Search results for ""author ralph hancock""

In 1805 the young Lord Byron, a new undergraduate at Cambridge University, was annoyed to find that he was not allowed to keep a dog in his rooms. So he bought a bear instead. And that might have been the end of it – except that Daisy was no ordinary bear. Three years later, thanks entirely to her unsparing efforts, the idle and dissolute young poet left Cambridge with a Master of Arts degree under his belt, and Daisy set out on a career as a scholar, entertainer, navigator and statesbear. As Napoleon’s armies swept over Europe, it was a time when history was being made. She fought beside the future Duke of Wellington, gave wise advice to the Tsar of Russia and Sir Stamford Raffles, unfortunately rescued John Bellingham who was later to shoot the British Prime Minister, and in company with an eccentric Russian aristocrat took a ship through the icy Northeast Passage for the first time. This is her diary, written over seven momentous years that shaped the modern world.

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Few people have influenced Hollywood history than Douglas Fairbanks. And who better than his niece and Fairbanks family historian, Letitia, to relate that story? On-screen and offscreen, he was a force of nature, progressing in easy leaps and bounds from the Broadway stage to silent movies when feature-length film was just a few years old. His happy, healthy characters and acrobatic acting style brought a new energy to the medium. But it was through his extraordinary success as a producer that Fairbanks achieved the goal of all creative people: to run his own show. This he did by co-founding United Artists in 1919 with his soon-to-be wife Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith. As a producer, he showed visionary taste, collaborating with his directors and designers to enact gallant tales in spectacular settings. Whether he played a young man on the go or a swashbuckling hero in a fairy-tale land, Fairbanks—one of the thirty-six founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—put America’s hopes and dreams on film. This updated version of the original 1953 biography has been expanded by the Fairbanks family with archival materials as well as never-before-seen photographs from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

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