Ben Okri: Nigerian-British author

Ben Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions. Ben Okri was born on Sunday, March 15, 1959, in Minna, Nigeria, just sixteen months before the country gained its independence from the United Kingdom. Okri was born to Silver Oghenegueke Loloje Okri, an Urhobo man from Warri on the Niger delta, and to his Ibo wife, Grace.

Okri's father, then a railway station clerk, soon left for England to study law. The rest of the family joined him shortly afterwards. Despite young Ben's protestations, the Okris returned to Lagos in 1965, where Silver Okri set up a law practice.

Okri began writing articles and fiction in 1976, after failing to get a place at university. His first novel, written when he was still living in Nigeria, was published by Longman in 1980. Entitled Flowers and Shadows, the narrative centers on a young man’s disillusionment with corruption in postcolonial Nigerian society.

He wrote a play and a novel while working in a paint company, and then moved to England, first to study comparative literature at the University of Essex, then to continue writing in London.

In 1983, Okri became the poetry editor for the weekly magazine West Africa, in which "In the Shadow of War" was first published during that same year. By the mid-eighties, Okri's talent began to be recognized, and he continued to publish.

In 2009, he invented a newform called the Stoku, which is a cross between a short story and a haiku. This was first displayed in his book 'Tales of Freedom’, now re-titled The Comic Destiny.

Ben Okri has published many books, including The Famished Road, which won the Booker Prize in 1991, & Songs of Enchantment, Astonishing the Gods and Dangerous Love.

Ben Okri’s books have won several awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore International Literary Prize and the Premio Grinanze Cavour.

In addition, he has been awarded Honorary Doctorates by the University of Westminster and the University of Essex. In 1998, he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2000 he served as the chairman of the judges for the Caine Prize for African Fiction.
Ben Okri: Nigerian-British author

George Bernard Shaw: Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist

George Bernard Shaw was born on July 26, 1856 in Dublin, in a lower-middle class family of Scottish-Protestant ancestry. Although he was best known for drama, he was also proficient in the areas of journalism, music, and literary criticism.

His education was irregular, due to his dislike of any organized training. Shaw developed a wide knowledge of music, art, and literature as a result of his mother’s influence and his visits to the National Gallery of Ireland. The education in artistic style and art history that he received through these visits to National Gallery of Ireland helped Shaw in his later work as an art critic, and the influence of this interest in art can also be seen in his plays.

After working in an estate agent’s office for a while he moved to London as a young man (1876), where he established himself as a leading music and theatre critic in the eighties and nineties and became a prominent member of the Fabian Society.

In 1885, the drama critic William Archer found Shaw steady journalistic work. His early journalism ranged from book reviews in the Pall Mall Gazette (1885–88) and art criticism in the World (1886–89) to brilliant musical columns in the Star (as “Corno di Bassetto”—basset horn) from 1888 to 1890 and in the World (as “G.B.S.”) from 1890 to 1894.

It was during the first decade of the 20th century that Shaw firmly established his reputation as a playwright. Harley Granville-Barker’s company at the Royal Court Theatre presented 14 of Shaw's plays over five years. These included Man and Superman (written in 1902, staged at the Court in 1905), Major Barbara (1905) and The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906). Shaw’s work also became more formally experimental.

He wrote 60 plays, most of which deal with social themes such as marriage, religion, class government and health care.

Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend in 1898, when they were both 41. They renamed their house in Hertfordshire Shaw's Corner and remained together until Charlotte’s death.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925. Shaw won his Oscar in 1939 for Best Writing, Screenplay for his role in adapting his own play Pygmalion for the screen. He died on November 2, 1950 in Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England.
George Bernard Shaw: Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist

Marcus Samuel: Founder of the Shell Transport and Trading Company

A London slum was his birthplace and a shipping office where he was a petty clerk was the springboard to his financial career. Marcus Samuel (1853–1927) was educated at Jewish schools in London and Brussels before joining the firm established by his father Marcus Samuel, who had prospered in the Far Eastern trade, principally from selling fancy shells and ornamental shell boxes.

In 1878, the younger Marcus Samuel formed his own business partnership with his brother Sam (1855–1934), who later sat as a member of parliament for 20 years.

In the 1880s they became particularly interested in the oil exporting business but shipping still posed a problem as oil was carried in barrels which could leak and took up a lot of space.

He built an experimental oil-tanker, with money borrowed from the Rothschilds of Paris, and thus he became the first to ship an entire boat-load of oil to the Far East. He built more tankers.

In July 1882, the first oil tanker Murex threaded through the Suez filled with 4,000 tons of Russian kerosene. On 18 October 1897 the brothers formed a company dedicated to their oil and shipping interests: The “Shell” Transport and Trading Company, Ltd.

To counter Royal Dutch and Standard Oil, Samuel's company began its own production in Borneo and in Texas. Moves towards Royal Dutch-Shell co-operation began in 1903 and culminated in a merger in 1907 with Royal Dutch owning 60 per cent and Shell Transport and Trading 40 per cent in the new company.

Marcus Samuel was Lord Mayor of London from 1902 to 1903 and was made a Baronet in 1903. In recognition of Shell's contribution to the British cause in the First World War, he was created 1st Viscount Bearsted of Maidstone in 1921.
Marcus Samuel: Founder of the Shell Transport and Trading Company

Beatrix Potter: English writer

Beatrix Potter was an English author and illustrator known for her children's books, most famously The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902). Stories that combined her love for both animals and the English countryside. In her later life, she bought a substantial amount of land in the Lake District and on her death donated it to the National Trust, helping to preserve a significant part of the Lake District national park.

Beatrix was born in Kensington, London to middle-class, Unitarian parents. Her father was a kind of lawyer, but he didn’t practice. He spent most of the time out of the house in clubs with his friends. Her mother was also very social, and spent whole days visiting and being visited. Her parents were also artistic and this artistic talent was passed on to Beatrix.

Beatrix was very smart, and studied archaeological artifacts, fossils and insects, but she was especially interested in mycology.

She never had children of her own, but Beatrix Potter always had a special understanding of children. In fact, many of her early books started as letters and presents to younger cousins and friends.

To earn some money, Beatrix started drawing cards with animals. She liked writing and illustrating letters too. One day, she wrote a letter to her friend’s son, and told the story of Peter Rabbit. She decided to make the story into a book. The Tale of Peter Rabbit was published in 1902 –and it was a great success.

Potter wrote 23 books. Some of her best know titles include:
•The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902)
•The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903)
•The Tailor of Gloucester (1903)
•The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904)
•The Tale of Two Bad Mice (1904)
•The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (1905)
•The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan (1905)
•The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher (1906)
•The Story of A Fierce Bad Rabbit (1906)

Beatrix used the money from the sale of her books to buy a farm and land. When she was 47, she moved to the countryside permanently and married William Heelis. He loved the country as much as she did, and had helped her extend her property. Potter went on like this, selling books and buying land, for many years.

Beatrix Potter died from pneumonia and heart disease on December 22, 1943, leaving almost all of her property and much of her art to the National Trust. The estate covered 4,000 acres and included cottages, herds of Herdwick sheep, and cattle spread across sixteen different farms.
Beatrix Potter: English writer

James Smithson – English scientist and philanthropist

James Smithson was born as James Lewis Macie in England about the year 1754. He was a natural son of Hugh Smithson, first Duke of Northumberland, his mother being a Mrs. Elizabeth Macie, of an old family in Wiltshire of the name of Hungerford.

He was the illegitimate offspring of Hugh Smithson, later known as Sir Hugh Percy, who rose from a merchant class background to become the Duke of Northumberland after marrying advantageously.

Hugh Smithson, his father, was distinguished as a member of one of the most illustrious houses of Great Britain, and also because of his alliance with the renowned family of Percy.

James Smithson has been known as the wealthy and eccentric Englishman who bequeathed his fortune to the US government ‘to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge’.

When he was 17 years old, James Lewis Macie matriculated at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he not only showed an aptitude for chemistry and mineralogy but also engaged in his first serious fieldwork. The brilliant physicist Henry Cavendish, for whom Macie briefly worked as a laboratory assistant, served as one of his scientific mentors. Macie soon positioned himself as “a serious scientist” with a reputation for “scrupulous laboratory methods”.

While still attending college, he managed to join the prominent French geologist Barthélemy Faujas de St. Fond on his tour of Scotland, with a group of distinguished scientists.

Within a year after his graduation from Oxford in 1786, he gained election as a fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Smithson died in Genoa, Italy on 27 June 1829. By the time he died in 1829, he had published 29 scientific papers, most of which detailed the chemical composition of minerals and various other substances (including a human tear).
James Smithson – English scientist and philanthropist

Jeffrey Howard Archer

Jeffrey Howard Archer is the successful author of a number of popular novels, a convicted perjurer and former Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party and a former M.P.

The son of a printer, Jeffrey Howard Archer was born in 1940 London and brought up in Somerset. He was educated at Wellington School, and Brasenose College, Oxford, where he excelled in sports and was president of the Athletic Club.

He became a familiar figure in campus when, as a captain of the Oxford track and field team, he broke the record of 9.6 seconds in the 100 yard dash and was chosen to be a member of the British track team that competed in the 1964 Summer Olympics.

He was a Member of Parliament and deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, and became a life peer in 1992. His political career, having suffered several controversies, ended after a conviction for perverting the course of justice and his subsequent imprisonment. He is married to Mary Archer, a scientist specializing in solar power. Outside politics, he is a novelist, playwright and short story writer.

Archer’s books are peppered with heroic feats and crime elements. His first novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, was published in both the United States and England in 1976 and was an instant success.

His second novel, Shall We Tell the President? (1977), is a thriller depicting a plot to assassinate Edward Kennedy. His Kane and Abel proved to be his best-selling novel, reaching no.1 on the New York Times "Best seller list". It was made into a successful television series.

In 1998 Jeffrey Archer published a novel, The Eleventh Commandment - Thou Shalt not Be Caught.
Jeffrey Howard Archer

Robert Grosseteste (1168-1253)

Robert Grosseteste, born around 1168 to a poor AngloNorman family in England, was one of the outstanding scholastics of his era. A philosopher, scientist, mathematician, theologian, teacher, and church leader, he served on the faculty of Oxford, rising to the role of “master of the schools” at the university.

Grosseteste taught theology at Oxford before becoming Bishop of Lincoln. His thought is representative of the conflicting currents in the intellectual climate of Europe in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.

Grosseteste was a man of unusually wide-ranging interests. His scientific writings – on astronomy an its practical applications for the calculation of the ecclesiastical calendar, meteorology, comets, the tides, the understanding of natural laws in terms of geometry, light and optics - were mostly composed before 1235.

His work in science and natural philosophy is inspired by a material newly translated from Arabic sources and by the new Aristotelian material philosophy, especially the Physics, On the Heaven and Posterior Analytics.

He also carried out pastoral ministry and in 1235 was elected to the Bishopric of Lincoln, where he served until his death in 1253.
Robert Grosseteste (1168-1253)

Margaret Thatcher (13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013)

Born October 13, 1925, Margaret Thatcher grew up in the small British town of Grantham. Her father owned a grocery store there and early on inculcated her with the Victorian virtues of hard work and thrift, along with a strong Methodist faith. Thatcher studied chemistry and law at Somerville College, Oxford University and graduated in 1947.

During the 1940s, Thatcher read a book that would have a lasting influenced on her outlook: Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. In her mid 20s, Thatcher twice ran for election unsuccessfully. In 1959 things change and she was elected to Parliament. That election began a 30 year career of representing the constituency of Finchley, in North London.

In 1970, at age 44, she was appointed to the cabinet as education secretary. Margaret Thatcher is considered by many to be one of the most influential women in politics, She gained a strong reputation in England and worldwide as the highest regarded political in recent British history.

Early on in her premiership, Thatcher faced the challenges of recession and high unemployment. Influenced by Keynesian economic thinking, she instigated reforms collectively referred to as “Thatcherism”. She pursued a policy of economic linearization, which extended to the selling and opening up to competition of state assets.
Margaret Thatcher (13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013)

Robert Willan: Father of modern dermatology

Robert Willan (12 November 1757 – 7 April 1812) in general is considered to be the father of modern dermatology. He was born at The Hill, near Sedbergh in Yorkshire, England.

He received his early education in the grammar-school of his native place. He began his medical training in Edinburgh in 1777, studying medicine under William Cullen and other teachers at the university. After the usual residence of three years Willan received his MD in Edinburgh in 1780 for a thesis on inflammation of the liver.

Willan is recognized for bringing order to the discipline of dermatology with his classifications and descriptions of skin lesions. He grouped skin disorders in eight categories, based on the morphology of skin lesions.
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Willan described the morphology of skin disease in detail, such as type of lesion, the shape and size, presence or absence of umbilication, redness, cooler, consistency, pattern of distribution, etc.  These he codified his very successful treatise On Cutaneous Diseases.
Robert Willan: Father of modern dermatology

Robert William Boyle

Robert William Boyle (1627-1691) was perhaps the most influential scientist in the late seventeenth century. His profuse extant manuscripts, which total over 20,000 leaves, constitute one of the most important archives to have come down from his period.

English theologian and scientist, Boyle was born January 25, 1627 at Lismore Castle, Ireland, the penultimate of fifteen children of the Earl of Cork and his second wife.

Robert William Boyle had the clarity of thought to think beyond the common practices and beliefs of Aristotle and the alchemists and to approach the study of matter using the scientific method, which is based on hypotheses, experimentation, and logical analysis.

Much of this is described in his 1661 book The Skeptical Chymist, in which he describes his skepticism, not of chemistry, but of the common premise of alchemy.

Boyle examined crystals, explored color, devised an acid-base indicator from the syrup of violets, and provided the first modern definition of an element. He was also physiologist and was the frost to show that the healthy human body has a constant temperature.
Robert William Boyle

Biography of William Matthew Flinders Petrie

William Matthew Flinders Petrie (3 June 1853 – 28 July 1942) was educated at home by his mother, the daughter of the explorer Mathew Flinders and his father a civil engineer.

In his teens he started surveying earthworks and ancient monuments, and with his father he made plans of Stonehenge.

Petrie developed a fascination with the Egyptian pyramids, both from his work at the museum and curiously from Piazzi Smyth, the author of a crackpot volume, Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid.

Petrie resolved to learn the truth about pyramids, and in 1880 he sailed to Alexandria and so began a six decade career as one of England’s greatest Egyptologists.

Among the leading Egyptologists of his day, Petrie excavated over fifty sites and trained a generation of archeologists.

Petrie’s most important discoveries are recounted, including his unearthing of the Merneptah Stele, some of the earliest evidence of mummification and elements of Greek and Roman cultural influence in Egypt.

The Pyramid Survey 1880-82, Petrie’s first book, enhanced his reputation considerably within the narrow community of Egyptologists, despite his lack of a formal education.

In 1892 Petrie was appointed to the chair of Egyptology at University College London, which was endowed by the will of his patron Miss Amelia Edwards.
Biography of William Matthew Flinders Petrie 

Joseph Rowntree (24 May 1836 – 24 February 1925)

Joseph Rowntree was born and brought up in the grocery business. His father owned a shop in Scarborough.

Joseph left school at fourteen with just five year’s education and started working for his father – although he would spend time away in London as an apprentice.

Subsequently, Joseph took over the running of the company with his brother John Stephenson Rowntree.

From 1859 he ran the family shop buy ten years later in 1869, he joined another brother, Henry Isaac Rowntree.

Henry owned a chocolate factory in York and when Henry died in 1883, Joseph became owner of the company.

Joseph employed his own progressive ideas in setting up and then running a new factory that opened in 1881.

He was known as an enlightened business man who did much to improve workplace conditions.

Rowntree’s company expanded from thirty to in excess of 4000 employees by the end of the nineteenth century.

Although the business was always well-managed, the real brand building would begin in the 1930s, after the Rowntree family ceased to have managerial control.

A merger with John Mackintosh & Co. in 1969 was followed by take-over by Nestlé in 1988.
Joseph Rowntree (24 May 1836 – 24 February 1925)