Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) was an English author who wrote 34 novels, 7 volumes of short stories and a daily journal of more than a million words. He also wrote or co-wrote 13 plays, wrote articles and stories for more than 100 newspapers and periodicals, worked in and briefly ran the UK's Ministry of Information in the First World War, and wrote for the cinema in the 1920s. He was the most financially successful British author of his day. Because his books appealed to a wide public rather than to literary cliques and élites, and for his adherence to realism, Virginia Woolf and other writers and supporters of the modernist school belittled him, and his fiction became neglected after his death. Studies of his writing since the 1970s have led to a re-evaluation of Bennett's work, and his finest novels, including Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives' Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910) and Riceyman Steps (1923), are now widely recognised as major works. (Full article...)
... that David W. Music has taught music, composed music, conducted music, and written about music?
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Mandy Rice-Davies
"Well he would, wouldn't he?" is an aphorism that is commonly used as a retort to a self-interested denial. It was said by the model Mandy Rice-Davies(pictured) while giving evidence at the 1963 trial of Stephen Ward, who had been accused of living off money paid to Rice-Davies and her friend Christine Keeler for sex: part of the larger Profumo affair. While being cross-examined Rice-Davies was told that Lord Astor, who owned the Cliveden estate on which Ward rented a cottage, had denied an affair with her; she replied: "Well he would, wouldn't he?" Political, communications and psychological experts have interpreted it as a phrase which indicates the speaker believes a person is making a self-interested, obvious or irrelevant denial. They have also stated it functions as a retort to mistruths made by public figures. Linguistically, it has been noted for its use of the modal verb would to create rhetorical effect. The phrase has been included in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations since 1979. (Full article...)
1904 – In the worst maritime disaster involving a Danish merchant ship, SS Norge ran aground on Hasselwood Rock and sank in the North Atlantic, resulting in more than 635 deaths.
1989 – President Slobodan Milošević gave a speech at Gazimestan in which he described the possibility of "armed battles" in the future of Serbia's national development.
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