Leon Gimpel is a French photographer. At an air show at Béthény in August 1909, Gimpel ascended in an air ballon to photograph the crowds below, pioneering aerial photography. However it is his pioneering work in colour photography that he is most notable for.
Gastronomica is an academic journal about food.
Simo Häyhä, nicknamed "White Death" by the Red Army, was a Finnish sharpshooter. Using a standard iron-sighted, bolt action rifle in the Winter War, he has the highest recorded number (505) of confirmed kills in any major war.
The Italian cyclist dominated the sport either side of the Second World War, using his all-around skills as a climber, sprinter and time-trialist to build a palmarès that rewrote the record books and raised the bar for those that followed him into professional road cycling.
In 1966, after a terrifying nightmare, the Italian maestro decided to abandon the making of a film called The Journey of G. Mastorna. Years later, the script was published in Italian newspapers with some illustrations by none other than Milo Manara, whose "Untitled" was a tribute to Fellini and which uncle Federico had liked. The subsequent collaboration on "Trip To Tulum" is a gorgeous blending of Fellini's dream vision and some of the finest illustrations ever put to paper by Manara.
Corto Maltese is a comics series featuring an eponymous character, a complex sailor-adventurer. It was created by Italian comic book creator Hugo Prattin 1967. The character embodies the author's skepticism of national, ideological, and religious assertions. Corto befriends people from all walks of life, including the murderous Russian Rasputin (no relation with the historical figure, apart from physical resemblance and some character traits), British heir Tristan Bantam, Voodoo priestess Gold Mouth and Czech academic Jeremiah Steiner. He also knows and meets various real-life historical figures, including Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Butch Cassidy, James Joyce, Frederick Rolfe, Joseph Conrad, Sukhbaatar, John Reed, White Russian general Roman Ungern von Sternberg and Enver Pasha of Turkey. His acquaintances treat him with great respect, as when a telephone call to Joseph Stalin frees him from arrest when he is threatened with execution on the border of Turkey and Armenia.
Lingua Franca was an American magazine about intellectual and literary life in academia. It ran stories about everything, from a historians’ quarrel over the efficacy of the 1960s student movement, to a dispute among anthropologists over whether cannibalism ever existed, to the fight between the Harvard biologists E.O. Wilson and Richard Lewontin over the extent to which genes control human behavior, to the question of whether dissertation advisers should sleep with their students.
Dar Sebastian house in Hammamet, often considered the embodyment of the perfect Tunisian house. George Sebastian fell in love with the simple beauty of the quiet fishing port of Hammamet and was the first of the international set of the times to build his villa there. He started a trend that has never ceased. Frank Lloyd Wright is said to have claimed it to be ” the most beautiful house I have ever seen”, but as we see it today, it is elegant, but rather sad in its emptiness. One has to have a vivid imagination to recreate the era when Cocteau, Elsa Schiaparelli, Paul Klee, Andre Gide, the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton and others came to enjoy visiting, partying and undertaking what someone once described as indulging the opportunity to do “some rather elaborate sinning”. Perhaps the marble bathtubs for four are a clue. These are two and the other two face them. There is an emptiness of spirit that fills the house where such original individuals once partied, but the space is cool, elegant and reflective of the medina which was its inspiration. It was no wonder that Dar Sebastian was requisitioned by the “Desert Fox” the much decorated and (by both sides) highly respected German General, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel for his wartime Headquarters during the Tunisian campaign.
Antony Price is a London fashion designer who is best known for glamorous evening wear and suits, and for the seventies icon of the cap sleeve t-shirt (trading under the Plaza label for the premium price of £6, this was quickly ripped off by numerous other manufacturers). Price has collaborated with a number of musical performers, including David Bowie, Steve Strange, and Duran Duran, but is best known for his close working relationship with Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music, whose respective looks were defined by Price's designs.
Sadhu Haridas was a hatha yogi and fakir of nineteenth-century India, renowned for his reputed power to control his body completely using the power of his mind, employing the energies of kundalini. His most notable feat, carried out in 1837, was to survive burial underground, without food or water and with only a limited supply of oxygen, for forty days. This feat took place at the court of the Maharaja of the Punjab, Ranjit Singh, at Lahore, India (now in Pakistan).