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  Diplomacy - From their pens to...

  Lafcadio Hearn

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  Lafcadio Hearn was born on the 27th June 1850 on the Ionian isle of Levkás in Greece to a British Army officer and a Greek Mother. 
  His father, fearing for his career prospects at being married to a Greek Orthodox wife, sent them to Dublin whilst he continued to advance his career with further postings.  Life there was difficult for mother and son.  His father returned, wounded and traumatised, when Lafcadio was three.  He annulled the marriage and she remarried but had to give up care of Lafcadio to her sister-in law.   
  After brief periods for Catholic education in England and France he emigrated to Ohio in the United States when he was 19, taking on a series of casual jobs before embarking on a career as a journalist, publishing poems and essays in Cincinnati.  It was whilst here that he began a side-line in translating, starting with Gautier and Flaubert.  He married in 1874 to a 20 year old African-American woman in violation of Ohio's anti-miscegenation law.  The marriage soon failed. 
  In 1877 he relocated to New Orleans to write on a variety of themes before picking up a two year assignment from Harper’s to write in the West Indies, where he also wrote his first novel. 
  In 1890 Harper’s sent him to Japan.  Here he left journalism and took the remarkable decision to become a schoolteacher in the north of Japan.   Enraptured by the culture he was driven to explain it in various Western publications to those who had little, if any, knowledge of its culture.  Within the year he had fallen in love with, and married, a high-born Japanese lady, together they would have four children.   
  In 1895 he became a Japanese national and took the name Koizumi Yakumo, Koizumi being his wife’s family name. 
  The following few years, whilst a professor of Literature at the Imperial University of Japan, were his most creative and admired period.   
  Lafcadio Hearn died of heart failure on the 26th of September 1904, in Tokyo, Japan shortly before leaving to deliver a series of lectures at Cornell University in New York State.  He was 54.

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  Hamlet - William Shakespeare

  William Shakespeare

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  The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet, is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play.

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  Short History Of England A...

  G. K. Chesterton

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  G.K. Chesterton was one of the towering figures of British literature in the early twentieth century. A man of massive size, massive personality, and massive appetite, Chesterton famous personality, dress, and personality gave rise to an eponymous adjective: Chestertonian. Although he is renowned for the Father Brown detective series, Chesterton also wrote volumes of nonfiction. First published in 1917, A Short History of England is exactly that, serving Chesterton's goal of publishing "a popular book of history written from the standpoint of a member of the public." Filled with Chestertonian wit, the fast-moving history includes such gemlike observations as, Henry VIII "was almost as unlucky in his wives as they were in their husband." Of the great late Victorian/Edwardian trio of wits: George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Chesterton himself, it is Chesterton whose body of work -- writing in an unassuming manner, without great pretension may well persist for future generations far longer than its charming, genial author ever imagined.

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  The House of Mapuhi

  Jack London

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  Despite the heavy clumsiness of her lines, the Aorai handled easily in the light breeze, and her captain ran her well in before he hove to just outside the suck of the surf. The atoll of Hikueru lay low on the water, a circle of pounded coral sand a hundred yards wide, twenty miles in circumference, and from three to five feet above high-water mark. On the bottom of the huge and glassy lagoon was much pearl shell, and from the deck of the schooner, across the slender ring of the atoll, the divers could be seen at work. But the lagoon had no entrance for even a trading schooner. With a favoring breeze cutters could win in through the tortuous and shallow channel, but the schooners lay off and on outside and sent in their small boats.

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  Oil!

  Upton Sinclair

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  “Passionate. . . . [The] lively satirical account of capitalist greed . . . and socialist struggle,” that inspired the film There Will Be Blood (The Guardian). From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Jungle, a novel set against the backdrop of the political corruption fueling the California oil industry during the Harding administration. Oil! is a tale of the capitalist insatiability that comes between an oil baron and his son, whose growing sympathies with the labor movement and socialist ideals fuels the riff between them. Peopled with politicians, financial investors, oil magnates, a Hollywood star, and a crusading evangelist, Oil! is also a spirited social commentary on the class struggle at the heart of the divide in post–World War I America. Written by an author heralded for his compelling narratives exploring themes of social justice, Oil! is as relevant today as it was when it was first published in 1927. “A marvelous panorama of Southern California life. It is storytelling with an edge on it.” —The New Republic   “A tremendous piece of work.” —The Nation  

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  The Thirty-Nine Steps

  John Buchan

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  The first of five novels by Buchan featuring Richard Hannay, an all-action hero with a stiff upper lip and a miraculous knack for getting himself out of sticky situations, the 39 Steps pits the adventurer against German agents in a tense backdrop of a Europe weeks away from the first world war. The story places him in a desperate game of cat and mouth that will lead Hannay from his Portland Place home to the highlands of Scotland, back to London, and to a sleepy holiday village on the coast, where all is not as it seems... 
  Narrated by Michael Ward.

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