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FRANZ KAFKA.SOPHIA LOREN. FRÃÃ,©DÃÃ,©RIC FRANCOIS CHOPIN.SEN CHOPIN.INDIRA GANDHI.PELE. FERNANDO.PESSOA.ROSA PARKS .CLARKE. FRANÃÃ,§OIS BERNIER.KURT GÃÃ,¶DEL.CHRISTIAN DIOR. THICH NHAT HANH .JOSIAH WEDGWOOD.AMARTYA SEN. XENOPHONE. ANNA PAVLOVA.YVES.ALFRED HITCHCOCK KALHO.YVES SAINT LAURENT. JOHN ERNST STEINBECK. MARGARET MEAD .HANH. PHIL BORGES .ALAIN ROBBE GRILLET. BOB DYLAN. GEORGE ORWELL . EWARD ST.JOHN GOREY. ARTHUR CLARKE. BOAS. DALAI LAMA. GODEL.EIFFEL.HIKMET .HARPER LEE .LEONARD BERNSTEIN .ELLA.FRIDA KAHLO.BERNINI. JOHN DAVISON ROCKEFELLER. BOB DYLAN. NAZIM HIKMET .MAURITS CORNELIS ESCHER .CONSTANCE COLLIER.ECO.FIDEL CASTRO .SEAN DEVEREUX .UMBERTO ECO.FELLINI.SALK.FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. NOSTRADAMUS. CHIEF JOSEPH NEZ PERCE .BUDDHA.OMAR KHAYYAM.GAUTAMA BUDDHA.MARGARET XENOPHON.HOMER.EDMUND HILLARY.JEAN-BAPTISTE TAVERNIER.KAHLO.PHILIPP WESDIN.CARL SAGAN. SIGMUND FREUD.HAYEK.HIPPOCRATES.FRANK LLYODWRIGHT. STEVEN SPIELBERG.JEAN.FEDERICO FELLINI.GEORGE EASTMAN. RIEDRICH A VON HAYEK.EDWARD de BONO.JONAS SALK. JOHN JAMES AUDUBON.ELLA FITZGERALD.FRANZ BOAZ . HANK KETCHAM .



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Chris Harman (1942-2009)

Marxist thinker of modern times

Chris Harman, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party died 7th November 2009 in Cairo of a cardiac arrest, where he was speaking at a Congress of Socialist Revolutionaries.

Chris Harman was not only an intellectual, a writer and a theorist of the most extraordinary quality He had something much more. Harman took Marx out of the hands of academics. This explains why attending a public meeting when he was speaking was a great experience. Chris Harman could write so well precisely because he had grasped the full wealth of Marxist ideas. He has produced numerous books, pamphlets and articles on a wide variety of topics: on the state capitalist tyrannies of the former Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, how the Russian revolution was lost, the failed German revolutions, the dynamics of modern capitalism, on the 1968 revolts, on political Islam, on Imperialism and many more. His writings comprised a valuable tool for revolutionaries wanting to intervene in the every day political and worker's struggles with clarity of ideas, strategy and tactics.

Harman was a towering figure in Britain and he made an immense theoretical and personal contribution to the Socialist Workers Party He edited the International Socialism journal, and had written an accessible critique of mainstream economic theory, Zombie Capitalism In addition, his historical work, culminating in the magisterial A People's History of the World, provided an invaluable introduction to the topics. Chris inspired our generation to be revolutionaries. His commitment to the building of a revolutionary party internationally was unflinching. He had nothing insular. He had that trait of the real revolutionary that would not allow him or her to be indifferent to people's predicament wherever they may be confronting oppression and injustice. Harman's writings, his efforts and contribution have played a significant part in germinating the seeds of revolutionary Marxist groups and organizations in whatever part of the world. He will remain an inspiration to successive generations of socialists.

Born into a working class family, Harman attended the London School of Economics (LSE) where he joined the International Socialists. He was instrumental in publishing the magazine of the LSE Socialist Society, The Agitator, and was a leading member of the IS by 1968. He was involved in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and outraged many leftists when, at a meeting in the Conway Hall, he denounced Ho Chi Minh for murdering the leader of the Vietnamese Trotskyist movement, Ta Thu Thau, in 1945 after crushing the workers' rising of that year in Saigon.

His main role in the IS (from 1978 the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)) was as a theorist and he has produced numerous books and articles on a wide variety of topics. Almost all his writing has appeared in the publications of the IS and SWP or has been published by related publishing houses, such as Bookmarks. He was first editor of Socialist Worker in 1976-77 and returned to the role after a break in 1982, remaining in the post until 2004, when he started editing the SWP's theoretical quarterly International Socialism Journal.

Harman has left behind his wife Talat and children Seth and Sinead.

HERTA MULLER

(1953 - Present)

Herta Muller is a Romanian-born German novelist, poet and essayist noted for her works depicting the harsh conditions of life in Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae CeauÃ...Ã...¸escu regime, the history of the Germans in Transylvania, and the persecution of Romanian ethnic Germans by Soviet forces in Romania. On October 8th, 2009, it was announced she would be awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The decision was expected to keep alive the controversy surrounding the academy's pattern of awarding the prize to European writers. Muller, a member of Romania's ethnic German minority, was honored for work that "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed," the Swedish Academy said.

Muller was born in NiÃ...Ã,£chidorf (German: Nitzkydorf), a historically German-speaking town in the Banat. The daughter of Banat Swabian farmers, her family was part of Romania's German minority; her father had served in the Waffen SS and her mother served five years (1944-1949) in a labour camp in the Soviet Union during and after World War II Her grandfather had been a wealthy farmer and merchant. While she speaks German as a native language, she is also fluent in Romanian.

She studied German studies and Romanian literature at the TimiÃ...Ã...¸oara University. She was a member of Aktionsgruppe Banat, a German-speaking literary society.

In 1976, MÃÃ,¼ller began working as a translator for an engineering factory, but was dismissed in 1979 for her refusal to cooperate with the Securitate, the Communist regime's secret police. Initially, she made a living by teaching kindergarten and giving private German lessons. Her first book was published in Romania (in German) in 1982, and appeared only in a censored version, as with most publications of the time.

Muller left for Wualler received membership of the German Academy for Writing and Poetry in 1995, and other positions followed. In 1997 she withdrew from the PEN centre of Germany in protest of its merger with the former German Democratic Republic branch. In July 2008, Muller sent a critical open letter to Horia-Roman Patapievici, president of the Romanian Cultural Institute in reaction to the support given by the institute to a Romanian-German Summer School involving two former informants of the Securitate.

Müller, 56, made her debut in 1982 with a collection of short stories titled "Niederungen," or "Nadirs," depicting the harshness of life in a small, German-speaking village in Romania. It was promptly censored by the communist government.

In 1984 an uncensored version was smuggled to Germany, where it was published and devoured by readers. That work was followed by "Oppressive Tango" in Romania but she was eventually prohibited from publishing inside her country for her criticism of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's rule and its feared secret police, the Securitate."The Romanian national press was very critical of these works while, outside of Romania, the German press received them very positively," the Academy said.

Most of Müller 's work is in German, but some works have been translated into English, French and Spanish, including "The Passport," "The Land of Green Plums," "Traveling on One Leg" and "The Appointment."

This year, her novel Atemschaukel was nominated for the German Book Prize and is now among the six finalists. In this book Müller describes the journey of a young man to a labour camp in the Soviet Union as an example for the fate of the German population in Siebenbürgen (Transylvania) after World War II. It was inspired by the experience of Oskar Pastior, whose oral memories she had made notes of, but also by what happened to her own mother.

IRVING PENN

(1907 - 2009 )

Irving Penn, Fashion Photographer Is Dead. Irving Penn, one of the 20th century's most prolific and influential photographers of fashion and the famous, whose signature blend of classical elegance and cool minimalism was recognizable to magazine readers and museumgoers worldwide, died Wednesday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.

Penn, the brother of the motion-picture director Arthur Penn, initially intended to become a painter, but at age 26 he took a job designing photographic covers for the fashion magazine Vogue. He began photographing his own ideas for covers and soon established himself as a fashion photographer.

Irving Penn studied under Alexey Brodovitch at the Philadelphia Museum School from which he graduated 1938. Penn's drawings were published by Harper's Bazaar and he also painted. As his career in photography blossomed, he became known for post World War II feminine chic and glamour photography.

His austere fashion images communicated elegance and luxury through compositional refinement and clarity of line rather than through the use of elaborate props and backdrops. Penn also became an influential portraitist. He photographed a large number of celebrities, engaging each subject to sit for hours and to reveal his or her personality to the camera. In his portraits the subject is usually posed before a bare backdrop and photographed in natural northern light. The resulting images combine simplicity and directness with great formal sophistication.

He was among the first photographers to pose subjects against a simple grey or white backdrop and used this simplicity more effectively than other photographers. Expanding his austere studio surroundings, Penn constructed a set of upright angled backdrops, to form a stark, acute corner. Posing his subjects within this tight, unorthodox space, Penn brought an unprecedented sense of drama to his portraits, driving the viewer's focus onto the person and their expression. In many photos, the subjects appeared wedged into the corner. Subjects photographed with this technique included Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O'Keeffe, W. H. Auden, Igor Stravinsky and Marlene Dietrich.

While a master of the studio flash, most of Penn's portraits are lighted with window light. For travelling to New Guinea and other locations to photograph indigenous people, Penn created a portable studio with a skylight deployed facing north with impressive results.

A memorable series of portraits he created in 1950-51, collectively called Small Trades, was of labourers in New York, Paris, and London formally posed in their work clothes and holding the tools of their trade. This project eventually extended to places such as Nepal, New Guinea, Dahomey (now Benin), and Morocco. Penn's later platinum prints of female nudes and of cigarette butts are characterized by the same tonal subtlety, compositional virtuosity, and serenity that mark his fashion photography and portraiture.

Three hundred of Penn's pictures were published in Moments Preserved (1960). His other books include Worlds in a Small Room (1974), a collection of portraits of people he encountered in remote foreign locales, and Passage (1991), a retrospective survey of more than 400 examples of his work in portraiture, fashion, ethnic studies, and still life. In 1996 he donated his archives to the Art Institute of Chicago. The museum organized a traveling retrospective of his work the following year.

In 1950, Penn married his favorite model, Lisa Fonssagrives and he founded his studio in 1953. They had one son together, who is named Tom.

PAUL DIRAC

(1902 -1984)

The mathematician Mark Kac divided geniuses into two classes. Ordinary ones whose achievements others will emulate, and magicians whose inventions are so astounding that it is hard to see how any human could have imagined them. Paul Dirac was one of these magicians.

When he went to Cambridge in 1923, at the age of 21, the world of physics was in turmoil. Experiments had shown that classical physicists could not explain the behaviour of atoms. The old principles of Isaac Newton didn't seem to apply to the microscopic world. Dirac soon developed his own widely-acclaimed theory of quantum mechanics. His theory included wave mechanics, the version of uantum mechanics developed by Erwin Schrodinger, and matrix mechanics, the theory put forward by Werner Heisenberg.

At the time, it seemed miraculous. Albert Einstein described Dirac's theory as "the most logically perfect of quantum mechanics". Perfect as it was, the theory was only a reformulation of a newly-discovered branch of physics. In 1928, Dirac made a breakthrough. He combined the theories of quantum mechanics and Einstein's special relativity. The resulting Dirac equation, still widely used today, was able to explain the mysterious magnetic and "spin" properties of the electron. Like so many great discoveries, it required an extraordinary leap of imagination.

But there was a conundrum. The equation had two solutions, one representing the electron, the other representing its opposite, a particle with negative energy and positive charge, that had never been seen or suspected before. Dirac concluded that each electron had an "anti-particle". The two could be created or destroyed in matching pairs. Dirac had predicted the existence of anti-matter, which makes up, at least in principle, half the universe.
Heisenberg judged this to be the supreme achievement of 20th Century physics.

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born in Bristol, England and grew up in the Bishopston area of the city. His father, Charles Dirac, was an immigrant from Saint-Maurice in the Canton of Valais, Switzerland. His mother was originally from Cornwall and the daughter of a mariner. Paul had an elder brother, Félix, who committed suicide in March 1925, and a younger sister, Béatrice. His early family life appears to have been unhappy due to his father's unusually strict and authoritarian nature.

He was educated first at Bishop Road Primary School and then at Merchant Venturers' Technical College , where his father was a French teacher.