Barbara Skelton
Barbara Skelton was a writer and literary femme fatale. She had many lovers and three husbands. She wrote two novels, a volume of short stories and two brilliant autobiographies.
City Hall subway station
City Hall was the original southern terminal of the first line of the New York City Subway, Passenger service was discontinued on December 31, 1945, making it a ghost station, although the station is still used as a turning loop for the 6 train.
Muriel Spark
Muriel Spark was a Scottish novelist.
Giuseppe Patroni Griffi
Giuseppe Patroni Griffi was born in Naples in an aristocratic family and moved to Rome immediately after the end of World War II and spent his professional life there. Patroni Griffi is considered one of the most prominent contributors to Italian theater and film in post-war Italy.
Imco
IMCO was an Austrian manufacturer of cigarette lighters. Established in 1907 by Julius Meister, who was formerly a manufacturer of brass buttons for the Austro-Hungarian Army.
Francine du Plessix Gray
"My mother enjoyed claiming direct descent from Genghis Khan," Gray explains as she opens this complex and rewarding family memoir. That claim gave her mother "both the aristocratic pedigree and the freedom to be a barbarian." Tatiana Yakovleva du Plessix Liberman was 19 and hungry in 1925 when she left the Soviet Union for France. Tatiana and Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky soon fell passionately in love, but the ever-practical woman married aristocratic Frenchman Bertrand du Plessix instead. They had one child, Francine, before du Plessix was killed in early WWII combat. Tatiana then became involved with Alexander Liberman, a British- and French-educated artistic Jewish-Russian émigré. Alex, Tatiana and Francine fled to New York in 1941 and started a new life—Tatiana designing hats for Bendel's before a career with Saks, Alex scaling the fashion journalism ladder at Condé Nast.
Zeta Ophiuchi
Discoveries announced in early 2011 show that Ophiuchi is moving through space at 85,000km/h, having likely been ejected from orbit around a more massive star that was destroyed in its own supernova blast. Due to this high proper motion in combination with high intrinsic brightness and its current location in a dust-rich area of the galaxy, the star is creating a bow-shock in the direction of motion. This shock has been made visible via NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer.
Pushball
Pushball is a game played by two sides on a field usually 140 yards long and 50 yards wide, with a ball 6 feet in diameter and 50 pounds in weight. Occasionally, much heavier balls were used.
André Kertész
André Kertész was a Hungarian-born photographer known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic composition and the photo essay.
Mário de Sá-Carneiro
Mário de Sá-Carneiro was a Portuguese poet and writer. While World War I was in progress in the north of France, he quit the university and started a relationship with a prostitute. A few months later, with growing financial problems and suffering from depression, Sá-Carneiro wrote a dramatic letter to Fernando Pessoa on March 31, 1916: «Unless a miracle, next Monday, March (or even the day before), your friend Mário de Sá-Carneiro will take a strong dose of strychnine and disappear from this world.» Extremely unhappy with his life, he still delayed the suicide almost one month. But, as he had proclaimed, at the age of 25 he killed himself swallowing a large dose of strychnine on April 26, 1916, at Hôtel de Nice in the Montmartre district of Paris.