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Le Grand Meaulnes

Le Grand Meaulnes is the only novel by French author Alain-Fournier who was killed in the first month of WW I. It is somewhat biographical - especially the name of the heroine Yvonne, with whom he had a doomed infatuation in Paris. Fifteen-year-old François Seurel narrates the story of his friendship with seventeen-year-old Augustin Meaulnes as Meaulnes searches for his lost love. Impulsive, reckless and heroic, Meaulnes embodies the romantic ideal, the search for the unobtainable, and the mysterious world between childhood and adulthood.

Henri Vever

Henri Vever was one of the most preeminent European jewelers of the early 20th century. Henri was also a collector of a broad range of fine art, including prints, paintings, and books of both European and Asian origin. At the peak of World War I, however, Vever was forced to dispose of the bulk of his collection, selling some 7996 prints to the Japanese industrial mogul Matsukata Kōjirō, who purchased them sight-unseen based on the collection's reputation.

Hoopoe

The hoopoe is a colourful bird found across Afro-Eurasia, notable for its distinctive crown of feathers.

Hermit crab

Unlike true crabs, hermit crabs have soft, vulnerable abdomens. For protection from predators, many hermit crabs seek out abandoned shells, usually snail shells. When a hermit crab finds one of the proper size, it pulls itself inside, leaving several legs and its head outside the shell.

Harry’s Bar

Harry's Bar is a legendary bar in Venice, Italy.

Huia

In Māori culture, the white heron and the huia were not normally eaten but were rare birds treasured for their precious plumes, worn by people of high rank. Although the Huia's range was restricted to the southern North Island, its feathers were valued highly and they were exchanged among tribes for other valuable goods, such as greenstone and shark teeth, or given as tokens of friendship and respect.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Andreas

Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Andreas is a novel of violence and naivety, pathos and melancholy. Set in the eighteenth century, it tells the story of a young Viennese aristocrat who intends to travel alone to Venice as the first stage of his "Grand Tour". On his journey, he acquires an unsavoury servant who unleashes a trail of destruction and violence which taints and corrupts Andreas's first experience of love. Andreas's loss of innocence takes place in the misty alleyways and gloomy palaces of Venice, whose masked inhabitants confuse and entice him, the women either madonnas or whores indistinguishable behind their masks.

Hortus Botanicus

One of the oldest botanical gardens in the world.

Happy Valley set

The Happy Valley set was a group of privileged British colonials living in Kenya and Uganda during the 1920s - 1940s. The elite social group became notorious for stories of drug use and promiscuous sexual encounters.

Ernst Haeckel

Ernst Haeckel was an eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology.

Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime

Hotel