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Austerlitz (novel)
''Austerlitz'' is a 2001 novel by the German writer W. G. Sebald. It was Sebald's final novel. The book received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2019, it was ranked 5th on ''The Guardians list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. Plot Jacques Austerlitz, the main character in the book, is an architectural historian who encounters and befriends the solitary narrator in Antwerp during the 1960s. Gradually we come to understand his life history. He arrived in Britain during the summer of 1939 as an infant refugee on a kindertransport from a Czechoslovakia threatened by Hitler's Nazis. He was adopted by an elderly Welsh Nonconformist preacher and his sickly wife, and spent his childhood near Bala, Gwynedd, before attending a minor public school. His foster parents died, and Austerlitz learned something of his background. After school he attended Oriel College, Oxford and became an academic who is drawn to, and began his research in, the study of European architectur ...
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Anthea Bell
Anthea Bell (10 May 1936 – 18 October 2018) was an English translator of literary works, including children's literature, from French, German and Danish. These include '' The Castle'' by Franz Kafka, '' Austerlitz'' by W. G. Sebald, the '' Inkworld'' trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the French ''Asterix'' comics with co-translator Derek Hockridge. Biography Bell was born in Suffolk on 10 May 1936. According to her own accounts, she picked up lateral thinking abilities essential in a translator from her father Adrian Bell, Suffolk author and the first '' Times'' cryptic crossword setter. Her mother, Marjorie Bell (née Gibson), was a home maker. The couple's son, Bell's brother, Martin, is a former BBC correspondent who was an independent Member of Parliament for one parliamentary term. After attending a boarding school in Bournemouth, she read English at Somerville College, Oxford. She was married to the publisher and writer Antony Kamm from 1957 to 1973; the couple had tw ...
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Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury is a district in the West End of London. It is considered a fashionable residential area, and is the location of numerous cultural, intellectual, and educational institutions. Bloomsbury is home of the British Museum, the largest museum in the United Kingdom, and several educational institutions, including University College London and a number of other colleges and institutes of the University of London as well as its central headquarters, the New College of the Humanities, the University of Law, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the British Medical Association and many others. Bloomsbury is an intellectual and literary hub for London, as home of world-known Bloomsbury Publishing, publishers of the ''Harry Potter'' series, and namesake of the Bloomsbury Set, a group of British intellectuals which included author Virginia Woolf, biographer Lytton Strachey, and economist John Maynard Keynes. Bloomsbury began to be developed in the 17th century under the Earls o ...
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Terneuzen
Terneuzen () is a city and municipality in the southwestern Netherlands, in the province of Zeeland, in the middle of Zeelandic Flanders. With almost 55,000 inhabitants, it is the most populous municipality of Zeeland. History First mentioned in 1325, Terneuzen was a strategically located port on the waterways to Ghent, in present-day Belgium. It received city rights in 1584. Tradition has it that Terneuzen was once the home of the legendary Flying Dutchman, Van der Decken, a captain who cursed God and was condemned to sail the seas forever, as described in the Frederick Marryat novel ''The Phantom Ship'' and the Richard Wagner opera '' The Flying Dutchman''. Before 1877, the city was often called Neuzen. Geography The city of Terneuzen is located on the southern shore of the Western Scheldt estuary. The municipality of Terneuzen consists of the following population centres: Economy The Ghent–Terneuzen Canal is still an important shipping route connecti ...
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Vertigo (Sebald Novel)
''Vertigo'' (german: Schwindel. Gefühle., "Dizziness. Feelings.") is a 1990 novel and the first by the German author W. G. Sebald. The first of its four sections, titled 'Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet', is a short but conventional biography of Stendhal, who is referred to not by his pen name but by his birth name of Beyle. The second, 'All'estero', is a travelogue of two journeys made to the Alpine region by an unnamed narrator whose biography resembles Sebald's; an episode from the life of Casanova is also featured. The third, 'Dr K Takes the Waters at Riva', describes a difficult period in the life of Franz Kafka, referred to only as "Dr. K." Kafka's short story '' The Hunter Gracchus'' is re-told in summary form and the meaning of the hunter's ceaseless voyage interpreted by the narrator as Kafka's penitence for a longing for love. And the fourth, 'Il ritorno in patria', is a nostalgic recounting of the narrator's visit to his German hometown of "W," a rural village ...
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The Rings Of Saturn
''The Rings of Saturn'' (german: Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt - An English Pilgrimage) is a 1995 novel by the German writer W. G. Sebald. Its first-person narrative arc is the account by a nameless narrator (who resembles the author in typical Sebaldian fashion) on a walking tour of Suffolk. In addition to describing the places he sees and people he encounters, including translator Michael Hamburger, Sebald discusses various episodes of history and literature, including the introduction of silkworm cultivation to Europe and the writings of Thomas Browne, which attach in some way to the larger text. The book was published in English in 1998. Genre and content Combining the details of a walking tour with meditations prompted by places and people encountered on that tour, ''The Rings of Saturn'' was called "a hybrid of a bookfiction, travel, biography, myth, and memoir". Themes and style Themes in the book are those treated in Sebald's other books: time, memory, ...
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The Emigrants (German Novel)
''The Emigrants'' (german: Die Ausgewanderten) is a 1992 collection of narratives by the German writer W. G. Sebald. It won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize, and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal. The English translation by Michael Hulse was first published in 1996. Summary In ''The Emigrants'', Sebald's narrator recounts his involvement with and the life stories of four different characters, all of whom are emigrants (to England and the United States). As with most of Sebald's work, the text includes many black and white, unlabeled photographs and strays sharply from general formats of plot and narrative. Dr. Henry Selwyn is the estranged husband of Sebald's landlady. Selwyn fought in the First World War and has an interest in gardening and tending to animals. He confides in Sebald about his Lithuanian Jewish family's immigration to England from Lithuania, and suspects that it is this secretive, alien past that contributed to the dissolution of his relationship ...
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Liverpool Street Station
Liverpool Street station, also known as London Liverpool Street, is a central London railway terminus and connected London Underground station in the north-eastern corner of the City of London, in the ward of Bishopsgate Without. It is the terminus of the West Anglia Main Line to Cambridge, the Great Eastern Main Line to Norwich, commuter trains serving east London and destinations in the East of England, and the Stansted Express service to Stansted Airport. The station opened in 1874, as a replacement for Bishopsgate station as the Great Eastern Railway's main London terminus. By 1895, it had the most platforms of any London terminal station. During the First World War, an air raid on the station killed 16 on site, and 146 others in nearby areas. In the build-up to the Second World War, the station served as the entry point for thousands of child refugees arriving in London as part of the ''Kindertransport'' rescue mission. The station was damaged by the 1993 Bishops ...
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St Clement's Hospital
St Clements Hospital was a mental health hospital located between Mile End and Bow, in the East End of London. History The building opened in a former workhouse building as the City of London Union Infirmary in 1874. The palatial design of the workhouse had been created by architect Richard Tress and had cost over £55,000 to construct, boasted central heating, a dining-hall measuring 100 feet by 50 feet, Siberian marble pillars, and a chapel with stained glass windows and a new organ. It closed in 1909 but re-opened as a hospital for chronically ill people becoming known as the City of London Institution in 1912 and as the Bow Institution in 1913. It became a psychiatric unit, known by its most commonly adopted name of 'St Clement's Hospital' in 1936. The west side of the site suffered extensive bomb damage during the war, destroying the chapel and the sites initial symmetry. The hospital joined the newly formerd National Health Service in 1948 and then came under the same man ...
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Orthodox Judaism
Orthodox Judaism is the collective term for the traditionalist and theologically conservative branches of contemporary Judaism. Theologically, it is chiefly defined by regarding the Torah, both Written and Oral, as revealed by God to Moses on Mount Sinai and faithfully transmitted ever since. Orthodox Judaism, therefore, advocates a strict observance of Jewish law, or '' halakha'', which is to be interpreted and determined exclusively according to traditional methods and in adherence to the continuum of received precedent through the ages. It regards the entire ''halakhic'' system as ultimately grounded in immutable revelation, and beyond external influence. Key practices are observing the Sabbath, eating kosher, and Torah study. Key doctrines include a future Messiah who will restore Jewish practice by building the temple in Jerusalem and gathering all the Jews to Israel, belief in a future bodily resurrection of the dead, divine reward and punishment for the righteo ...
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Lithuania
Lithuania (; lt, Lietuva ), officially the Republic of Lithuania ( lt, Lietuvos Respublika, links=no ), is a country in the Baltic region of Europe. It is one of three Baltic states and lies on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea. Lithuania shares land borders with Latvia to the north, Belarus to the east and south, Poland to the south, and Russia to the southwest. It has a maritime border with Sweden to the west on the Baltic Sea. Lithuania covers an area of , with a population of 2.8 million. Its capital and largest city is Vilnius; other major cities are Kaunas and Klaipėda. Lithuanians belong to the ethno-linguistic group of the Balts and speak Lithuanian, one of only a few living Baltic languages. For millennia the southeastern shores of the Baltic Sea were inhabited by various Baltic tribes. In the 1230s, Lithuanian lands were united by Mindaugas, becoming king and founding the Kingdom of Lithuania on 6 July 1253. In the 14th century, the Grand Duchy of Li ...
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Dan Jacobson
Dan Jacobson (7 March 1929 – 12 June 2014) was a South African novelist, short story writer, critic and essayist of Lithuanian Jewish descent. Early life and career Dan Jacobson was born 7 March 1929, in Johannesburg, South Africa, where his parents' families had come to avoid the persecution of Jews and to escape poverty in their European homelands. His father, Hymann Michael Jacobson, was born in Ilūkste, Latvia, in 1885. His mother, Liebe (Melamed) Jacobson, was born in Kelme, Lithuania, in 1896. Jacobson had two older brothers, Israel Joshua and Hirsh, and a younger sister, Aviva. His mother's family emigrated to South Africa in 1919, after the death of his grandfather. His grandfather, Heshel Melamed, was a rabbi, and refused to leave Lithuania after traveling to the United States and finding that many Jews were not following their religion. Jacobson later wrote in his memoir ''Heshel's Kingdom'' about his travels back to Lithuania to find out more information about his g ...
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