Showing results for "robert maskell"

The bookshelves of World literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors. From their countries and continents their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure. Among them is Ricardo Fernandez Garcia.

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in the Russian province of Tula to a wealthy noble family. As a child, he had private tutors but he showed little interest in any formal education. When he went to the University of Kazan in 1843 to study oriental languages and law, he left without completing his courses. Life now was relaxed and idle but with some writing also taking place. Gambling debts forced an abrupt change of path and he joined the army to fight in the Crimean War. He was commended for h...

A fascinating journey through the history of railways, packed with first-hand accounts of innovation, triumph, and tragedy.From the earliest steam engine to the high-speed bullet trains of today, A Short History of the Railway reveals the hidden stories of railway history across the world - the inspired engineering; the blood, sweat, and tears that went into the construction of the tracks; the ground-breaking innovations behind the trains that travelled along them;...

The bookshelves of British literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors. From these Isles their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure. Among them is CJohn Oakum.

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in the Russian province of Tula to a wealthy noble family. As a child, he had private tutors but he showed little interest in any formal education. When he went to the University of Kazan in 1843 to study oriental languages and law, he left without completing his courses. Life now was relaxed and idle but with some writing also taking place. Gambling debts forced an abrupt change of path and he joined the army to fight in the Crimean War. He was commended for h...

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in the Russian province of Tula to a wealthy noble family. As a child, he had private tutors but he showed little interest in any formal education. When he went to the University of Kazan in 1843 to study oriental languages and law, he left without completing his courses. Life now was relaxed and idle but with some writing also taking place. Gambling debts forced an abrupt change of path and he joined the army to fight in the Crimean War. He was commended for h...

Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25th June 1903 in Motihari, Bihar, in what was then British India. When Eric was one his mother took him to England and they settled at Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire.His education was at the nearby convent school before moving on to St Cyprian's School at Eastbourne and finally Eton where his academic studies were sidelined in favour of work on college publications.University could not be achieved without a scholarship, which depended on good...

François-Anatole Thibault was born on the 16th April 1844 in Paris, France, the son of a bookseller and bibliophile.He studied at the Collège Stanislas, a private Catholic school, and after graduating joined his father in the bookstore, which specialised in works on the French Revolution. Several years later he secured a position as cataloguer at Bacheline-Deflorenne and at Lemerre before being appointed librarian for the French Senate in 1876.His literary career had begun ...

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5th, 1850 near Dieppe in France.Maupassant’s early life was badly torn when at age 11 (his younger brother Hervé was then five) his mother, Laure, a headstrong and independent-minded woman, risked social disgrace in order to obtain a legal separation from her husband.After the separation, Laure kept custody of her two boys. With the father now forcibly absent, Laure became the most influential and important figure in th...

Ferguson Wright Hume was born in Powick, Worcestershire on the 8th July 1859.When he was three the family emigrated to Dunedin in New Zealand. Here he started his education at the Otago Boys' High School before studying law at the University of Otago. Hume was admitted to the New Zealand bar in 1885.He moved to become a barrister’s clerk to Melbourne and once there also began writing plays. The local theatres were not interested in his works, and it was only after one was s...

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke was born into a troubled marriage on the 4th December 1875 in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His mother, having previously lost a baby girl, would dress the young boy up in girl’s clothing.Later his father dispatched him to a military academy at age 10 but after a miserable 5 years the young Rilke left due to illness and instead entered first Prague and then Munich and finally Berlin university to study art history, phil...

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 remain...