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  At Christmas Time - From their...

  Anton Chekhov

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  Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on 29th January 1860 in Taganrog, on the south coast of Russia.  
  His family life was difficult; his father was strict and over-bearing but his mother was a passionate story-teller, a subject Chekhov warmed to. As he later said; ‘our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother’.  
  At school Chekhov was distinctly average. At 16 his father mis-managed his finances and was declared bankrupt. His family fled to Moscow. Chekhov remained and eked out a living by various means, including writing and selling short sketches to newspapers, to finish his schooling. That completed and with a scholarship to Moscow University obtained he rejoined his family. 
  He was able to help support them by selling satirical sketches and vignettes of Russian lifestyles and gradually obtained further commissions. In 1884, he qualified as a physician and, although it earned him little, he often treated the poor for free, he was fond of saying ‘Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.’ 
  His own health was now an issue as he began to cough up blood, a symptom of tuberculosis.  Despite this his writing success enabled him to move the family into more comfortable accommodation.  
  Chekhov wrote over 500 short stories which included many, many classics including ‘The Kiss’ and ‘The Lady with a Dog’.  His collection ‘At Dusk’ won him the coveted Pushkin Prize when was only 26.  
  He was also a major playwright beginning with the huge success of ‘Ivanov’ in 1887.   
  In 1892 Chekhov bought a country estate north of Moscow. Here his medical skills and money helped the peasants tackle outbreaks of cholera and bouts of famine. He also built three schools, a fire station and a clinic.  It left him with less time for writing but the interactions with real people gained him detailed knowledge about the peasantry and their living conditions for his stories.  
  His most famous work, ‘The Seagull’ was received disastrously at its premiere in St Petersburg. It was later restaged in Moscow to highlight its psychological aspects and was a huge success. It led to ‘Uncle Vanya’, ‘The Three Sisters’ and ‘The Cherry Orchard’.  
  Chekhov suffered a major lung hemorrhage in 1897 while visiting Moscow. A formal diagnosis confirmed tuberculosis and the doctors ordered changes to his lifestyle.  
  Despite a dread of weddings the elusive literary bachelor quietly married the actress Olga Knipper, whom he had met at rehearsals for ‘The Seagull’, on 25th May 1901. 
  By May 1904 with his tuberculosis worsening and death imminent he set off for the German town of Badenweiler writing cheerful, witty letters to his family and assuring them his health was improving.  
  On 15th July 1904 Anton Chekhov died at Badenweiler.  He was 44.

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  Character as Shown in Dress...

  Booker T. Washington

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  Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 - November 14, 1915) was an American educator, author, orator, and adviser to several presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African American community and of the contemporary black elite. Washington was from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants. They were newly oppressed in the South by disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
  CHARACTER AS SHOWN IN DRESS: It is surprising how much we can tell about a person's character by his dress. I think it is very seldom that we cannot tell whether a person is ignorant or educated, simply by his dress; and there are some few, plain facts about dress that I am going to mention to you to-night. While it is hard to lay down any rules as to how we must dress, I think there are some well-defined principles of dress to which all well-educated persons will conform.

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  Crooked Cross

  Sally Carson

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  "Sally Carson’s prescient novel offers an unflinching look at the early days of Nazism, resonating with today’s fears of lost boys, strong men and old hatreds... A remarkable novel: chilling, compelling, contained..." The Times"...warrants a permanent place in the growing canon of World War Two literature." Clare McHugh, BBC CultureIt is Christmas Eve 1932, and the Kluger family are celebrating at home. Their only daughter Lexa is excited about her upcoming summer wedding to Moritz Weissmann, a promising young doctor. 
  Lexa has many admirers, but her heart belongs to Moritz, who is initially welcomed by her parents and two brothers, Helmy and Erich. As the year progresses, Lexa enjoys skiing, swimming and going to parties with Moritz and her friends. But little by little Moritz is excluded from the pool, the library, and eventually his own home.As support for the Nazi Party grows rapidly across the country, Lexa’s own brothers, now fervent members of the Nazi Youth, turn against Moritz. Under immense pressure and desperate to be together, Lexa and Moritz have to meet in secret.By midsummer, the once close-knit Kluger family are now fractured by irreconcilable beliefs and differing loyalties. When legislation strips the town’s Jewish citizens of their rights and their livelihoods, Lexa remains steadfast in her determination to stay true to Moritz.Crooked Cross is part of the Persephone Audiobook Collection, a series of forgotten classics including neglected fiction and non-fiction by women writers. This novel was first published in 1934.

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  Henry James - A Short Story...

  Henry James

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  Henry James was born 15th April 1843 in New York City. 
   
  His youth was spent travelling with his family receiving what was an "extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous" education as they journeyed through London, Paris, Geneva, Boulogne-sur-Mer and Newport, Rhode Island, according to the father's current interests and publishing ventures. James studied primarily with tutors and only briefly attended schools.    
   
  Undoubtedly the quality of his writing has ensured his name is enshrined in the American literary tradition.  
   
  James was a committed Anglophile and spent most of his adult life as an expatriate in Europe.  Many of his novels juxtapose the Old World with the New World. Classics such as ‘The Portrait of a Lady’, ‘Daisy Miller’ and ‘The Ambassadors’, display the entanglement between American and European cultures and mentalities. They highlight the differences between the two worlds through following the experiences of American expatriates in Europe.  
   
  A prolific author he was able to easily move across genres to create vivid and totally real worlds and situations and to offer sophisticated observations of human relations as well as realistic, social criticism. 
  As a critic James was unafraid to venture into reviews and essays of those other literary giants around him.  These together with his short stories and, of course, classic novels, make Henry James an author to be not only admired but read, and read often.  
   
  In 1915 Henry James became a British citizen. 
   
  On 28th February 1916, at the age of 72, Henry James died in Chelsea, London. 
   
  He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912 and 1916. He never won.

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  Parade's End - The Complete...

  Madox Ford

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  There is a hard brightness overlying the emotion and the human suffering and the human passions… Mr. Ford achieves not only what is probably his own best work but what is certainly one of the ablest of recent English novels. — The New York Times, 1924  
  There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them. — W. H. Auden  
  Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End tetralogy, written in the aftermath of World War I, was originally published in four parts in the 1920s: Some Do Not…; No More Parades; A Man Could Stand Up —; and Last Post. Highlighting the tension between traditional values and a rapidly changing social order in a world embroiled in war, the story details Tietjens' turmoils in both his personal life and on the warfront—and what follows when some of those struggles become one and the same.  
  Unique among other war fiction of the time, Parade's End privileges not the conflict of the Great War itself, but the impact the war had on its participants and upon society writ large. With it's publication, Ford hoped to contribute to the obviating of all future wars. 
  Parade's End is often referred to as one of the greatest 20th century novels, and one of the best depictions of war in literature. The 2012 television adaptation, written by Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love), directed by Susanna White (Andor) and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall, was nominated for two Primetime Emmy Awards and seven BAFTA Television Awards.

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  HOMER: The Iliad & the Odyssey

  Homer

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  Nearly three thousand years after they were composed, The Iliad and The Odyssey remain two of the most celebrated and widely read stories ever told, yet next to nothing is known about their author. He was certainly an accomplished Greek bard, and he probably lived in the late eighth and early seventh centuries BCE Authorship is traditionally ascribed to a blind poet named Homer, and it is under this name that the works are still published. Greeks of the third and second centuries BCE, however, already questioned whether Homer existed and whether the two epics were even written by a single individual. 
  Most modern scholars believe that even if a single person wrote the epics, his work owed a tremendous debt to a long tradition of unwritten, oral poetry. Stories of a glorious expedition to the East and of its leaders’ fateful journeys home had been circulating in Greece for hundreds of years before The Iliad and The Odyssey were composed. Casual storytellers and semiprofessional minstrels passed these stories down through generations, with each artist developing and polishing the story as he told it. According to this theory, one poet, multiple poets working in collaboration, or perhaps even a series of poets handing down their work in succession finally turned these stories into written works, again with each adding his own touch and expanding or contracting certain episodes in the overall narrative to fit his taste.

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