Search results for ""Author Simon Murray""

'One of the greatest adventure stories in years.' – Chris Patten 'The drama, excitement and colour of a good guts-and-glory thriller.' – Dr. Henry Kissinger The French Foreign Legion – mysterious, romantic, deadly – is filled with men of dubious character, and hardly the place for a proper Englishman just nineteen years of age. Yet in 1960, Simon Murray traveled alone to Paris, Marseilles, and on to Algeria to fulfill the toughest contract of his life: a five-year stint in the Legion. Along the way, he kept a diary.Legionnaire is a compelling, firsthand account of Murray's experience with this legendary band of soldiers. Subjected to brutal sergeants, merciless training methods and barbaric punishments – all in the hostile, sun-baked North African desert – Murray and his fellow men were pushed to breaking point, and beyond.Sixty years on, it remains a remarkable account of one of the most notorious military groups, a tale of true adventure and one man's determination never to surrender.

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This book engages with the relationship between ruins, dilapidation, and abandonment and cultural events performed within such spaces. Following the author’s fieldwork in the UK, Bosnia Herzegovina, Poland, Germany, Greece, and Sicily, chapters describe, investigate, and reflect upon live performance events which have taken place in sites of decay and abandonment. The book’s main focus is upon modern economic ruins and ruins of warfare. Each chapter provides several case studies based upon the author’s own site visits and interviews with actors, directors, producers, curators, writers, and other artists. The book contextualises these events within the wider framework of Ruin Studies and provides brief summaries of how we might understand the ruin in terms of time, politics, culture, and atmospheres. The book is particularly preoccupied with artists’ reasons and motivations for placing performance events in ruined spaces and how these work dramaturgically.

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In Nobody Will Shoot You If You Make Them Laugh: One Man's Journey Through The Mountains And Valleys of Life, the businessman and adventurer Simon Murray tells his extraordinary life story. From an orphanage in Leicester through the rigours and brutality of the English public school system in the 1950s, to a five-year spell in French Foreign Legion, his early life was recounted in his million-selling book Legionnaire. Since 1965 he has been one of the most successful businessmen operating out of Hong Kong. Starting as a sales manager for Jardine Matheson he worked his way up to running Hutchison Whampoa. He has also been actively involved with the Hong Kong Electricity Company, Deutsche Bank Asia Pacific, Glencore and Huawei among others. In-between he founded Orange and other mobile telephone operators across Asia and Africa. He has been off the path many times: climbed in the Atlas Mountains; trekked up to Everest and Annapurna; climbed Kilimanjaro and abseiled down the Shard in London. He is the oldest man to walk unsupported to the South Pole. He has run the Marathon des Sables, 250 kilometres across the Moroccan desert when he was 60 years old, and follows his motto ‘Do not follow where the path may lead, but go instead where there is no path and leave a trail’ somewhat earnestly. He was awarded the CBE from the Queen and been decorated with the Order of Merit and the Legion d’Honneur in France. He claims his greatest success is his marriage of 54 years to Jennifer and the raising of three children and his six grandchildren.

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