married for the third time in 1940, but the marriage did not last long and he married for the last time in 1946.
Hemingway became depressed as his literary friends died: in 1939 Yeats and Ford Madox Ford; in 1940 Scott Fitzgerald; in 1941 Sherwood Anderson and James Joyce; in 1946 Gertrude Stein; and the following year in 1947, Max Perkins, Hemingway’s long time Scribner’s editor and friend. During this period he had severe headaches, high blood pressure, weight problems, and eventually diabetes—much of which was the result of previous accidents and heavy drinking.
In May 1952, he set went to Africa, where he was seriously injured in two successive plane crashes. When a bushfire broke out he was again injured, with second degree burns on his legs, front torso, lips, left hand and right forearm. The accidents may have precipitated the physical deterioration that was to follow. After the plane crashes, Hemingway, who had been “a thinly controlled alcoholic throughout much of his life, drank more heavily than usual to combat the pain of his injuries.
During his final years, Hemingway’s behaviour was similar to his father’s before he committed suicide; his father may have had the genetic disease hemochromatosis, in which the inability to metabolize iron culminates in mental and physical deterioration. His sister Ursula and his brother Leicester also committed suicide. In the early morning hours of July 2, 1961, Hemingway “quite deliberately” shot himself with his favourite shotgun. The story told to the press was that the death had been “accidental”, but his wife later admitted that it was suicide.
Sheona
4. Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), prolific French journalist and author wrote La Comédie Humaine (“The Human Comedy”). While Balzac also had ambitions for life in the theatre and politics, he is best known for ranking highly with fellow French realist Gustave Flaubert as a major contributor to the movement. He was a friend of Alexandre Dumas and influenced Emile Zola, Marcel Proust, and Guy de Maupassant. He was inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, and studied the works of and was friends with Sir Walter Scott, who said that Balzac’s writing was “observation and imagination”, a difficult balance he seemed to have mastered. Some of his historical novels are similar to the Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe’s. His works have inspired numerous adaptations to the stage and film and are still widely read and studied.
Honoré Balzac was born into a family which had struggled nobly to achieve respectability. His father, born Bernard-François Balssa, was one of eleven children from a poor family.
In 1814 the Balzac family moved to Paris, and Honoré was sent to private tutors and schools for the next two and a half years. This was an unhappy time in his life, during which he attempted suicide on a bridge over the Loire River.
In 1816 Balzac entered the Sorbonne. Once his studies were completed, Balzac was persuaded by his father to follow him into the law; for three years he trained and worked at the office of Victor Passez, a family friend.
In 1819 Passez offered to make Balzac his successor, but his apprentice had had enough of the law. He despaired of being “a clerk, a machine, a riding-school hack, eating and drinking and sleeping at fixed hours. I should be like everyone else. And that’s what they call living, that life at the grindstone, doing the same thing over and over again…. I am hungry and nothing is offered to appease my appetite.” He announced his intention to be a writer.
In February 1832 Balzac received a letter from Odessa – lacking a return address and signed only by “L’Étrangère” (“The Foreigner”) – expressing sadness at the cynicism and atheism in La Peau de Chagrin and its negative portrayal of women. He responded by purchasing a classified advertisement in the Gazette de France, hoping that his secret critic would find it. Thus began a fifteen-year correspondence between Balzac and “the object of [his] sweetest dreams”: Ewelina Hańska.
Ewelina’s husband died in 1841, and his widow and her admirer finally had the chance to pursue their affections. Competing with the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, Balzac visited her in St. Petersburg in 1843 and impressed himself on her heart. After a series of economic setbacks, health problems, and prohibitions from the Tsar, the couple were finally able to wed. On 14 March 1850, with Balzac’s health in serious decline, they drove from her estate in Wierzchownia (village of Verkhivnia) to a church in Berdyczów (city of Berdychiv, today in Ukraine) and were married. The ten-hour journey to and from the ceremony took a toll on both husband and wife: her feet were too swollen to walk, and he endured severe heart trouble.
In late April the newly-weds set off for Paris. His health deteriorated on the way, and Ewelina wrote to her daughter about Balzac being “in a state of extreme weakness” and “sweating profusely”.
Five months after his wedding, on 18 August, Balzac died. His mother was the only one with him when he expired; Mme. Hańska had gone to bed. He had been visited that day by Victor Hugo, who later served as pallbearer and eulogist at Balzac’s funeral.
Araminta
6. Spanish novelist, playwright, and poet, the creator of Don Quixote, the most famous figure in Spanish literature. Miguel de Cervantes, (1547-1616) was born in Alcalá de Henares in 1547, he was the son of a surgeon who presented himself as a nobleman, although Cervantes’s mother seems to have been a descendant of Jewish converts to Christianity.
Little is known of his early years. Four poems published in Madrid by his teacher, the humanist López de Hoyos, mark his literary début, punctuated by his sudden departure for Rome, where he resided for several months. In 1571 he fought valiantly at Lepanto, where he was wounded in his left hand by a harquebus shot. The following year he took part in Juan of Austria’s campaigns in Navarino, Corfu, and Tunis. Returning to Spain by sea, he fell into the hands of Algerian corsairs. After five years spent as a slave in Algiers, and four unsuccessful escape attempts, he was ransomed by the Trinitarians and returned to his family in Madrid.
In 1585, a few months after his marriage to Catalina de Salazar, twenty-two years younger than he, Cervantes published a pastoral novel, La Galatea, at the same time that some of his plays, now lost except for El trato de arge and El cerco de Numancia, were playing on the stages of Madrid. Two years later he left for Andalusia, which he travelled for ten years, first as a purveyor for the Invincible Armada and later as a tax collector.
As a result of money problems with the government, Cervantes was thrown into jail in Seville in 1597; but in 1605 he was in Valladolid, then seat of the government, just when the immediate success of the first part of his Don Quixote, published in Madrid, signalled his return to the literary world. In 1607, he settled in Madrid just after the return there of the monarch Philip III. During the last nine years of his life, in spite of deaths in the family and personal setbacks, Cervantes solidified his reputation as a writer. He published the Novelas ejemplares in 1613, the Viaje del Parnaso in 1614, and in 1615, the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses and the second part of Don Quixote, a year after the mysterious Avellaneda had published his apocryphal sequel to the novel. At the same time, Cervantes continued working on Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, which he completed three days before his death on April 22, 1616, and which appeared posthumously in January 1617.
Is No 7 Arthur Conan Doyle?
Sheona – Boadicea is busy watching the Kennedys, but she says, “No”. Sorry! 🙂
Which Kennedys? Is it an Australian soap or a documentary on America’s unluckiest family?
I’ll have another go at no. 7. H G Wells?
Don’t ask me, Sheona, I never watch stuff like that. But here’s what the web says –
The Kennedys is one of the most controversial and compelling mini-series of the year. The series stars Greg Kinnear as John F Kennedy, Katie Holmes as Jackie Kennedy, Tom Wilkinson as patriarch Joe Kennedy Jnr and Barry Pepper as Bobby Kennedy.
Perhaps you'll recognise the actors – I don't. 😦
Sheona
7. Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was an English writer best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Doctor Moreau. He was a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and produced works in many different genres, including contemporary novels, history, and social commentary. He was also an outspoken socialist. His later works become increasingly political and didactic, and only his early science fiction novels are widely read today. He is often warmly called “The Father Of Science Fiction”.
Herbert George Wells was born at Atlas House, 47 High Street, Bromley. He was the fourth and last child of Joseph Wells (a former domestic gardener, and at the time a shopkeeper and professional cricketer) and his wife Sarah Neal (a former domestic servant). An inheritance had allowed the family to acquire a shop in which they sold china and sporting goods, although it failed to prosper: the stock was old and worn out, and the location was poor. Joseph Wells managed to earn a meagre income, most of which came from playing professional cricket for the Kent county team. Payment for skilled bowlers and batsmen came from voluntary donations afterwards, or from small payments from the clubs where matches were played.
A defining incident of young Wells’s life was an accident he had in 1874, which left him bedridden with a broken leg. To pass the time he started reading books from the local library, brought to him by his father. He soon became devoted to the other worlds and lives to which books gave him access; they also stimulated his desire to write.
In 1877, his father, Joseph Wells, fractured his thigh. The accident effectively put an end to Joseph’s career as a cricketer, and his subsequent earnings as a shopkeeper were not enough to compensate for the loss of the primary source of family income. No longer able to support themselves financially, the family instead sought to place their sons as apprentices in various occupations.
In 1883 Wells persuaded his parents to release him from the apprenticeship, taking an opportunity offered by Midhurst Grammar School to become a pupil-teacher; his proficiency in Latin and Science during a previous, short stay had been remembered.
The following year, Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science (later the Royal College of Science in South Kensington, now part of Imperial College London) in London, studying biology under Thomas Henry Huxley. As an alumnus, he later helped to set up the Royal College of Science Association, of which he became the first president in 1909. Wells studied in his new school until 1887 with a weekly allowance of twenty-one shillings (a guinea) thanks to his scholarship.
He soon entered the Debating Society of the school. These years mark the beginning of his interest in a possible reformation of society and he soon turned to contemporary ideas of socialism as expressed by the recently formed Fabian Society and free lectures at the home of William Morris. He was also among the founders of The Science School Journal, a school magazine which allowed him to express his views on literature and society, as well as trying his hand at fiction: the first version of his novel The Time Machine was published in the journal under the title, The Chronic Argonauts.
It was not until 1890 that Wells earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology from the University of London External Programme. In 1889–90 he managed to find a post as a teacher at Henley House School where he taught and admired A. A. Milne.
1891 Wells, married his cousin Isabel Mary Wells, but left her in 1894 for one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins (known as Jane), whom he married in 1895. Poor health took him to Sandgate, near Folkestone, where in 1901 he constructed a large family home – Spade House. During his marriage to Amy Robbins, Wells had affairs with a number of women, including the American birth-control activist Margaret Sanger and novelist Elizabeth von Arnim. In 1909 he had a daughter, Anna-Jane, with the writer Amber Reeves, and in 1914, a son, Anthony West (1914–1987), by the novelist and feminist Rebecca West. Despite Amy Catherine’s knowledge of some of these affairs, she remained married to Wells until her death in 1927. Wells also had affairs with Odette Keun and Moura Budberg.
Wells was a diabetic, and a co-founder in 1934 of what is now Diabetes UK, the leading charity for people living with diabetes in the UK.
Wells died of unspecified causes on 13 August 1946 at his home in Regent’s Park, London. Some reports indicate the cause of death was diabetes or liver cancer. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and his ashes were scattered at sea.
Not sure, but is #10 Simone de Beauvoir?
FEEG
10. Born and educated in Paris, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was among the first women permitted to complete a program of study at the École Normale Supérieure. Through her lifelong friendship with Sartre, she contributed significantly to the development and expression of existentialist philosophy. In Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), de Beauvoir traced the development of male oppression through historical, literary, and mythical sources, attributing its contemporary effects on women to a systematic objectification of the male as a positive norm.
Simone was born in Paris, the eldest daughter of Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir, a legal secretary who once aspired to be an actor, and Françoise Brasseur, a wealthy banker’s daughter and devout Catholic. Her younger sister, Hélène, was born two years later. The family struggled to maintain their bourgeois status after losing much of their fortune shortly after World War I, and Françoise insisted that the two daughters be sent to a prestigious convent school. Beauvoir herself was deeply religious as a child—at one point intending to become a nun—until a crisis of faith at age 14. She remained an atheist for the rest of her life.
Beauvoir was intellectually precocious from a young age, fuelled by her father’s encouragement: he reportedly would boast, “Simone thinks like a man!” After passing baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy in 1925, she studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique and literature/languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie. She then studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, writing her thesis on Leibniz for Léon Brunschvicg.
Although not officially enrolled, she sat in on courses at the École Normale Supérieure in preparation for the agrégation in philosophy, a highly competitive postgraduate examination which serves as a national ranking of students. It was while studying for the agrégation that she met École Normale students Sartre, Paul Nizan, and René Maheu. The jury for the agrégation narrowly awarded Sartre first place instead of Beauvoir, who placed second and, at age 21, was the youngest person ever to pass the exam.
During October 1929, the Beauvoir and Satre became a couple and Sartre asked her to marry him. Beauvoir chose to never marry and did not set up a joint household with Sartre. She never had children. This gave her time to earn an advanced academic degree, to join political causes and to travel, write, teach, and to have (male and female – the latter often shared) lovers.
Beauvoir died of pneumonia in Paris, aged 78. She is buried next to Sartre at the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.
Some in number 9…. Looks so familiar, but I can’t think who it is
2. Is Agatha Christie as a child.
9. Is Gore Vidal.
Now I have most certainly exceeded my quota but I thought they would all be sorted in my absence.
Sorry!
Araminta
2. From the 1920s until the 1970s Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was the world’s most popular mystery author, reportedly selling more than one billion books worldwide.
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, Devon, England, UK.
Agatha described herself as having had a very happy childhood. While she never received any formal schooling, she did not lack an education. Her mother believed children should not learn to read until they were eight, but Agatha taught herself to read at four. Her father taught her mathematics via story problems, and the family played question-and-answer games much like today’s Trivial Pursuit. She had piano lessons, which she liked, and dance lessons, which she did not. When she could not learn French through formal instruction, the family hired a young woman who spoke nothing but French to be her nanny and companion. Agatha made up stories from a very early age and invented a number of imaginary friends and paracosms.
During the First World War, she worked at a hospital as a nurse; she liked the profession, calling it “one of the most rewarding professions that anyone can follow”. She later worked at a hospital pharmacy, a job that influenced her work, as many of the murders in her books are carried out with poison.
Despite a turbulent courtship, on Christmas Eve 1914 Agatha married Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps. The couple had one daughter, Rosalind Hicks. They divorced in 1928, two years after Christie discovered her husband was having an affair.
In 1930, Christie married archaeologist Max Mallowan (Sir Max from 1968) after joining him in an archaeological dig. Their marriage was especially happy in the early years and remained so until Christie’s death in 1976.
9. Gore Vidal (bn 1925) is a novelist, essayist, playwright, and provocateur whose career has spanned six decades, beginning in the years immediately following World War II and continuing into the early years of the twenty-first century. In addition to a major sequence of seven novels about American history, and satirical novels, he has written dozens of television plays, film scripts, and even three mystery novels written under a pseudonym. He has also written well over a hundred essays, gathered in several volumes published between 1962 and 2001.
Vidal was born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal in West Point, New York, the only child of 1st Lieutenant Eugene Luther Vidal and Nina Gore.
Good quiz Boadicea and thank you for your hard work. (I’m still sulking though) 🙂
OZ
Well done, Araminta. No 2 really had me puzzled – I was thinking along the lines of Daisy Ashford of Young Visitors fame. Didn’t like Gore Vidal’s wallpaper though.
Thank you, Sheona.
I rarely manage more than a couple, but I was obviously feeling inspired. 🙂
Thanks, Boadicea; another excellent quiz.
Too late for this but I might have managed a few… Always interesting though. Thanks Boa! 🙂
Boadicea's Chariot 
Hiya, Boa. Is #10 Enid Blyton?
OZ
And is #5 Siegfried Sassoon?
OZ
No! and No! 🙂
Was no 6 just for me? 😉
Shakespeare?
Okay, just researched my answer, not Shakespeare, but your guy has borrowed from the Bard’s wardrobe 😦
Just a little earlier than the Bard, Soutie – only a bit!
Good mornig Boadicea
No 1 Kingsley Amis
John
Good Evening!
1. Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism. According to his biographer, Zachary Leader, Amis was “the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century.” In 2008, The Times ranked Kingsley Amis ninth on their list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
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, in July 1942, he was called up for national service. 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 earned a first in English, he had, by then, decided to devote most of his time to writing.
In 1946, he became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
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.
8.Is Virginia Woolf!
Boadicea @ 3. Right, I shall go and sulk then. 🙂
OZ
6. Could be Spenser, but I’m not sure!
Araminta
8. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), British novelist, was also a distinguished feminist essayist, critic, and central figure of the Bloomsbury group. During the inter-war period Woolf was at the centre of literary Society. The Bloomsbury group was initially based at the Gordon Square residence of Virginia and her sister Vanessa. Virginia Woolf’s concern with feminist thematics are dominant in A Room Of One’s Own (1929), which deals with the obstacles and prejudices that have hindered women writers, and explores in the last chapter the possibility of an androgynous mind. She was also prolific as an essayist, publishing some 500 essays in periodicals and collections, beginning 1905.
Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882. Her mother, a renowned beauty, was Julia Prinsep Stephen (born Jackson) and her father was Sir Leslie Stephen, was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer.
Woolf was educated by her parents. The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia’s several nervous breakdowns. The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised.
Virginia married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912. The two also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press.
After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work. On 28 March 1941, she put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, and walked into the River Ouse near her home and drowned. Woolf’s body was not found until 18 April 1941.
In her last note to her husband she wrote:
“ Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier ’til this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”
No to number 6 🙂
Before I go and sulk, is #1 Ian Fleming?
OZ
No OZ – don’t sulk for too long!! 🙂
🙂
OZ
3. Is Huxley.
Araminta
3. Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963) was an English writer who emigrated to the United States, living in Los Angeles until his death in 1963. He was a member of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels and wide-ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. Through his novels and essays Huxley functioned as an examiner and sometimes critic of social mores, societal norms and ideals. While his earlier concerns might be called humanist, ultimately, he became quite interested in spiritual subjects like parapsychology and philosophical mysticism, about which he also wrote. By the end of his life, Huxley was considered, in many academic circles, a ‘leader of modern thought’ and an intellectual of the highest rank.
Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, UK in 1894. He was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster Leonard Huxley and his first wife, Julia Arnold who founded Prior’s Field School. Julia was the niece of educator Matthew Arnold and the sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic and controversialist (“Darwin’s Bulldog”). His brother Julian Huxley and half-brother Andrew Huxley also became outstanding biologists.
During the First World War, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, working as a farm labourer. Here he met several Bloomsbury figures including Bertrand Russell and Clive Bell.
After the Second World War, Huxley applied for United States citizenship. His application was continuously deferred on the grounds that he would not say he would take up arms to defend the U.S. He claimed a philosophical, rather than a religious objection, and therefore was not exempt under the McCarran Act. So, he withdrew his application. Nevertheless, he remained in the country.
In October 1930, the English occultist Aleister Crowley dined with Huxley in Berlin, and to this day rumours persist that Crowley introduced Huxley to peyote on that occasion. He was introduced to mescaline (considered to be the key active ingredient of peyote) by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1953. Through Dr. Osmond, Huxley met millionaire Alfred Matthew Hubbard who would deal with LSD on a wholesale basis.
He married Maria Nys (10 September 1899 – 12 February 1955), a Belgian he met at Garsington, in 1919. They had one child, Matthew Huxley (19 April 1920 – 10 February 2005), who had a career as an author, anthropologist, and prominent epidemiologist.[20] In 1955, Maria died of breast cancer.
In 1956 he married Laura Archera (1911–2007), also an author.
On his deathbed, unable to speak, Huxley made a written request to his wife for “LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular”. According to her account of his death in This Timeless Moment, she obliged with an injection at 11:45 am and another a couple of hours later. He died, aged 69, at 5:20 pm on 22 November 1963, several hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Huxley’s ashes were interred in the family grave at the Watts Cemetery, home of the Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton, a village near Guildford, Surrey, England.
5 Is Hemingway.
Blimey this is quite difficult.
4 = Balzac
Is 10 Daphne du Maurier?
Aha, I know no.2 but I’ll wait a while.
6. Is Cervantes.
I have to go out now, so I’ll check back later, Boadicea.
Sorry, I’ve possibly exceeded my quota. 😦
Araminta
5. Ernest Hemmingway (1899-1961) was an American author and journalist. His distinctive writing style, characterized by economy and understatement, influenced 20th-century fiction, as did his life of adventure and public image. He produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Hemingway’s fiction was successful because the characters he presented exhibited authenticity that resonated with his audience. Many of his works are classics of American literature. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works during his lifetime; a further three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction works were published posthumously.
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father Clarence Edmonds Hemingway was a physician, and his mother, Grace Hall-Hemingway, was a musician. Both were well educated and well respected in the conservative community of Oak Park.
Early in 1918 Hemingway responded to a Red Cross recruitment effort and signed on to be an ambulance driver in Italy. Hemingway returned home early in 1919 – in Chicago he worked as an associate editor of the monthly journal Cooperative Commonwealth. In 1921, shortly after Hemmingawy married for the first time, he was hired as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star; and the couple left for Paris.
In 1923, the couple returned to Toronto, where their son was born. But he missed Paris, considered Toronto boring, and wanted to return to the life of a writer, rather than live the life of a journalist. They returned to Paris, and in 1926 Hemmingway married for the second time.
He married for the third time in 1940, but the marriage did not last long and he married for the last time in 1946.
Hemingway became depressed as his literary friends died: in 1939 Yeats and Ford Madox Ford; in 1940 Scott Fitzgerald; in 1941 Sherwood Anderson and James Joyce; in 1946 Gertrude Stein; and the following year in 1947, Max Perkins, Hemingway’s long time Scribner’s editor and friend. During this period he had severe headaches, high blood pressure, weight problems, and eventually diabetes—much of which was the result of previous accidents and heavy drinking.
In May 1952, he set went to Africa, where he was seriously injured in two successive plane crashes. When a bushfire broke out he was again injured, with second degree burns on his legs, front torso, lips, left hand and right forearm. The accidents may have precipitated the physical deterioration that was to follow. After the plane crashes, Hemingway, who had been “a thinly controlled alcoholic throughout much of his life, drank more heavily than usual to combat the pain of his injuries.
During his final years, Hemingway’s behaviour was similar to his father’s before he committed suicide; his father may have had the genetic disease hemochromatosis, in which the inability to metabolize iron culminates in mental and physical deterioration. His sister Ursula and his brother Leicester also committed suicide. In the early morning hours of July 2, 1961, Hemingway “quite deliberately” shot himself with his favourite shotgun. The story told to the press was that the death had been “accidental”, but his wife later admitted that it was suicide.
Sheona
4. Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), prolific French journalist and author wrote La Comédie Humaine (“The Human Comedy”). While Balzac also had ambitions for life in the theatre and politics, he is best known for ranking highly with fellow French realist Gustave Flaubert as a major contributor to the movement. He was a friend of Alexandre Dumas and influenced Emile Zola, Marcel Proust, and Guy de Maupassant. He was inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, and studied the works of and was friends with Sir Walter Scott, who said that Balzac’s writing was “observation and imagination”, a difficult balance he seemed to have mastered. Some of his historical novels are similar to the Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe’s. His works have inspired numerous adaptations to the stage and film and are still widely read and studied.
Honoré Balzac was born into a family which had struggled nobly to achieve respectability. His father, born Bernard-François Balssa, was one of eleven children from a poor family.
In 1814 the Balzac family moved to Paris, and Honoré was sent to private tutors and schools for the next two and a half years. This was an unhappy time in his life, during which he attempted suicide on a bridge over the Loire River.
In 1816 Balzac entered the Sorbonne. Once his studies were completed, Balzac was persuaded by his father to follow him into the law; for three years he trained and worked at the office of Victor Passez, a family friend.
In 1819 Passez offered to make Balzac his successor, but his apprentice had had enough of the law. He despaired of being “a clerk, a machine, a riding-school hack, eating and drinking and sleeping at fixed hours. I should be like everyone else. And that’s what they call living, that life at the grindstone, doing the same thing over and over again…. I am hungry and nothing is offered to appease my appetite.” He announced his intention to be a writer.
In February 1832 Balzac received a letter from Odessa – lacking a return address and signed only by “L’Étrangère” (“The Foreigner”) – expressing sadness at the cynicism and atheism in La Peau de Chagrin and its negative portrayal of women. He responded by purchasing a classified advertisement in the Gazette de France, hoping that his secret critic would find it. Thus began a fifteen-year correspondence between Balzac and “the object of [his] sweetest dreams”: Ewelina Hańska.
Ewelina’s husband died in 1841, and his widow and her admirer finally had the chance to pursue their affections. Competing with the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, Balzac visited her in St. Petersburg in 1843 and impressed himself on her heart. After a series of economic setbacks, health problems, and prohibitions from the Tsar, the couple were finally able to wed. On 14 March 1850, with Balzac’s health in serious decline, they drove from her estate in Wierzchownia (village of Verkhivnia) to a church in Berdyczów (city of Berdychiv, today in Ukraine) and were married. The ten-hour journey to and from the ceremony took a toll on both husband and wife: her feet were too swollen to walk, and he endured severe heart trouble.
In late April the newly-weds set off for Paris. His health deteriorated on the way, and Ewelina wrote to her daughter about Balzac being “in a state of extreme weakness” and “sweating profusely”.
Five months after his wedding, on 18 August, Balzac died. His mother was the only one with him when he expired; Mme. Hańska had gone to bed. He had been visited that day by Victor Hugo, who later served as pallbearer and eulogist at Balzac’s funeral.
Araminta
6. Spanish novelist, playwright, and poet, the creator of Don Quixote, the most famous figure in Spanish literature. Miguel de Cervantes, (1547-1616) was born in Alcalá de Henares in 1547, he was the son of a surgeon who presented himself as a nobleman, although Cervantes’s mother seems to have been a descendant of Jewish converts to Christianity.
Little is known of his early years. Four poems published in Madrid by his teacher, the humanist López de Hoyos, mark his literary début, punctuated by his sudden departure for Rome, where he resided for several months. In 1571 he fought valiantly at Lepanto, where he was wounded in his left hand by a harquebus shot. The following year he took part in Juan of Austria’s campaigns in Navarino, Corfu, and Tunis. Returning to Spain by sea, he fell into the hands of Algerian corsairs. After five years spent as a slave in Algiers, and four unsuccessful escape attempts, he was ransomed by the Trinitarians and returned to his family in Madrid.
In 1585, a few months after his marriage to Catalina de Salazar, twenty-two years younger than he, Cervantes published a pastoral novel, La Galatea, at the same time that some of his plays, now lost except for El trato de arge and El cerco de Numancia, were playing on the stages of Madrid. Two years later he left for Andalusia, which he travelled for ten years, first as a purveyor for the Invincible Armada and later as a tax collector.
As a result of money problems with the government, Cervantes was thrown into jail in Seville in 1597; but in 1605 he was in Valladolid, then seat of the government, just when the immediate success of the first part of his Don Quixote, published in Madrid, signalled his return to the literary world. In 1607, he settled in Madrid just after the return there of the monarch Philip III. During the last nine years of his life, in spite of deaths in the family and personal setbacks, Cervantes solidified his reputation as a writer. He published the Novelas ejemplares in 1613, the Viaje del Parnaso in 1614, and in 1615, the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses and the second part of Don Quixote, a year after the mysterious Avellaneda had published his apocryphal sequel to the novel. At the same time, Cervantes continued working on Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, which he completed three days before his death on April 22, 1616, and which appeared posthumously in January 1617.
Is No 7 Arthur Conan Doyle?
Sheona – Boadicea is busy watching the Kennedys, but she says, “No”. Sorry! 🙂
Which Kennedys? Is it an Australian soap or a documentary on America’s unluckiest family?
I’ll have another go at no. 7. H G Wells?
Don’t ask me, Sheona, I never watch stuff like that. But here’s what the web says –
Perhaps you'll recognise the actors – I don't. 😦
Sheona
7. Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was an English writer best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Doctor Moreau. He was a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and produced works in many different genres, including contemporary novels, history, and social commentary. He was also an outspoken socialist. His later works become increasingly political and didactic, and only his early science fiction novels are widely read today. He is often warmly called “The Father Of Science Fiction”.
Herbert George Wells was born at Atlas House, 47 High Street, Bromley. He was the fourth and last child of Joseph Wells (a former domestic gardener, and at the time a shopkeeper and professional cricketer) and his wife Sarah Neal (a former domestic servant). An inheritance had allowed the family to acquire a shop in which they sold china and sporting goods, although it failed to prosper: the stock was old and worn out, and the location was poor. Joseph Wells managed to earn a meagre income, most of which came from playing professional cricket for the Kent county team. Payment for skilled bowlers and batsmen came from voluntary donations afterwards, or from small payments from the clubs where matches were played.
A defining incident of young Wells’s life was an accident he had in 1874, which left him bedridden with a broken leg. To pass the time he started reading books from the local library, brought to him by his father. He soon became devoted to the other worlds and lives to which books gave him access; they also stimulated his desire to write.
In 1877, his father, Joseph Wells, fractured his thigh. The accident effectively put an end to Joseph’s career as a cricketer, and his subsequent earnings as a shopkeeper were not enough to compensate for the loss of the primary source of family income. No longer able to support themselves financially, the family instead sought to place their sons as apprentices in various occupations.
In 1883 Wells persuaded his parents to release him from the apprenticeship, taking an opportunity offered by Midhurst Grammar School to become a pupil-teacher; his proficiency in Latin and Science during a previous, short stay had been remembered.
The following year, Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science (later the Royal College of Science in South Kensington, now part of Imperial College London) in London, studying biology under Thomas Henry Huxley. As an alumnus, he later helped to set up the Royal College of Science Association, of which he became the first president in 1909. Wells studied in his new school until 1887 with a weekly allowance of twenty-one shillings (a guinea) thanks to his scholarship.
He soon entered the Debating Society of the school. These years mark the beginning of his interest in a possible reformation of society and he soon turned to contemporary ideas of socialism as expressed by the recently formed Fabian Society and free lectures at the home of William Morris. He was also among the founders of The Science School Journal, a school magazine which allowed him to express his views on literature and society, as well as trying his hand at fiction: the first version of his novel The Time Machine was published in the journal under the title, The Chronic Argonauts.
It was not until 1890 that Wells earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology from the University of London External Programme. In 1889–90 he managed to find a post as a teacher at Henley House School where he taught and admired A. A. Milne.
1891 Wells, married his cousin Isabel Mary Wells, but left her in 1894 for one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins (known as Jane), whom he married in 1895. Poor health took him to Sandgate, near Folkestone, where in 1901 he constructed a large family home – Spade House. During his marriage to Amy Robbins, Wells had affairs with a number of women, including the American birth-control activist Margaret Sanger and novelist Elizabeth von Arnim. In 1909 he had a daughter, Anna-Jane, with the writer Amber Reeves, and in 1914, a son, Anthony West (1914–1987), by the novelist and feminist Rebecca West. Despite Amy Catherine’s knowledge of some of these affairs, she remained married to Wells until her death in 1927. Wells also had affairs with Odette Keun and Moura Budberg.
Wells was a diabetic, and a co-founder in 1934 of what is now Diabetes UK, the leading charity for people living with diabetes in the UK.
Wells died of unspecified causes on 13 August 1946 at his home in Regent’s Park, London. Some reports indicate the cause of death was diabetes or liver cancer. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and his ashes were scattered at sea.
Not sure, but is #10 Simone de Beauvoir?
FEEG
10. Born and educated in Paris, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was among the first women permitted to complete a program of study at the École Normale Supérieure. Through her lifelong friendship with Sartre, she contributed significantly to the development and expression of existentialist philosophy. In Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), de Beauvoir traced the development of male oppression through historical, literary, and mythical sources, attributing its contemporary effects on women to a systematic objectification of the male as a positive norm.
Simone was born in Paris, the eldest daughter of Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir, a legal secretary who once aspired to be an actor, and Françoise Brasseur, a wealthy banker’s daughter and devout Catholic. Her younger sister, Hélène, was born two years later. The family struggled to maintain their bourgeois status after losing much of their fortune shortly after World War I, and Françoise insisted that the two daughters be sent to a prestigious convent school. Beauvoir herself was deeply religious as a child—at one point intending to become a nun—until a crisis of faith at age 14. She remained an atheist for the rest of her life.
Beauvoir was intellectually precocious from a young age, fuelled by her father’s encouragement: he reportedly would boast, “Simone thinks like a man!” After passing baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy in 1925, she studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique and literature/languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie. She then studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, writing her thesis on Leibniz for Léon Brunschvicg.
Although not officially enrolled, she sat in on courses at the École Normale Supérieure in preparation for the agrégation in philosophy, a highly competitive postgraduate examination which serves as a national ranking of students. It was while studying for the agrégation that she met École Normale students Sartre, Paul Nizan, and René Maheu. The jury for the agrégation narrowly awarded Sartre first place instead of Beauvoir, who placed second and, at age 21, was the youngest person ever to pass the exam.
During October 1929, the Beauvoir and Satre became a couple and Sartre asked her to marry him. Beauvoir chose to never marry and did not set up a joint household with Sartre. She never had children. This gave her time to earn an advanced academic degree, to join political causes and to travel, write, teach, and to have (male and female – the latter often shared) lovers.
Beauvoir died of pneumonia in Paris, aged 78. She is buried next to Sartre at the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.
Some in number 9…. Looks so familiar, but I can’t think who it is
2. Is Agatha Christie as a child.
9. Is Gore Vidal.
Now I have most certainly exceeded my quota but I thought they would all be sorted in my absence.
Sorry!
Araminta
2. From the 1920s until the 1970s Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was the world’s most popular mystery author, reportedly selling more than one billion books worldwide.
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, Devon, England, UK.
Agatha described herself as having had a very happy childhood. While she never received any formal schooling, she did not lack an education. Her mother believed children should not learn to read until they were eight, but Agatha taught herself to read at four. Her father taught her mathematics via story problems, and the family played question-and-answer games much like today’s Trivial Pursuit. She had piano lessons, which she liked, and dance lessons, which she did not. When she could not learn French through formal instruction, the family hired a young woman who spoke nothing but French to be her nanny and companion. Agatha made up stories from a very early age and invented a number of imaginary friends and paracosms.
During the First World War, she worked at a hospital as a nurse; she liked the profession, calling it “one of the most rewarding professions that anyone can follow”. She later worked at a hospital pharmacy, a job that influenced her work, as many of the murders in her books are carried out with poison.
Despite a turbulent courtship, on Christmas Eve 1914 Agatha married Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps. The couple had one daughter, Rosalind Hicks. They divorced in 1928, two years after Christie discovered her husband was having an affair.
In 1930, Christie married archaeologist Max Mallowan (Sir Max from 1968) after joining him in an archaeological dig. Their marriage was especially happy in the early years and remained so until Christie’s death in 1976.
9. Gore Vidal (bn 1925) is a novelist, essayist, playwright, and provocateur whose career has spanned six decades, beginning in the years immediately following World War II and continuing into the early years of the twenty-first century. In addition to a major sequence of seven novels about American history, and satirical novels, he has written dozens of television plays, film scripts, and even three mystery novels written under a pseudonym. He has also written well over a hundred essays, gathered in several volumes published between 1962 and 2001.
Vidal was born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal in West Point, New York, the only child of 1st Lieutenant Eugene Luther Vidal and Nina Gore.
Good quiz Boadicea and thank you for your hard work. (I’m still sulking though) 🙂
OZ
Well done, Araminta. No 2 really had me puzzled – I was thinking along the lines of Daisy Ashford of Young Visitors fame. Didn’t like Gore Vidal’s wallpaper though.
Thank you, Sheona.
I rarely manage more than a couple, but I was obviously feeling inspired. 🙂
Thanks, Boadicea; another excellent quiz.
Too late for this but I might have managed a few… Always interesting though. Thanks Boa! 🙂
You’re all welcome!