Portrait: Salman Schocken, a German Jewish publisher, co-founder of the Schocken Department Store chain, and Zionist

26 July 2023 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: Portrait, Shopping Reading Time:  11 minutes

Salman Schocken © haaretz.co.il - Alfred Bernheim

Salman Schocken © haaretz.co.il – Alfred Bernheim

Salman Schocken was a German Jewish publisher, and co-founder of the large Kaufhaus Schocken chain of department stores in Germany. Stripped of his citizenship and forced to sell his company by the German government, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1934, where he purchased the newspaper Haaretz (which is still majority-owned by his descendants).   read more…

Portrait: Johann Sebastian Bach, a German composer and musician

21 June 2023 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: Portrait Reading Time:  8 minutes

Johann Sebastian Bach in 1746 by Elias Gottlob Haussmann © jsbach.net

Johann Sebastian Bach in 1746 by Elias Gottlob Haussmann © jsbach.net

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his orchestral music such as the Brandenburg Concertos; instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites; keyboard works such as the Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier; organ works such as the Schübler Chorales and the Toccata and Fugue in D minor; and vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach revival he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music.   read more…

Portrait: Max Planck, originator of quantum theory

24 May 2023 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: Portrait Reading Time:  7 minutes

Max Planck, c. 1930 © library.si.edu - Transocean Berlin

Max Planck, c. 1930 © library.si.edu – Transocean Berlin

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck ForMemRS was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.   read more…

Portrait: Socrates, a Greek philosopher from Athens

26 April 2023 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: Portrait Reading Time:  7 minutes

Socrates statue outside the National Library of Uruguay, Montevideo © Franquito53/cc-by-sa-3.0

Socrates statue outside the National Library of Uruguay, Montevideo © Franquito53/cc-by-sa-3.0

Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no texts and is known mainly through the posthumous accounts of classical writers, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. These accounts are written as dialogues, in which Socrates and his interlocutors examine a subject in the style of question and answer; they gave rise to the Socratic dialogue literary genre. Contradictory accounts of Socrates make a reconstruction of his philosophy nearly impossible, a situation known as the Socratic problem. Socrates was a polarizing figure in Athenian society. In 399 BC, he was accused of impiety and corrupting the youth. After a trial that lasted a day, he was sentenced to death. He spent his last day in prison, refusing offers to help him escape.   read more…

Portrait: Charles Boycott, an English land agent in Ireland

22 March 2023 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: Portrait Reading Time:  5 minutes

Caricature of Charles Cunningham Boycott in Vanity Fair, 1881 © Vanity Fair magazine

Caricature of Charles Cunningham Boycott in Vanity Fair, 1881 © Vanity Fair magazine

Charles Cunningham Boycott was an English land agent whose ostracism by his local community in Ireland gave the English language the term boycott. He had served in the British Army 39th Foot, which brought him to Ireland. After retiring from the army, Boycott worked as a land agent for Lord Erne, a landowner in the Lough Mask area of County Mayo.   read more…

Portrait: James of Saint George, master of works and architect

22 February 2023 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: Portrait Reading Time:  8 minutes

Master James statue at Beaumaris Castle © AJ Marshall/cc-by-sa-4.0

Master James statue at Beaumaris Castle © AJ Marshall/cc-by-sa-4.0

Master James of Saint George (French: Maître Jacques de Saint-Georges) was a master of works/architect from Savoy, described by historian Marc Morris as “one of the greatest architects of the European Middle Ages”. He was largely responsible for designing King Edward I‘s castles in North Wales, including Conwy, Harlech and Caernarfon (all begun in 1283) and Beaumaris on Anglesey (begun 1295).   read more…

Portrait: Mark Twain, an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer

25 January 2023 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: Portrait Reading Time:  6 minutes

Mark Twain by Ernest H  Mills, ca 1895 © NPR

Mark Twain by Ernest H Mills, ca 1895 © NPR

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the “greatest humorist the United States has produced”, and William Faulkner called him “the father of American literature“. His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter of which has often been called the “Great American Novel“. Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.   read more…

Portrait: Oscar Wilde, Irish poet and playwright

28 December 2022 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: Portrait Reading Time:  8 minutes

Oscar Wilde Memorial Sculpture in Merrion Square, Dublin © flickr.com - Stéphane Moussie/cc-by-2.0

Oscar Wilde Memorial Sculpture in Merrion Square, Dublin © flickr.com – Stéphane Moussie/cc-by-2.0

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in “one of the first celebrity trials”, imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46.   read more…

Portrait: Josephus

23 November 2022 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: Portrait Reading Time:  7 minutes

Josephus - Fictional portrait in William Whinston's English translation of 'Antiquitates'

Josephus – Fictional portrait in William Whinston’s English translation of ‘Antiquitates’

Titus Flavius Josephus was a first-century Romano-Jewish historian and military leader, best known for The Jewish War, who was born in Jerusalem—then part of Roman Judea—to a father of priestly descent and a mother who claimed royal ancestry.   read more…

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