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American Psycho

American Psycho is a horror novel by American writer Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1991. The story is told in the first-person by Patrick Bateman, a wealthy, narcissistic, vain Manhattan investment banker who lives a double life as a serial killer. Alison Kelly of The Observer notes that while "some countries [deem it] so potentially disturbing that it can only be sold shrink-wrapped", "critics rave about it" and "academics revel in its transgressive and postmodern qualities".

A film adaptation starring Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman was released in 2000 to generally favorable reviews. Producers David Johnson and Jesse Singer developed a musical adaptation for Broadway. The musical premiered at the Almeida Theatre, London in December 2013.

The book has garnered notoriety for its graphic violence and has led to it being censored in multiple countries.

Development
"Bateman was crazy the same way I was. He did not come out of me sitting down and wanting to write a grand sweeping indictment of yuppie culture. It initiated because of my own isolation and alienation at a point in my life. I was living like Patrick Bateman. I was slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and make me feel good about myself but just made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself. That is where the tension of American Psycho came from. It wasn't that I was going to make up this serial killer on Wall Street. High concept. Fantastic. It came from a much more personal place, and that's something that I've only been admitting in the last year or so. I was so on the defensive because of the reaction to that book that I wasn't able to talk about it on that level."

Plot
Set in Manhattan during the Wall Street boom of the late 1980s, American Psycho follows the life of wealthy young investment banker Patrick Bateman. Bateman, in his mid-20s when the story begins, narrates his everyday activities, from his recreational life among the Wall Street elite of New York to his forays into murder by night. Through present tense stream-of-consciousness narrative, Bateman describes his daily life, ranging from a series of Friday nights spent at nightclubs with his colleagues—where they snort cocaine, critique fellow club-goers' clothing, trade fashion advice, and question one another on proper etiquette—to his loveless engagement to fellow yuppie Evelyn and his contentious relationship with his brother and senile mother. Bateman's stream of consciousness is occasionally broken up by chapters in which he directly addresses the reader in order to critique the work of 1980s pop music artists. The novel maintains a high level of ambiguity through mistaken identity and contradictions that introduce the possibility that Bateman is an unreliable narrator. Characters are consistently introduced as people other than themselves, and people argue over the identities of others they can see in restaurants or at parties. Deeply concerned with his personal appearance, Bateman gives extensive descriptions of his daily aesthetics regimen.

After killing Paul Owen, one of his colleagues, Bateman appropriates Paul's apartment as a place to host and kill more victims. Bateman's control over his violent urges deteriorates. His murders become increasingly sadistic and complex, progressing from simple stabbings to drawn-out sequences of rape, torture, mutilation, cannibalism, and necrophilia, and his grasp on sanity begins to slip. He introduces stories about serial killers into casual conversations and on several occasions openly confesses his murderous activities to his coworkers, who never take him seriously, do not hear what he says, or misunderstand him completely—for example, hearing the words "murders and executions" as "mergers and acquisitions". These incidents culminate in a shooting spree during which he kills several random people in the street, resulting in a SWAT team being dispatched in a helicopter. This narrative episode sees the first-person perspective shift to third-person and the subsequent events are, although not for the first time in the novel, described in terms pertaining to cinematic portrayal. Bateman flees on foot and hides in his office, where he phones his attorney, Harold Carnes, and confesses all his crimes to an answering machine.

Later, Bateman revisits Paul Allen's [should be Paul Owen, per above reference to book name] apartment, where he had earlier killed and mutilated two prostitutes, carrying a surgical mask in anticipation of the decomposing bodies he expects to encounter. He enters the perfectly clean, refurbished apartment, however, filled with strong-smelling flowers meant, perhaps, to conceal a bad odor. The real estate agent, who sees his surgical mask, fools him into stating he was attending the apartment viewing because he "saw an ad in the Times" (when in fact there was no such advertisement). She tells him to leave and never return.

Bateman's mental state continues to deteriorate and he begins to experience bizarre hallucinations such as seeing a Cheerio interviewed on a talk show, being stalked by an anthropomorphic park bench, and finding a bone in his Dove Bar. At the end of the story, Bateman confronts Carnes about the message he left on his machine, only to find the attorney amused at what he considers a hilarious joke. Mistaking Bateman for another colleague, Carnes claims that the Patrick Bateman he knows is too much of a coward to have committed such acts. In the dialogue-laden climax, Carnes stands up to a defiant Bateman and tells him his claim of having murdered Owen is impossible, because he had dinner with him twice in London just a few days previously.

The book ends as it began, with Bateman and his colleagues at a new club on a Friday night, engaging in banal conversation. The sign seen at the end of the book simply reads "This is not an exit".

Themes
According to literary critic Jeffrey W. Hunter, American Psycho is largely a critique of the "shallow and vicious aspects of capitalism." The characters are predominantly concerned with material gain and superficial appearances, traits indicative of a postmodern world in which the 'surface' reigns supreme. This leads Patrick Bateman to act as if "everything is a commodity, including people", an attitude that is further evident in the rampant objectification and brutalization of women that occurs in the novel. This distancing allows Bateman to rationalize his actions; in one scene in which he cannibalizes a victim, Bateman remarks "though it does sporadically penetrate how unacceptable some of what I'm doing actually is, I just remind myself that this thing, this girl, this meat, is nothing ..."

Patrick Bateman's consumption of what he views as nothing more than a piece of meat is an almost parodically literal interpretation of a monster created by consumer culture. This, combined with sex, violence, drugs, and other desires of the id, is how Bateman enacts his sociopathic violence in a superficial world.

Bateman's episodes of schizophrenia also shows clear signs on how he copes with being an affluent person living in a superficial world, fashioned on consumerism. As described by the critic Jennifer Krause in her intertextual analysis of the novel, which relies on the work of postmodern theorist Fredric Jameson, Jameson "blames the schizophrenic's ills on the incoherence of postmodern media and capitalistic consumption".

Jameson's critique is expanded by Krause, who writes: "We can see a distinctly popular culture schizophrenia arise, a disease spread by the postmodern culture industry, which ruptures personality and isolates the fractured self. Though Jameson does not specifically reference two different types of schizophrenia in his writings, he implies an artistic schizophrenia versus a more popular form—one more or less accepted, and the other anathema. This raises questions about how popular culture might act as a potential cure for madness". On the one hand is a rich Wall Street banker, Bateman, concerned and very self-conscious about every detail of his physical appearance, expensive possessions, and control of the people and the world around him. On the other hand, is the inner self of Patrick Bateman, the aboriginal-self, who copes and relinquishes his outer complications and "fake" identity, created by consumerism, through violence on other human beings, who he finds consumable, and expresses absolute control of his desires and true self through his violent fantasies. His consumer, artificial self, proceeding in society as a wealthy consumer would live and spend his income, versus his natural self, who, instead of spending money, would hunt and prey on the weak and vulnerable, usually women (which we observe in the repetitive use of the word "girls"), whom he deems expendable. Bateman treats the people around him just like any other consumer product, because of the void he still battles with and wishes to fulfill from within, hence, having dual personas, having the dull artificial identity, compared to his free limitless persona of his mind.

Observing another side of potential behavior coming from the affluent American society of consumerism is explained through C. Serpell: "Though serialized violence in American Psycho is an extension of the deadening effects of serialized consumer exchanges in an economy where commodities and bodies become interchangeable and indistinguishable, this point largely escaped the notice of the novel's harshest critics". Despite critics arguing over the aesthetic properties of the novel from rapid patterns and transitions of self-consciousness and murder, Serpell claims critics have overlooked the key themes and motives of the novel. Serpell brings to light the patterns and trends Ellis expresses through Bateman, the consequences of how "serialized consumer exchanges in an economy where commodities and bodies become interchangeable and indistinguishable", could affect society, and the way affluent people view others whether they are higher, lower, or the same in wealth or social status. The critic Thomas Heise states that "the uncertainty about the reality of Patrick's violence has become the chief critical debate on American Psycho, and it serves as a convenient introduction to the entanglement of epistemology and ethics in the novel". Bateman's character and traits, according to Heise, challenge what readers understand as the social norms for the way the elite upper class think and react to society on a normal basis. Bateman's epistemology and ethics in regards to his actions and way of thinking throughout the novel is a reflection, through his violence, which raises the questions of the moral and ethical understanding of all individuals in Bateman's position and status, and how they might act and think similar or completely identical in a consumer world built on capitalism as people see in today's American society.

Citing the many bodies that are never found, Henry Bean wonders "is it possible that the murders themselves never occurred?" He continues:

"The novel subtly and relentlessly undercuts its own authority, and because Bateman, unlike, say, Nabokov's unreliable narrators, does not hint at a 'truth' beyond his own delusions, American Psycho becomes a wonderfully unstable account. The most persuasive details are combined with unlikely incidents until we're not only unsure what's real, we begin to doubt the existence of reality itself."

It has often been noted that Patrick Bateman is an example of an unreliable narrator, and this feature of American Psycho has been the subject of discussion in several academic works. In a 2014 appearance on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast, Ellis stated that Bateman's narration was so unreliable that even he, as the author of the book, did not know if Bateman was honestly describing events that actually happened or if he was lying or even hallucinating.

Major characters

 * Patrick Bateman – the central narrator and villainous protagonist of the novel.
 * Evelyn Richards – Bateman's supposed fiancée.
 * Timothy Price – Bateman's best friend and colleague. Later appears as a teenager in Ellis's novel The Informers.
 * Paul Allen – Bateman's colleague who is later murdered by Bateman.
 * Jean – Bateman's secretary, whom Bateman refers to as "Jean, my secretary who is in love with me".
 * Luis Carruthers – a closeted homosexual co-worker who is attracted to Bateman, something that disgusts the latter.
 * Courtney Lawrence – Luis' fiancée who is having an affair with Bateman.
 * Craig McDermott – Bateman's colleague, part of a social foursome alongside Bateman, Timothy Price and David Van Patten.
 * David Van Patten – Bateman's colleague, also part of Bateman's main social group.

Minor characters

 * "Christie" – a prostitute, employed and badly abused by Bateman on multiple occasions before he eventually murders her in a grisly fashion. Bateman gives her this name; her real one is never revealed.
 * Elizabeth – a dinner date of Bateman's, drugged and coerced into having sex with "Christie" before being violently murdered.
 * Marcus Halberstam – Bateman's colleague; Paul Allen repeatedly mistakes Bateman for Marcus.
 * Donald Kimball – private detective hired to investigate Paul Allen's disappearance.
 * Harold Carnes – Bateman’s lawyer who misidentifies him then refuses to believe Bateman’s confession at the climax of the novel.
 * Alison Poole – sexually and physically assaulted by Bateman; created by Ellis's friend Jay McInerney in his novel Story of My Life and based on McInerney's former girlfriend Rielle Hunter, reappears as a main character in Ellis's later novel Glamorama, where she is involved with the lead character, Victor Ward.
 * Sean Bateman – younger brother of Patrick Bateman and also the lead character of The Rules of Attraction.
 * Paul Denton – friend of Paul Allen, who also appears in The Rules of Attraction where he is possibly romantically involved with Patrick's brother Sean.
 * Christopher Armstrong – Bateman's colleague at Pierce & Pierce.
 * Bethany – an old girlfriend of Patrick's whom, after a date, he tortures and subsequently murders.
 * Stash – Evelyn's friend, who is HIV positive.
 * Vanden – Evelyn's friend from the East Village who claims to attend Camden College, the main setting of The Rules of Attraction.
 * Al – a homeless man whom Bateman blinds and disfigures with a knife.
 * Tom Cruise – lives in the same apartment building as Bateman, in the penthouse.
 * Bono – the leader singer of Irish rock band U2. Appears in a chapter in which Bateman and his colleagues attend a U2 concert.
 * Patty Winters – the host of a talk show which Bateman frequently views. As the novel progresses the subject of her programs become more and more absurd, implied to be no more than a figment of Bateman's imagination.

Controversy
Ellis later wrote that people assumed that American Psycho would end his career. It was originally to have been published by Simon & Schuster in March 1991, but the company withdrew from the project because of "aesthetic differences". Vintage Books purchased the rights to the novel and published the book after the customary editing process. The book was not published in hardcover in the United States until 2012, when a limited hardcover edition was published by Centipede Press, although a deluxe paperback was offered. Writing for The New York Times, Roger Rosenblatt quipped, "'American Psycho' is the journal Dorian Gray would have written had he been a high school sophomore. But that is unfair to sophomores," and he approved of its canceled publication. Ellis received numerous death threats and hate mail after the publication of American Psycho. The Los Angeles Times's review —"the one good review in the national press", he said—resulted in "a three-page letter section of all these people canceling their subscriptions".

In the United States, the book was named the 53rd most banned and challenged book from 1990–1999 by the American Library Association.

In Germany, the book was deemed "harmful to minors" and its sales and marketing severely restricted from 1995 to 2000.

In Australia, the book is sold shrink-wrapped and is classified "R18" under national censorship legislation (i.e., the book may not be sold to those under 18 years of age). Along with other Category 1 publications, its sale is theoretically banned in the state of Queensland, and it may only be purchased shrink-wrapped. In Brisbane, the novel is available to those over 18 from all public libraries and can still be ordered and purchased (shrink-wrapped) from many book stores despite this prohibition. Ellis has commented on this: "I think it's adorable. I think it's cute. I love it". In New Zealand, the Government's Office of Film & Literature Classification has rated the book as R18 (i.e., the book may not be sold or lent in libraries to those under 18 years of age). It is generally sold shrink wrapped in bookstores.

Feminist activist Gloria Steinem was among those opposed to Ellis's book because of its portrayal of violence toward women. Coincidentally, Steinem is the stepmother of Christian Bale, who played Bateman in the film. This coincidence is mentioned in Ellis's mock memoir Lunar Park.

Phil Collins, whose solo career is referenced in the book, recalled: "I didn't read it. At the time, I just thought, 'That's all we need: glorifying all this crap. I'm not interested'. Then the film came out, and I thought it was very funny".

Connections to real-life crimes
A copy was found in possession of Wade Frankum, perpetrator of the 1991 Strathfield massacre in Sydney, Australia. It was suggested that the novel had inspired Frankum.

During the trial of Canadian serial killer Paul Bernardo, a copy was discovered in Bernardo's bedroom. The Toronto Sun reported that Bernardo "read it as his 'bible, though it turned out it actually belonged to his wife and accomplice Karla Homolka; it is unlikely Bernardo ever read it.

During the Duke lacrosse case, a team member named Ryan McFayden sent a profane email to several of his teammates alleging he was going to kill and skin some strippers. The administrators asserted the email was an imitation of Bateman. McFayden subsequently received numerous death threats.

2000 film
In 2000, writer Guinevere Turner and writer/director Mary Harron adapted American Psycho into a dark, comic film released by Lions Gate Films in United States and Columbia Pictures in other territories. This screenplay was selected over three others, including one by Elis himself. Bateman is played by Christian Bale with Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon in supporting roles. As a promotion for the film, one could register to receive e-mails "from" Patrick Bateman, supposedly to his therapist. The e-mails, written by a writer attached to the film and approved by Ellis, follow Bateman's life since the events of the film. American Psycho premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival where it was touted as the next Fight Club. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) gave the film an NC-17 rating for a scene featuring Bateman having a threesome with two sex workers. The producers excised approximately 18 seconds of footage to obtain an R-rating for the film.

It polarized audiences and critics with some showering praise, others scorn. Upon its theatrical release, however, the film received positive reviews in crucial publications, including The New York Times which called it a "mean and lean horror comedy classic". Ellis said, "American Psycho was a book I didn't think needed to be turned into a movie", as "the medium of film demands answers", which would make the book "infinitely less interesting". The film received generally positive reviews.

A direct-to-video sequel, American Psycho 2, was released and directed by Morgan J. Freeman. This film was not based on the novel or the original film, as its only connection with the original is the death of Patrick Bateman (played by Michael Kremko wearing a face mask), briefly shown in a flashback.

Other adaptations
In 2009, Audible.com produced an audio version of American Psycho, narrated by Pablo Schreiber, as part of its Modern Vanguard line of audiobooks. A Hungarian version of the novel was written by Attila Hazai (1967–2012) called Budapesti skizo ("Budapest Psycho", 1997); it was Hazai's best known work but as of his death never translated into English.

In 2013, a Kickstarter campaign was launched by Ellis and others to get a musical stage adaptation made. The premiere of the musical, with music and lyrics by Duncan Sheik opened at the Almeida Theatre, London in December. The role of Patrick Bateman was played by Matt Smith. In 2015, the musical was workshopped in New York, with Benjamin Walker re-assuming the role of Patrick that he had originally taken on in 2011. It premiered in early 2016, but closed on June 5 of that year after a run of only 54 regular performances. In the announcement, they cited "stiff competition" from more well-known musicals like Waitress, Shuffle Along, and Hamilton. A version of the musical is the focus of the musical episode titled "Chapter One Hundred and Twelve: American Psychos" of the sixth season from the series Riverdale.

In April 2021, Lionsgate Television chairman Kevin Beggs confirmed a TV series is in development.

In 2023, Sumerian Comics published a sequel comic adaptation that includes new narratives surrounding Bateman's murders.

title: American Psycho


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Georg Solti

Sir Georg Solti (, ; born György Stern; 21 October 1912 – 5 September 1997) was a Hungarian-British orchestral and operatic conductor, known for his appearances with opera companies in Munich, Frankfurt, and London, and as a long-serving music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Born in Budapest, he studied there with Béla Bartók, Leó Weiner, and Ernő Dohnányi. In the 1930s, he was a répétiteur at the Hungarian State Opera and worked at the Salzburg Festival for Arturo Toscanini. His career was interrupted by the rise of the Nazis' influence on Hungarian politics, and being of Jewish background, he fled the increasingly harsh Hungarian anti-Jewish laws in 1938. After conducting a season of Russian ballet in London at the Royal Opera House, he found refuge in Switzerland, where he remained during the Second World War. Prohibited from conducting there, he earned a living as a pianist.

After the war, Solti was appointed musical director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1946. In 1952, he moved to the Oper Frankfurt, where he remained in charge for nine years. He took West German citizenship in 1953. In 1961, he became musical director of the Covent Garden Opera Company, London. During his 10-year tenure, he introduced changes that raised standards to the highest international levels. Under his musical directorship, the status of the company was recognised with the grant of the title "the Royal Opera". He became an honorary citizen of the coastal holiday town of Castiglione della Pescaia, and a British citizen in 1972.

In 1969, Solti became music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a post he held for 22 years. He conducted many recordings and high-profile international tours with the orchestra. Solti relinquished the position in 1991 and became the orchestra's music director laureate, a position he held until his death. During his time as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's eighth music director, he also served as music director of the Orchestre de Paris from 1972 until 1975 and principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra from 1979 until 1983.

Known in his early years for the intensity of his music making, Solti was widely considered to have mellowed as a conductor in later years. He recorded many works two or three times at various stages of his career, and was a prolific recording artist, making more than 250 recordings, including 45 complete opera sets. The best-known of his recordings is probably Decca's complete set of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, made between 1958 and 1965. Solti's Ring has twice been voted the greatest recording ever made, in polls for Gramophone magazine in 1999 and the BBC's Music Magazine in 2012. Solti was repeatedly honoured by the recording industry with awards throughout his career. From 1963 to 1998, he won 31 Grammy Awards as a recording artist, making him the Grammy Awards' most-awarded artist until Beyoncé surpassed his record in 2023.

Early years
Solti was born György Stern on Maros utca, in the Hegyvidék district of the Buda side of Budapest. He was the younger of the two children of Teréz and Móricz "Mor" Stern, both of whom were Jewish. In the aftermath of the First World War it became the accepted practice in Hungary for citizens with Germanic surnames to adopt Hungarian ones. The territorial revisionist regime of Admiral Horthy enacted a series of Hungarianisation laws, including a requirement that state employees with foreign-sounding names must change them. Mor Stern, a self-employed merchant, felt no need to change his surname, but thought it prudent to change that of his children. He renamed them after Solt, a small town in central Hungary. His son's given name, György, was acceptably Hungarian and was not changed.

Solti described his father as "a kind, sweet man who trusted everyone. He shouldn't have, but he did. Jews in Hungary were tremendously patriotic. In 1914, when war broke out, my father invested most of his money in a war loan to help the country. By the time the bonds matured, they were worthless." Mor Stern was a religious man, but his son was less so. Late in life, Solti recalled, "I often upset him because I never stayed in the synagogue for longer than 10 minutes." Teréz Stern was from a musical family, and encouraged her daughter Lilly, by eight years the elder of the children, to sing, and György to accompany her on the piano. Solti remembered, "I made so many mistakes, but it was invaluable experience for an opera conductor. I learnt to swim with her." He was not a diligent student of the piano: "My mother kept telling me to practise, but what 10-year-old wants to play the piano when he could be out playing football?"

Solti enrolled at the Ernő Fodor School of Music in Budapest at the age of 10, transferring to the more prestigious Franz Liszt Academy two years later. When he was 12, he heard a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony conducted by Erich Kleiber, which gave him the ambition to become a conductor. His parents could not afford to pay for years of musical education, and his rich uncles did not consider music a suitable profession; from the age of 13, Solti paid for his education by giving piano lessons.

The faculty of the Franz Liszt Academy included some of the most eminent Hungarian musicians, including Béla Bartók, Leó Weiner, Ernő Dohnányi, and Zoltán Kodály. Solti studied under the first three, for piano, chamber music, and composition, respectively. Some sources state that he also studied with Kodály, but in his memoirs, Solti recalled that Kodály, whom he would have preferred, turned him down, leaving him to study composition first with Albert Siklós and then with Dohnányi. Not all the academy's tutors were equally distinguished; Solti remembered with little pleasure the conducting classes run by Ernő Unger, "who instructed his pupils to use rigid little wrist motions. I attended the class for only two years, but I needed five years of practical conducting experience before I managed to unlearn what he had taught me".

Pianist and conductor
After graduating from the academy in 1930, Solti was appointed to the staff of the Hungarian State Opera. He found that working as a répétiteur, coaching singers in their roles and playing at rehearsals, was a more fruitful preparation than Unger's classes for his intended career as a conductor. In 1932, he went to Karlsruhe in Germany as assistant to Josef Krips, but within a year, Krips, anticipating the imminent rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, insisted that Solti should go home to Budapest, where at that time Jews were not in danger. Other Jewish and anti-Nazi musicians also left Germany for Budapest. Among other musical exiles with whom Solti worked there were Otto Klemperer, Fritz Busch, and Kleiber. Before Austria fell under Nazi control, Solti was assistant to Arturo Toscanini at the 1937 Salzburg Festival:

"Toscanini was the first great musical impression in my life. Before I heard him live in 1936, I had never heard a great opera conductor, not in Budapest, and it was like a lightning flash. I heard his Falstaff in 1936 and the impact was unbelievable. It was the first time I heard an ensemble singing absolutely precisely. It was fantastic. Then I never expected to meet Toscanini. It was a chance in a million. I had a letter of recommendation from the director of the Budapest Opera to the president of the Salzburg Festival. He received me and said: 'Do you know Magic Flute, because we have an influenza epidemic and two of our repetiteurs are ill? Could you play this afternoon for the stage rehearsals?'"

After further work as a répétiteur at the opera in Budapest, and with his standing enhanced by his association with Toscanini, Solti was given his first chance to conduct, on 11 March 1938. The opera was Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. During that evening, news came of the German invasion of Austria. Many Hungarians feared that Hitler would next invade Hungary; he did not do so, but Horthy, to strengthen his partnership with the Nazis, instituted anti-semitic laws, mirroring the Nuremberg Laws, restricting Hungary's Jews from engaging in professions. Solti's family urged him to move away. He went first to London, where he made his Covent Garden debut, conducting the London Philharmonic for a Russian ballet season. The reviewer in The Times was not impressed with Solti's efforts, finding them "too violent, for he lashed at the orchestra and flogged the music so that he endangered the delicate, evocative atmosphere." At about this time Solti dropped the name "György" in favour of "Georg".

After his appearances in London, Solti went to Switzerland to seek out Toscanini, who was conducting in Lucerne. Solti hoped that Toscanini would help find him a post in the U.S. He was unable to do so, but Solti found work and security in Switzerland as vocal coach to tenor Max Hirzel, who was learning the role of Tristan in Wagner's opera. Throughout the Second World War, Solti remained in Switzerland. He did not see his father again; Mor Stern died of diabetes in a Budapest hospital in 1943. Solti was reunited with his mother and sister after the war. In Switzerland, he could not obtain a work permit as a conductor, but earned his living as a piano teacher. After he won the 1942 Geneva International Piano Competition, he was permitted to give piano recitals, but was still not allowed to conduct. During his exile, he met Hedwig (Hedi) Oeschli, daughter of a lecturer at Zürich University; they married in 1946. In his memoirs, he wrote of her, "She was very elegant and sophisticated. ... Hedi gave me a little grace and taught me good manners – although she never completely succeeded in this. She also helped me enormously in my career".

Munich and Frankfurt
With the end of the war, Solti's luck changed dramatically. He was appointed musical director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1946. In normal circumstances, this prestigious post would have been an unthinkable appointment for a young and inexperienced conductor, but the leading German conductors such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Clemens Krauss, and Herbert von Karajan were prohibited from conducting pending the conclusion of denazification proceedings against them. Under Solti's direction, the company rebuilt its repertoire and began to recover its prewar eminence. He benefited from the encouragement of the elderly Richard Strauss, in whose presence he conducted Der Rosenkavalier. Strauss was reluctant to discuss his own music with Solti, but gave him advice about conducting. In addition to the Munich appointment, Solti gained a recording contract in 1946. He signed for Decca Records, not as a conductor, but as a piano accompanist. He made his first recording in 1947, playing Brahms's First Violin Sonata with violinist Georg Kulenkampff. He was insistent that he wanted to conduct, and Decca gave him his first recording sessions as a conductor later in the same year, with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra in Beethoven's Egmont overture. Twenty years later, Solti said, "I'm sure it's a terrible record, because the orchestra was not very good at that time and I was so excited. It is horrible, surely horrible – but by now it has vanished." He had to wait two years for his next recording as a conductor, in London, Haydn's Drum Roll symphony, in sessions produced by John Culshaw, with whose career Solti's became closely linked over the next two decades. Reviewing the record, The Gramophone said, "The performance of the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Georg Solti (a fine conductor who is new to me) is remarkable for rhythmic playing, richness of tone, and clarity of execution." The Record Guide compared it favourably with EMI's rival recording by Sir Thomas Beecham and the Royal Philharmonic.

In 1951, Solti conducted at the Salzburg Festival for the first time, partly through the influence of Furtwängler, who was impressed by him. The work was Mozart's Idomeneo, which had not been given there before. In Munich, Solti achieved critical and popular success, but for political reasons, his position at the State Opera was never secure. The view persisted that a German conductor should be in charge; pressure mounted, and after five years, Solti accepted an offer to move to Frankfurt in 1952 as musical director of the Oper Frankfurt. The city's opera house had been destroyed in the war, and Solti undertook to build a new company and repertoire for its recently completed replacement. He also conducted the symphony concerts given by the opera orchestra. Frankfurt's was a less prestigious house than Munich's and he initially regarded the move as a demotion, but he found the post fulfilling and remained at Frankfurt from 1952 to 1961, presenting 33 operas, 19 of which he had not conducted before. Frankfurt, unlike Munich, could not attract many of the leading German singers. Solti recruited many rising young American singers such as Claire Watson and Sylvia Stahlman, to the extent that the house acquired the nickname "Amerikanische Oper am Main". In 1953, the West German government offered Solti German citizenship, which, being effectively stateless as a Hungarian exile, he gratefully accepted. He believed he could never return to Hungary, by then under communist rule. He remained a German citizen for two decades.

During his Frankfurt years, Solti made appearances with other opera companies and orchestras. He conducted in the Americas for the first time in 1952, giving concerts in Buenos Aires. In the same year, he made his debut at the Edinburgh Festival as a guest conductor with the visiting Hamburg State Opera. The following year, he was a guest at the San Francisco Opera with Elektra, Die Walküre, and Tristan und Isolde. In 1954, he conducted Don Giovanni at the Glyndebourne Festival. The reviewer in The Times said that no fault could be found in Solti's "vivacious and sensitive" conducting. In the same year Solti made his first appearance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, at the Ravinia Festival. In 1960, he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, conducting Tannhäuser, and he continued to appear there until 1964.

In the recording studios, Solti's career took off after 1956, when John Culshaw was put in charge of Decca's classical recording programme. Culshaw believed Solti to be "the great Wagner conductor of our time", and was determined to record the four operas of Der Ring des Nibelungen with Solti and the finest Wagner singers available. The cast Culshaw assembled for the cycle included Kirsten Flagstad, Hans Hotter, Birgit Nilsson and Wolfgang Windgassen. Apart from Arabella in 1957, in which he substituted when Karl Böhm withdrew, Solti had made no complete recording of an opera until the sessions for Das Rheingold, the first of the Ring tetralogy, in September and October 1958. In their respective memoirs, Culshaw and Solti told how Walter Legge of Decca's rival EMI predicted that Das Rheingold would be a commercial disaster ("'Very nice,' he said, 'Very interesting. But of course you won't sell any.'") The success of the recording took the record industry by surprise. It featured for weeks in the Billboard charts, the sole classical album alongside best sellers by Elvis Presley and Pat Boone, and brought Solti's name to international prominence. He appeared with leading orchestras in New York City, Vienna, and Los Angeles, and at Covent Garden, he conducted Der Rosenkavalier and Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Covent Garden
In 1960, Solti signed a three-year contract to be music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1962. Even before he took the post, the philharmonic's autocratic president, Dorothy Chandler, breached his contract by appointing a deputy music director without Solti's approval. Although he admired the chosen deputy, Zubin Mehta, Solti felt he could not have his authority undermined from the outset, and he withdrew from his appointment. He accepted an offer to become musical director of Covent Garden Opera Company, London. When first sounded out about the post, he had declined it. After 14 years of experience at Munich and Frankfurt, he was uncertain that he wanted a third successive operatic post. Moreover, founded only 15 years earlier, the Covent Garden company was not yet the equal of the best opera houses in Europe. Bruno Walter convinced Solti that it was his duty to take on Covent Garden.

Biographer Montague Haltrecht suggests that Solti seized the breach of his Los Angeles contract as a convenient pretext to abandon the philharmonic in favour of Covent Garden. In his memoirs, though, Solti wrote that he wanted the Los Angeles position very much indeed. He originally considered holding both posts in tandem, but later acknowledged that he had had a lucky escape, as he could have done justice to neither post had he attempted to hold both simultaneously.

Solti took up the musical directorship of Covent Garden in August 1961. The press gave him a cautious welcome, but some concern arose that under him a drift away from the company's original policy of opera in English might occur. Solti, however, was an advocate of opera in the vernacular, and he promoted the development of British and Commonwealth singers in the company, frequently casting them in his recordings and important productions in preference to overseas artists. He demonstrated his belief in vernacular opera with a triple bill in English of Ravel's L'heure espagnole, Schoenberg's Erwartung, and Puccini's Gianni Schicchi. As the decade went on, however, more and more productions had to be sung in the original language to accommodate international stars.

Like his predecessor Rafael Kubelík, and his successor Colin Davis, Solti found his early days as musical director marred by vituperative hostility from a small clique in the Covent Garden audience. Rotten vegetables were thrown at him, and his car was vandalised outside the theatre, with the words "Solti must go!" scratched on its paintwork. Some press reviews were strongly critical; Solti was so wounded by a review in The Times of his conducting of The Marriage of Figaro that he almost left Covent Garden in despair. The chief executive of the Opera House, Sir David Webster, persuaded him to stay with the company, and matters improved, helped by changes on which Solti insisted. The chorus and orchestra were strengthened, and in the interests of musical and dramatic excellence, Solti secured the introduction of the stagione system of scheduling performances, rather than the traditional repertory system. By 1967, The Times commented that "Patrons of Covent Garden today automatically expect any new production, and indeed any revival, to be as strongly cast as anything at the Met in New York, and as carefully presented as anything in Milan or Vienna".

The company's repertory in the 1960s combined the standard operatic works with less familiar pieces. Among the most celebrated productions during Solti's time in charge was Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron in the 1965–66 and 1966–67 seasons. In 1970, Solti led the company to Germany, where they gave Don Carlos, Falstaff, and Victory, a new work by Richard Rodney Bennett. The public in Munich and Berlin were, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, "beside themselves with enthusiasm".

Solti's bald head and demanding rehearsal style earned him the nickname "The Screaming Skull". A music historian called him "the bustling, bruising Georg Solti – a man whose entire physical and mental attitude embodied the words 'I'm in charge'." Singers such as Peter Glossop described him as a bully, and after working with Solti, Jon Vickers refused to do so again. Nevertheless, under Solti, the company was recognised as having achieved parity with the greatest opera houses in the world. Queen Elizabeth II conferred the title "the Royal Opera" on the company in 1968. By this point, Solti was, in the words of his biographer Paul Robinson, "after Karajan, the most celebrated conductor at work". By the end of his decade as music director at Covent Garden Solti had conducted the company in 33 operas by 13 composers.

In 1964, Solti separated from his wife. He moved into the Savoy Hotel, where not long afterwards he met Valerie Pitts, a British television presenter, sent to interview him. She, too, was married, but after pursuing her for three years, Solti persuaded her to divorce her husband. Solti and Valerie Pitts married on 11 November 1967. They had two daughters.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
In 1967, Solti was invited to become music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It was the second time he had been offered the post. The first had been in 1963 after the death of the orchestra's conductor, Fritz Reiner, who made its reputation in the previous decade. Solti told the representatives of the orchestra that his commitments at Covent Garden made it impossible to give Chicago the eight months a year they sought. He suggested giving them three and a half months a year and inviting Carlo Maria Giulini to take charge for a similar length of time. The orchestra declined to proceed on these lines.

When Solti accepted the orchestra's second invitation, they agreed that Giulini should be appointed to share the conducting. Both conductors signed three-year contracts with the orchestra, effective from 1969.

One of the members of the Chicago Symphony described it to Solti as "the best provincial orchestra in the world." Many players remained from its celebrated decade under Reiner, but morale was low, and the orchestra was $5M in debt. Solti concluded that raising the orchestra's international profile was essential. He ensured that it was engaged for many of his Decca sessions, and Giulini and he led it in a European tour in 1971, playing in 10 countries. This was the first time in its 80-year history that the orchestra had played outside of North America. The orchestra received plaudits from European critics, and was welcomed home at the end of the tour with a ticker-tape parade.

The orchestra's principal flute player, Donald Peck, commented that the relationship between a conductor and an orchestra is difficult to explain: "Some conductors get along with some orchestras and not others. We had a good match with Solti and he with us." Peck's colleague, violinist Victor Aitay, said, "Usually conductors are relaxed at rehearsals and tense at the concerts. Solti is the reverse. He is very tense at rehearsals, which makes us concentrate, but relaxed during the performance, which is a great asset to the orchestra." Peck recalled Solti's constant efforts to improve his own technique and interpretations, at one point experimentally dispensing with a baton, drawing a "darker and deeper, much more relaxed" tone from the players.

As well as raising the orchestra's profile and helping it return to prosperity, Solti considerably expanded its repertoire. Under him, the Chicago Symphony gave its first cycles of the symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler. He introduced new works commissioned for the orchestra, such as Lutosławski's Third Symphony, and Tippett's Fourth Symphony, which was dedicated to Solti. Another new work was Tippett's Byzantium, an orchestral song-cycle, premiered by Solti and the orchestra with soprano Faye Robinson. Solti frequently programmed works by American composers, including Charles Ives and Elliott Carter.

Solti's recordings with the Chicago Symphony included the complete symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler. Most of his operatic recordings were with other orchestras, but his recordings of Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer (1976), Beethoven's Fidelio (1979), Schoenberg's Moses und Aron (1984) and his second recordings of Die Meistersinger (1995) and Verdi's Otello (1991) were made with the Chicago players.

After relinquishing the position of music director in 1991, Solti continued to conduct the orchestra, and was given the title of music director laureate. He conducted 999 concerts with the orchestra. His 1,000th concert was scheduled for October 1997, around the time of his 85th birthday, but Solti died that September.

Later years
In addition to his tenure in Chicago, Solti was music director of the Orchestre de Paris from 1972 to 1975. From 1979 until 1983, he was also principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He continued to expand his repertoire. With the London Philharmonic, he performed many of Elgar's major works in concert and on record. Before performing Elgar's two symphonies, Solti studied the composer's own recordings made more than 40 years earlier, and was influenced by their brisk tempi and impetuous manner. Edward Greenfield, music critic for The Guardian, wrote that Solti "conveys the authentic frisson of the great Elgarian moment more vividly than ever before on record." Late in his career he became enthusiastic about the music of Shostakovich, whom he admitted he failed to appreciate fully during the composer's lifetime. He made commercial recordings of seven of Shostakovich's fifteen symphonies.

In 1983, Solti conducted for the only time at the Bayreuth Festival. By this stage in his career, he no longer liked abstract productions of Wagner, or modernistic reinterpretations, such as Patrice Chéreau's 1976 Bayreuth Centenary Ring, which he found grew boring on repetition. Together with the director Sir Peter Hall and designer William Dudley, he presented a Ring cycle that aimed to represent Wagner's intentions. The production was not well received by German critics, who expected radical reinterpretation of the operas. Solti's conducting was praised, but illnesses and last-minute replacements of leading performers affected the standard of singing. He was invited to return to Bayreuth for the following season, but was unwell and withdrew on medical advice before the 1984 festival began.

In 1991, Solti collaborated with actor and composer Dudley Moore to create an eight-part television series, Orchestra!, which was designed to introduce audiences to the symphony orchestra. In 1994, he directed the "Solti Orchestral Project" at Carnegie Hall, a training workshop for young American musicians. The following year, to mark the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, he formed the World Orchestra for Peace, which consisted of 81 musicians from 40 nations. The orchestra has continued to perform after his death, under the conductorship of Valery Gergiev.

Solti regularly returned to Covent Garden as a guest conductor in the years after he relinquished the musical directorship, greeted with "an increasingly boisterous hero's welcome" (Grove). From 1972 to 1997, he conducted 10 operas, some of them in several seasons. Five were operas he had not conducted at the Royal Opera House before: Bizet's Carmen, Wagner's Parsifal, Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, and a celebrated production of La traviata (1994), which propelled Angela Gheorghiu to stardom. On 14 July 1997 he conducted the last operatic music to be heard in the old house before it closed for more than two years for rebuilding. The previous day he had conducted what proved to be his last symphony concert. The work was Mahler's Fifth Symphony; the orchestra was the Zurich Tonhalle, with whom he had made his first orchestral recording 50 years earlier.

Solti died suddenly, in his sleep, on 5 September 1997 while on holiday in Antibes in the south of France. He was 84. After a state ceremony in Budapest, his ashes were interred beside the remains of Bartók in Farkasréti Cemetery.

Recordings
Solti recorded throughout his career for the Decca Record Company. He made more than 250 recordings, including 45 complete opera sets. During the 1950s and 1960s, Decca had an alliance with RCA Victor, and some of Solti's recordings were first issued on the RCA label.

Solti was one of the first conductors who came to international fame as a recording artist before being widely known in the concert hall or opera house. Gordon Parry, the Decca engineer who worked with Solti and Culshaw on the Ring recordings, observed, "Many people have said 'Oh well, of course John Culshaw made Solti.' This is not true. He gave him the opportunity to show what he could do."

Solti's first recordings were as a piano accompanist, playing at sessions in Zurich for violinist Georg Kulenkampff in 1947. Decca's senior producer, Victor Olof did not much admire Solti as a conductor (nor did Walter Legge, Olof's opposite number at EMI's Columbia Records), but Olof's younger colleague and successor, Culshaw, held Solti in high regard. As Culshaw, and later James Walker, produced his recordings, Solti's career as a recording artist flourished from the mid-1950s. Among the orchestras with whom Solti recorded were the Berlin Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, London Philharmonic, London Symphony and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras. Soloists in his operatic recordings included Birgit Nilsson, Joan Sutherland, Régine Crespin, Plácido Domingo, Gottlob Frick, Carlo Bergonzi, Kiri Te Kanawa, Ben Heppner and José van Dam. In concerto recordings, Solti conducted for, among others, András Schiff, Julius Katchen, Clifford Curzon, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and Kyung-wha Chung.

Solti's most celebrated recording was Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen made in Vienna, produced by Culshaw, between 1958 and 1965. It has twice been voted the greatest recording ever made, the first poll being among readers of Gramophone magazine in 1999, and the second of professional music critics in 2011, for the BBC's Music Magazine. This recording is heard in the film Apocalypse Now during the helicopter attack scene.

Honours and memorials
Honours awarded to Solti included the British CBE (honorary), 1968, and an honorary knighthood (KBE), 1971, which became a substantive knighthood when he took British citizenship in 1972, after which he was known as Sir Georg Solti. He was also awarded honorary citizenship from the coastal town of Castiglione della Pescaia, in Tuscany, a holiday destination particularly frequented by celebrities where he owned a holiday house and used to spend the summer holidays with his wife and daughters. In Castiglione, the Georg Solti Accademia and the main piazza within the town's historic hamlet are named after Solti. Furthermore, Solti received a number of honours from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Portugal and the US. He received honorary fellowships or degrees from the Royal College of Music and DePaul, Furman, Harvard, Leeds, London, Oxford, Surrey and Yale universities.

In celebration of his 75th birthday in 1987, a bronze bust of Solti by Dame Elisabeth Frink was dedicated in Lincoln Park, Chicago, outside the Lincoln Park Conservatory. It was first displayed temporarily at the Royal Opera House in London. The sculpture was moved to Grant Park in 2006 in a new Solti Garden, near Orchestra Hall in Symphony Center. In 1997, to commemorate the 85th anniversary of his birth, the City of Chicago renamed the block of East Adams Street adjacent to Symphony Center as "Sir Georg Solti Place" in his memory.

Record industry awards to Solti included the Grand Prix Mondial du Disque (14 times) and 31 Grammy Awards (besides a special Trustees' Grammy Award, shared with John Culshaw, for the recording of the Ring (1967) and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1996)). He held the record for most Grammy wins of all time, until Beyoncé tied and later beat the record in 2023. In September 2007, as a tribute on the 10th anniversary of his death, Decca published a recording of his final concert.

After Solti's death, his widow and daughters set up the Solti Foundation to assist young musicians. Solti's memoirs, written with the assistance of Harvey Sachs, were published the month after his death. Solti's life was also documented in a 1997 film by Peter Maniura, Sir Georg Solti: The Making of a Maestro.

In 2012, a series of events under the banner of "Solti @ 100" was announced, to mark the centenary of Solti's birth. Among the events were concerts in New York City and Chicago, and commemorative exhibitions in London, Chicago, Vienna, and New York City. In the same year, Solti was voted into the inaugural Gramophone "Hall of Fame".

The Sir Georg Solti International Conductors' Competition, which occurs every two years in Frankfurt, is named in his honour.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Georg Solti


text:
Servius Sulpicius Rufus

Servius Sulpicius Rufus (c. 105 BC – 43 BC), was a Roman orator and jurist. He was consul in 51 BC.

Early life
He studied rhetoric with Cicero, accompanying him to Rhodes in 78 BC, though Sulpicius decided subsequently to pursue legal studies. In the later dialogue Brutus, Cicero praised the artistry of his legal learning as well as his eloquence.

Career
In 63 BC, Sulpicius was a candidate for the consulship, but was defeated by Lucius Licinius Murena, whom he subsequently accused of bribery. In Cicero's successful oration in defense of Murena against the accusations, he mocked Sulpicius' legal expertise despite their friendship. Nevertheless, in 52 BC Sulpicius successfully stood for election to be consul in 51 BC.

In the Civil War, Sulpicius was a supporter of Pompey, while his son joined Julius Caesar. Caesar made him proconsul of Achaea in 46 BC. He died in 43 BC while on a mission (in legatione) from the senate to Marcus Antonius at Mutina, and was eulogized in Cicero's ninth Philippic. Sulpicius was accorded a public funeral; the people erected a statute to his memory in front of the Rostra of Augustus.

Two excellent specimens of Sulpicius's style are preserved in Cicero's letters. One of these is a letter of condolence to Cicero after the death of his daughter, Tullia. It is a letter that posterity has much admired, full of subtle, melancholy reflection on the transiency of all things. Byron quotes from this letter in his Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The other is an excellently clear account of the murder of his ex-colleague Marcus Claudius Marcellus (consul 51 BC) in Piraeus (the port of Athens) in 45 BC. Quintilian speaks of three orations by Sulpicius as still in existence; one of these was the speech against Murena, another Pro or Contra Aufidium, of whom nothing is known.

It is as a jurist, however, that Sulpicius was chiefly distinguished. He left behind him a large number of treatises, and he is often quoted in the Pandects, although direct extracts are not found. His chief characteristics were lucidity, an intimate acquaintance with the principles of civil and natural law, and an unrivaled power of expression.

Personal life
Servius Sulpicius Rufus was married to Postumia, they had at least one child, a son by the same name. The son was likely the father of Sulpicia, who is the only identified Roman female poet whose poetry is known to have survived.

title: Servius Sulpicius Rufus


text:
Wilhelm Siegmund Teuffel

Wilhelm Siegmund Teuffel (September 27, 1820 – March 8, 1878), German classical scholar, was born at Ludwigsburg in the Kingdom of Württemberg. In 1849 he was appointed extraordinary, in 1857 ordinary professor in the university of Tübingen, which post he held till his death.

Works
Teuffel's most important work was his Geschichte der römischen Litteratur (1870); revisions by Ludwig Schwabe, Wilhelm Kroll and Franz Skutsch carried this to a 6th–7th edition (1913–1920).

An English translation of the 5th edition by George Charles Winter Warr was published in 1891–1892, as Teuffel's History of Roman Literature. The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition described Teuffel's history as "written in an unattractive style" but "indispensable to the student" especially for its "bibliographical information", and Warr's translation is described in the 1996 Oxford Classical Dictionary as "still useful on details".

After the death of August Pauly, the editor of the well-known Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, Teuffel, at first assisted by Ernst Christian Walz, undertook the completion of the work, to which he also contributed numerous articles.

He was also the author of
 * "Prolegomena zur Chronologie der horazischen Geschichte" (in Zeitschrift für die Altertumswissenschaft, 1842)
 * Charakteristik des Horaz (Leipzig, 1842)
 * Horaz, eine litterar-historische Übersicht (Tübingen, 1843),

and of editions of
 * The Clouds of Aristophanes (1856)
 * The Persians of Aeschylus (1866).

His Studien und Charakteristiken (1871; 2nd ed., 1889) contain valuable contributions to the history of Greek and Roman literature.

title: Wilhelm Siegmund Teuffel


text:
ZOG

Zog or ZOG may refer to:

People

 * King Zog I of Albania (1895–1961), ruled 1928 to 1939
 * Zog Djaloshi (born 2000), Albanian footballer
 * The Zog, a nickname of American comedian Seth Herzog

Fiction

 * Zog (children's book) by Julia Donaldson

Fictional entities

 * Zog, the home planet of the puppet characters Zig and Zag
 * Zog, Triceraton soldier in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles universe
 * Zog, robot character in the film Astro Boy (2009)
 * King Zog, father of the protagonist Bean in the animated series Disenchantment
 * Zog, semi-humanoid sea-monster and evil magician in L. Frank Baum's fantasy novel The Sea Fairies (published 1911)
 * Zog, an alien in a Doctor Who stage play

Other

 * Zionist Occupation Government conspiracy theory, an antisemitic trope
 * ZOG (hypertext), an early hypertext system developed at Carnegie Mellon University during the 1970s
 * Zillions of Games, a commercial general game playing system developed by Jeff Mallett and Mark Lefler in 1998

title: ZOG


text:
Dennis Potter

Dennis Christopher George Potter (17 May 1935 – 7 June 1994) was an English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist. He is best known for his BBC television serials Pennies from Heaven (1978) and The Singing Detective (1986) as well as the BBC television plays Blue Remembered Hills (1979) and Brimstone and Treacle (1976). His television dramas mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social, and often used themes and images from popular culture. Potter is widely regarded as one of the most influential and innovative dramatists to have worked in British television.

Born in Gloucestershire and graduating from Oxford University, Potter initially worked in journalism. After standing for parliament as a Labour candidate at the 1964 general election, his health was affected by the onset of psoriatic arthropathy which necessitated Potter to change career and led to his becoming a television dramatist. He began with contributions to BBC1's regular series The Wednesday Play from 1965, and he continued to work in the medium for the rest of his life, including writing screenplay adaptations for Hollywood studios. Potter died of pancreatic cancer in 1994.

Early life
Dennis Potter was born in Berry Hill, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. His father, Walter Edward Potter (1906–1975), was a coal miner in this rural mining area between Gloucester and Wales; his mother was Margaret Constance (née Wale; 1910–2001). Potter had a sister named June.

In 1946, Potter passed the eleven-plus and attended Bell's Grammar School at Coleford. Most of his secondary education, however, was in London at St. Clement Danes Grammar School in Hammersmith (since demolished). It was in a street near Hammersmith Broadway that the ten-year-old Potter was sexually abused by his uncle, an experience he would later allude to many times in his writing. During his speech at the 1993 James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, Potter referred to this event when explaining his decision to switch from newspaper journalism to screenwriting: "Different words had to be found, with different functions. But why? Why, why, why; the same desperately repeated question I asked myself without any sort of an answer, or any ability to tell my mother or my father, when at the age of ten, between V.E. Day and V.J. Day, I was trapped by an adult's sexual appetite and abused out of innocence." His family returned to the Forest of Dean in 1952, having first left it in 1945, but Potter remained in London.

Between 1953 and 1955, his national service was in the Intelligence Corps of the British Army and he learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists. Having won a State Scholarship to New College, Oxford, he studied philosophy, politics and economics.

Early career
Potter's first non-fiction work, The Glittering Coffin, was published by the Gollancz Press in 1960. The book was a rumination on the changing face of England in the prosperity following the end of the war years. It was followed by The Changing Forest: Life in the Forest of Dean Today (1962), which was based on the "Between Two Rivers" documentary. This book is a study of class and social mobility that demonstrates an early fascination with the effects of the mass media on British cultural life.

He soon returned to television. Daily Herald journalist David Nathan persuaded Potter to collaborate with him on sketches for That Was the Week That Was. Their first piece was used in the edition of 5 January 1963.

Potter stood as the Labour Party candidate for Hertfordshire East, a safe Conservative Party seat, in the 1964 general election against the incumbent Derek Walker-Smith. By the end of the unsuccessful campaign, he claimed that he was so disillusioned with party politics he did not even vote for himself. Potter now embarked on work as a television playwright. He had begun to suffer in 1962 from a condition known as psoriatic arthropathy causing arthritis to develop in his joints as well as affecting his skin with psoriasis. It also made futile any attempt to follow a conventional career path.

The Wednesday Play
Potter's career as a television playwright began with The Confidence Course (The Wednesday Play, 1965) which Potter had begun as a novel. An exposé of the Dale Carnegie Institute, it drew threats of litigation from that organisation. Although Potter effectively disowned the play, excluding it from his Who's Who entry, it used non-naturalistic dramatic devices (in this case breaking the fourth wall) which would become hallmarks of Potter's subsequent work. The Confidence Course script was liked by Wednesday Play script editor Roger Smith who then commissioned Potter to write what became the second Nigel Barton play for the new anthology series. Alice (also 1965), his next transmitted play, chronicled the relationship between Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his nom de plume, Lewis Carroll, and his muse Alice Liddell. The play drew complaints from the descendants of Dodgson, and of Macmillan, the publisher, who objected to the way the relationship was depicted. George Baker played Dodgson.

Potter's most highly regarded works from this period were the semi-autobiographical plays Stand Up, Nigel Barton! and Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, which featured Keith Barron. The former recounts the experience of a miner's son attending Oxford University where he finds himself torn between two worlds, culminating in Barton's participation in a television documentary. This mirrored Potter's participation in Does Class Matter (1958), a television documentary made while Potter was an Oxford undergraduate. The second play features the same character standing as a Labour candidate—his disillusionment with the compromises of electoral politics is based on Potter's own experience. Both plays received praise from critics but aroused considerable tension at the BBC for their potentially incendiary critique of party politics. In his James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture in 1993, Potter recalled how he was asked by "several respected men at the corporation why I wanted to shit on the Queen."

First film screenplays
In 1978, Herbert Ross was shooting Nijinsky at Shepperton Studios and invited Potter to write the screenplay for his next project Unexpected Valleys. But after watching Pennies from Heaven on television one evening, Ross contacted Potter about the prospect of adapting that series for the cinema. The film version of Pennies from Heaven was launched at MGM as an 'anti-musical' with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters in the lead roles. According to Potter, the studio demanded continual rewrites of the script and made significant cuts to the film after initial test screenings. The film was released in 1981 to mixed critical reaction and was a box-office failure. Potter, however, was nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar that year.

Having already adapted Brimstone and Treacle for the stage after the television production was banned by the BBC, Potter set about writing a film version. It was directed by Richard Loncraine, who also directed Potter's Blade on the Feather at LWT, with Denholm Elliott reprising his role of Mr. Bates from the original television production, while Sting and Joan Plowright, replaced Michael Kitchen and Patricia Lawrence in the roles of Martin Taylor and Mrs Bates respectively. Although a British film made by Potter's own production company (Pennies Productions), the casting of Sting piqued the interest of American investors. As a result, references to Mr Bates' membership of the National Front and a scene discussing racial segregation were omitted—as were many of the non-naturalistic flourishes present in the television production—although the film was much more graphic in its depiction of sexual abuse and rape. The film was not a success at the box office.

Potter's screenplay for Gorky Park (1983) led to his gaining an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

Works for the BBC in the 1980s
Potter's career in the early 1980s was spent as a screenwriter for the cinema. He returned to the BBC for a co-production with 20th Century Fox, writing the scripts for a widely praised but seldom-seen miniseries of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (1985) with Mary Steenburgen as Nicole Diver.

The Singing Detective (1986), featuring Michael Gambon, used the dramatist's own problems with the skin disease psoriasis, for Potter an often debilitating condition leading to hospital admission, as a means to merge the lead character's imagination with his perception of reality.

Following Christabel (1988), Potter's adaptation of the memoirs of Christabel Bielenberg, his next TV serial, Blackeyes (1989) was a major disappointment in his career. A drama about a fashion model, it was reviewed as self-indulgent by some critics, and accused of contributing to the misogyny Potter claimed he intended to expose. The critical backlash against Potter following Blackeyes led to Potter being labelled 'Dirty Den' (after Den Watts, the EastEnders character) by the British tabloid press, and resulted in a period of reclusion from television. The serial was adapted into a novel (see below),

In 1990, referring to a scene in The Singing Detective, Mary Whitehouse claimed on BBC Radio that Potter had been influenced by witnessing his mother engaging in adulterous sex. Potter's mother won substantial damages from the BBC and The Listener. Potter had at least at times actually been an admirer of Mrs Whitehouse: the journalist Stanley Reynolds found in 1973 that he "loves the idea of Mrs Whitehouse. He sees her as standing up for all the people with ducks on their walls who have been laughed at and treated like rubbish by the sophisticated metropolitan minority". In 1979 in an interview for The South Bank Show, he rejected "the chorus of abuse" suffered by Whitehouse because she accepted the "central moral importance of – to use the grandest word – art".

Later film work
Potter wrote the screenplay for Dreamchild (1985), a film which shared themes with his script for the Alice (1965) television play. In her last film role, Coral Browne portrayed the elderly Alice Hargreaves who recalls in flashbacks her childhood when she was the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Potter adapted his television play Schmoedipus (1974) for the cinema. The ensuing film, Track 29 (1988), directed by Nicolas Roeg, was Potter's last filmed American project. However, Potter did provide uncredited script work on James and the Giant Peach (released 1995)—his chief contribution providing dialogue for the sardonic caterpillar. Potter makes a sly reference to this in Karaoke when the character Daniel Feeld (Albert Finney) is invited to provide dialogue for an "arthritic goat" in a children's film.

Potter's reputation within the American film industry following the box office disappointments of Pennies from Heaven and Gorky Park ultimately led to difficulty receiving backing for his projects. Potter is known to have written adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, The White Hotel and his earlier television play Double Dare (1976): all these reached the preproduction stage before work was suspended. More fortunate was Mesmer (1993), a biographical film of the 19th century pseudo-scientist Franz Anton Mesmer. Potter's film, Secret Friends (1991), from his novel, Ticket to Ride, starring Alan Bates, premiered in New York at the Museum of Modern Art as the gala closing of the Museum of Television & Radio's week-long Potter retrospective.

The last film Potter actively worked on was Midnight Movie (1994), an adaptation of Rosalind Ashe's novel Moths. The film starred Louise Germaine and Brian Dennehy (who had appeared respectively in Lipstick on Your Collar and Gorky Park) and was directed by Renny Rye. Unable to secure financing from the Arts Council, Potter invested £500,000 in the production; BBC Films provided the rest of the capital. The film was not given a cinema release owing to a lack of interest from distributors and remained unseen until after Potter's death. It was finally broadcast on BBC2 in December 1994 in the Screen Two series, two months after a remake of his lost 1967 play Message for Posterity was transmitted.

A film version of The Singing Detective, based on Potter's own adapted screenplay, was released in 2003 by Icon Productions. Robert Downey, Jr. played the lead alongside Robin Wright Penn and Mel Gibson. Gibson also acted as producer. Potter's screenplay of The White Hotel was adapted as a radio play and broadcast in September 2018.

The media and Rupert Murdoch
In 1993, Potter was given a half-hour slot in prime time by Channel 4 in their Opinions strand produced by Open Media. Potter's chosen topic was what he perceived to be a contamination of news media and its effect on declining standards in British television "particularly journalists who criticised his Channel 4 series Lipstick on Your Collar", Kelvin MacKenzie "the sharp little oaf who edits the Sun" and Garry Bushell "that sub-literate homophobic, sniggering rictus of a lout". His talk was published in The Guardian in abbreviated form as "Murdoch's Desolate View of Human Life" Craig Brown described the programme in the (Rupert Murdoch owned) Sunday Times:

 * "Potter announced at the beginning: 'I'm going to get down there in the gutter where so many journalists crawl... what I'm about to do is to make a provenly vindictive and extremely powerful enemy... the enemy in question is that drivel-merchant, global huckster and so-to-speak media psychopath, Rupert Murdoch... Hannibal the Cannibal.'...

 * As a performance, it had a lot going for it. I have never seen a talking head on television so immediate or so unabated in its anger. In many ways, it felt like being collared by a madman on the Tube. Filmed disturbingly close to camera, seemingly ad-libbing the entire half-hour, now mumbling, now rasping, Potter somehow managed to cut through the vacuum that on television usually separates viewer from viewee. This made the performance extraordinary."

Final works
The last serial broadcast during Potter's lifetime was the romantic comedy Lipstick on Your Collar (1993). Set during the Suez Crisis of 1956 like the much earlier Lay Down Your Arms (1970), elements of which it recycled, this six-parter did not become a popular success and in it Potter returned to use of lip-synched musical numbers in the manner of Pennies from Heaven. It helped to launch the career of actor Ewan McGregor.

On 15 March 1994, three months before his death while his health was deteriorating, Potter gave an interview to Melvyn Bragg, later broadcast on 5 April 1994 by Channel 4. He had broken most of his ties with the BBC as a result of his disenchantment with Directors-General Michael Checkland and John Birt. Using a morphine and champagne cocktail as pain relief, and chain smoking, he revealed that he had named his cancer "Rupert", after Rupert Murdoch, who Potter said represented so much of what he found despicable about the mass media in Britain. He described his work and his determination to continue writing until his death. Telling Bragg that he had two works he intended to finish, he proposed that these works, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, should be made with the rival BBC and Channel 4 working in collaboration, a suggestion which was accepted.

The Bragg TV interview had revealed the “real” Dennis Potter as gentle and thoughtful and the immediate response was intense. The Guardian printed a full transcript the next day while Bragg reported: “Thousands of people reacted with phone calls and letters.” Michael Grade, Channel 4’s chief executive said: “I’ve never known a reaction to a programme like that, achieving such intimacy with an audience. Nothing stacks up against it in terms of impact.”

Potter’s final commission came from The Daily Telegraph Arts & Books section, prompted by the TV interview in March, to which he replied on 16 May, after honouring his television commitments: “I am pleased to tell you that I have completed Karaoke and Cold Lazarus – which I regard as essentially one eight-part piece. Now all that effort is of course evaporating into an overwhelming sense of loss, I itch to scribble something.” Immediately he was prompted to consider "the prospect of confronting imminent death" and on 25 May he submitted “my first and last short story” titled "Last Pearls", which was published on 4 June, days before he died.

The two related stories, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, were eventually broadcast in 1996. One set in the present and the other in the far future, both feature Albert Finney as the same principal character. Both series were released on DVD on 6 September 2010.

Novels
Hide and Seek (1973) is a meta-fictional novel exploring the relationship between reader and author and contains a protagonist, Daniel Miller, who is convinced he is the plaything of an omniscient author. This concept forms the core of Potter's next two novels, and portions of Hide and Seek would reappear in several of his television plays, especially Follow the Yellow Brick Road (1972) and The Singing Detective.

Ticket to Ride (1986) was written between drafts of The Singing Detective and concerns a herbithologist who is unable to make love to his wife unless he imagines her as a prostitute. This was followed in 1987 by Blackeyes: a study of a model whose abusive uncle, a writer, has stolen details of his niece's experiences in the glamour industry as the basis for his latest potboiler.

To tie-in with the release of the MGM production of Pennies from Heaven in 1981, Potter wrote a novelisation of the screenplay. Potter turned down the option of writing a novelisation for the film version of Brimstone and Treacle, allowing his daughter Sarah Potter to write it instead.

Stage plays
Although Potter only produced one play exclusively for theatrical performance (Sufficient Carbohydrate, 1983 – later filmed for television as Visitors in 1987), he adapted several of his television scripts for the stage. Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, which featured material from its sister-play Stand Up, Nigel Barton, was premiered in 1966, while Only Make Believe (1973), which incorporated scenes from Angels Are So Few (1970), made the transition to the stage in 1974. Son of Man appeared in 1969 with Frank Finlay in the title role (Finlay would also play Casanova in Potter's 1971 serial) and was restaged by Northern Stage in 2006. Brimstone and Treacle was adapted for the stage in 1977 after the BBC refused to screen the original television version. The play text for Blue Remembered Hills was first published in the collection Waiting for the Boat (with Joe's Ark and Blade on the Feather) in 1984 and has since enjoyed several successful stage performances. Potter proposed to write an "intermedia" stage play for producers Geisler-Roberdeau based on William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris, or The New Pygmalion, but he died before it could be commenced.

Style and themes
Potter's work is known for its use of non-naturalistic devices. These include the extensive use of flashback and nonlinear plot structure (Casanova; Late Call), direct to camera address (Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton) and works where "the child is father to the man", in which he used adult actors to play children (Stand Up, Nigel Barton; Blue Remembered Hills). The 'lip-sync' technique he developed for his "serials with songs" (Pennies from Heaven; The Singing Detective and Lipstick on Your Collar) is perhaps the best known of the Potter trademarks. They are frequently used in works where the line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred, often as a result of the influence of popular culture (Willie, the Wild West obsessive played by Hywel Bennett in Where the Buffalo Roam) or from a character's apparent awareness of their status as a pawn in the hands of an omniscient author (the actor Jack Black (Denholm Elliott) in Follow the Yellow Brick Road first broadcast in 1972).

Potter's pioneering method of using music in his work emerged when developing Pennies from Heaven (1978), one of his biggest successes. He asked actors to mime along to period songs. "Potter tried out the concept himself by lip-syncing to old songs while looking into a mirror. Potter himself once revealed that, working on harnessing songs in his plays, he was most productive 'at night, with old Al Bowlly records playing in the background'". Potter had previously experimented with Bowlly's voice in Moonlight on the Highway (1969).

Potter's characters are frequently "doubled up"; either by Doppelgänger, using the same actor to play two roles (Kika Markham as the actress and the escort in Double Dare; Norman Rossington as Lorenzo the gaoler and the English traveller in Casanova) or two actors whose characters' destinies and personalities appear linked (Bob Hoskins and Kenneth Colley as Arthur and the accordion man in Pennies from Heaven; Rufus (Christian Rodska) and Gina the bear in A Beast With Two Backs).

A motif in Potter's writing is the concept of betrayal and this takes many forms in his plays. Sometimes it is personal (Stand Up, Nigel Barton), political (Traitor; Cold Lazarus) and other times it is sexual (A Beast With Two Backs; Brimstone and Treacle). In Potter on Potter, published as part of Faber and Faber's series on auteurs, Potter told editor Graham Fuller that all forms of betrayal presented in literature are essentially religious and based on "the old, old story"; this is evoked in a number of works, from the use of popular songs in Pennies from Heaven to Potter's gnostic retelling of Jesus' final days in Son of Man.

The device of a disruptive outsider entering a claustrophobic environment is another theme. In plays where this occurs, the outsider will commit some apparently liberating act of evil (rape in Brimstone and Treacle) or violence (murder in Shaggy Dog) that gives physical expression to the un-sublimated desires of the characters in that setting. While these more malevolent visitors are often supernatural beings (Angels Are So Few), intelligence agents (Blade on the Feather) or even figments of their host's imagination (Schmoedipus), there are also—rare—instances of benign visitors whose presence resolves personal conflicts rather than exploits them (Joe's Ark; Where Adam Stood).

Legacy
Although Potter won few awards, he was and remains held in high regard by many within the television and film industry and was an influence on such creators as Mark Frost, Steven Bochco, Andrew Davies, Alain Resnais and Peter Bowker. Alan Bennett was critical, referring in his 1998 diaries to a television programme "that took Potter at his own self-evaluation (always high), when there was a good deal of indifferent stuff which was skated over", and believed that Potter's health was a factor in his fame, saying "he visibly conformed to what the public thinks artists ought to be—poor or promiscuous, suffering or starved". BBC Four marked the tenth anniversary of Potter's death in December 2004 with documentaries about his life and work, accompanied by showings of Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, as well as several of his single plays—many of which had not been shown since their initial broadcast. Potter's papers, including unproduced plays and unpublished fiction, are being catalogued and preserved at the Dean Heritage Centre in Gloucestershire.

Personal life
Potter married Margaret Amy Morgan (14 August 1933 – 29 May 1994) on 10 January 1959, at the Christ Church parish church in Berry Hill. They lived at Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, and had three children, Robert, Jane, and Sarah.

Illness and death
In 1961, while covering a meeting of the Young Conservatives, Potter was suddenly unable to rise from the press table and his knee felt hot. He was taken to a hospital, where his other major joints became inflamed and swollen, also, and his skin scalded off his body overnight. Potter was diagnosed with psoriatic arthropathy.

On 14 February 1994, Potter experienced more than his usual daily pain. He was told he was suffering from incurable pancreas and liver cancer.

Months before Potter was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, his wife, Margaret, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Despite his own deteriorating condition and punishing work schedule, Potter continued to care for his wife until she died on 29 May 1994.

Nine days later, on 7 June 1994, Potter died of pancreatic cancer in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, England, at age 59.

title: Dennis Potter


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Conrad Bursian

Conrad Bursian (14 November 1830 – 21 September 1883) was a German philologist and archaeologist.

Biography
He was born at Mutzschen in Saxony. When his parents moved to Leipzig, he received his early education at Thomasschule zu Leipzig. From 1847 to 1851 he was a student at the University of Leipzig, where his instructors included Moritz Haupt (1808–1874) and Otto Jahn (1813–1869). He then spent six months in Berlin, where he attended lectures given by Philipp August Böckh (1785–1867). In 1852 he completed his university studies at Leipzig, spending the next three years traveling in Belgium, France, Italy and Greece.

In 1856 he obtained his habilitation, and two years later was an associate professor in Leipzig. In 1861 he was appointed professor of philology and archaeology at Tübingen; in 1864 he was a professor of classical antiquities at Zürich. From 1869 at Jena, he was a professor and director of the archaeological museum, and in 1874 he relocated to Munich, where he served as a professor until his death.

Principal works
His favorite classical authors were Aristophanes, Demosthenes, Theocritus and the Greek tragedians; among the Romans, he favoured Lucretius, Juvenal and the Elegiacs. He was editor of the Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft (Annual report on the progress of classical studies), and wrote an outline of Greek art history for Ersch and Gruber's Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste.

His most important works are:
 * Geographie von Griechenland (1862–1872) – Geography of Greece.
 * Beiträge zur Geschichte der klassischen Studien im Mittelalter (1873) – Contributions to the history of classical studies in the Middle Ages.
 * Geschichte der klassischen Philologie in Deutschland (1883) – History of classical philology in Germany.
 * edition of Julius Firmicus Maternus' "De Errore Profanarum Religionum" (1856)
 * edition of Seneca the Elder's "Suasoriae" (1857).

title: Conrad Bursian


text:
Sixth form

In the education systems of England, Northern Ireland, Wales, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and some other Commonwealth countries, sixth form represents the final two years of secondary education, ages 16 to 18. Pupils typically prepare for A-level or equivalent examinations like the International Baccalaureate or Cambridge Pre-U. In England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, the term Key Stage 5 has the same meaning. It only refers to academic education and not to vocational education.

England and Wales
Sixth Form describes the two school years that are called by many schools the Lower Sixth (L6) and Upper Sixth (U6). The term survives from earlier naming conventions used in both the state-maintained and private school systems. Another well known term is Year 12 and 13, carried on from the year group system started in primary school.

In the state-maintained sector in England and Wales, pupils in the first five years of secondary schooling were divided into cohorts determined by age, known as forms (these referring historically to the long backless benches on which rows of pupils sat in the classroom). Pupils started their first year of secondary school in the first form or first year; this being the academic year in which pupils would normally be 12 years old by August 31. Pupils would move up a form each year before entering the fifth form in the academic year in which they would be 16 years old by August 31. Those who stayed on at school to study for A-levels moved up into the sixth form, which was divided into the Lower Sixth and the Upper Sixth.

In the independent schools sector, the traditional public schools did not have a consistent naming convention, except for the Sixth Form. As well as the Upper Sixth and Lower Sixth, the public schools used and still use a variety of descriptions for lower forms, such as Shell, Remove, Lower Fourth, Upper Fourth, Lower Fifth, Middle Fifth, Upper Fifth.

In some private schools, the term Middle Sixth was used in place of Upper Sixth, with the latter being used for those who stayed on for an extra term to take the entrance examinations that were previously set for candidates to Oxford or Cambridge universities. Other schools described these Oxbridge examination students as being in the Seventh Form or Third Year Sixth.

In the state sector, the system was changed for the 1990–1991 academic year and school years are now numbered consecutively from primary school onwards. Year 1 is the first year of primary school after Reception. The first year of secondary school is Year 7. The Lower Sixth (the first year of sixth form) is Year 12 and the Upper Sixth (the second year of sixth form) is Year 13. Public (fee-charging) schools, along with some state schools, tend to use the old system of numbering.

In some parts of the country, specialist sixth form colleges were introduced. A large proportion of English secondary schools no longer have an integral sixth form. This is mainly related to reforms in the later 20th century, where different political areas became a factor in the introduction of colleges instead of the original sixth forms. There are now numerous sixth form colleges throughout England and Wales, and in areas without these, sixth form schools and specialist further education (FE) colleges called tertiary colleges may fill the same role.

Sixth form itself isn't compulsory in England and Wales (although from 2013 onwards, people of sixth form age must remain in some form of education or training in England only; the school leaving age remains 16 in Wales); however, university entrance normally requires at least three A level qualifications and perhaps one AS level. Before the most recent reforms, students would usually select between three and five subjects from the GCSEs they have just taken, for one "AS" year, the AS exams being taken at the end of Lower Sixth. Three subjects would then be carried into the A2 year (the dropped AS being "cashed in" as a qualification), then further exams would be taken at the end of that year. The marks attained in both sets of exams were converted into UCAS points, which must meet the offer made by the student's chosen university. Since the move to a "linear" system, students more commonly choose three or four subjects and either continue to study them for the full two years before a single set of final "A level" exams, or choose to drop one or two subjects by sitting "AS level" exams at the end of the first year.

Northern Ireland
In Northern Ireland, the equivalent of Reception is "P1", and the equivalent of the English Year 1 "P2", while the first year of secondary school is known as Year 8 or first year (rather than Year 7 as in England), and following that Lower and Upper Sixth are Year 13 and Year 14 respectively.

Scotland
In the Scottish education system, the final year of school is known as Sixth Year or S6. During this year, students typically study Advanced Higher and/or Higher courses in a wide range of subjects, taking SQA exams at the end of both S5 and S6. Pupils in Scotland may leave once they have reached the age of 16; those who reach 16 before 30 September may leave after national examinations in May, whilst those who are 16 by the end of February may leave the previous Christmas.

It is not essential for candidates to do a sixth year if they wish to attend a Scottish university, as they have obtained adequate Higher grades in S5 and may apply and receive acceptance, though this is conditional on being successful in the examinations. However, the vast majority of Scottish students return for S6 if they plan to attend university. Some English universities will also accept Scottish students who have obtained adequate Higher grades in S5. It was announced in December 2008 that, as from 2010, UCAS will increase the number of points awarded to those who achieve Highers and Advanced Highers.

In some cases, particularly in independent schools, the term sixth form is also used for the last two years of secondary education.

Jamaica
In the Jamaican education system, sixth form describes the two school years which are called the Lower Sixth (6B) and Upper Sixth (6A), or grades 12 (lower) and 13 (upper), by many schools. Students are usually aged 17 or 18 by October 31.

Sixth form is a must, two years long, advanced post-secondary program, at the end of which students write the CAPE (Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Exams). These are the equivalent of the GCE A Level examinations which were the standard up until 2003. Some students still choose to sit A-levels if they wish, but in doing so they must still meet CAPE's basic subject requirements/groupings. CAPE and A-level exams are significantly harder than exams sat at the end of high school, and are often thought to be harder than most exams students will ever sit in university. Students usually select between three and five subjects from the GCSEs/CAPE they have just taken.

Other countries
In the Republic of Ireland, the last year of secondary schooling is called the Sixth Year. There is no Sixth Form per se but a similar concept exists called the Senior Cycle where school pupils aged 16–19 prepare in their final two years for the Leaving Certificate examination.

In some secondary schools in Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago, the sixth and seventh years, are called Lower and Upper Sixth respectively.

In India and Nepal, the Higher Secondary Education is called "Class 11th" and "Class 12th" which is also known as "+1" and "+2" respectively of the "10+2" educational system. In India, this is also referred to as "Intermediate" in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh and Bihar State Boards, " Pre-University Course"(PUC) in Karnataka State Board, and "Junior College" or "Higher Secondary Certificate" in Maharashtra State Board, in CBSE and CISCE Boards it is called “Class 11th" and "Class 12th".

Similarly, the term sixth form is also used to define the final two years of education before entering university in Malta.

In Malaysia, a sixth form is known as "Tingkatan 6", and lasts for three semesters.

In Singapore the equivalent of a sixth form college would be called a junior college, where pupils take their Cambridge GCE A-levels after two years. Prior to the 1990s, these two years were known as "Pre-University" (Pre-U) 1 and 2.

In New Zealand, under the old system of forms, standards and juniors, sixth form was the equivalent of Year 12 in today's system. Year 13 was known as seventh form. Australia also sometimes uses the term for year 12, though the Australian year 12 is equivalent to the NZ Year 13 / seventh form and the UK's upper sixth / Year 13.

In Brunei, sixth form comprises Year 12 and 13, which may also be referred to as Lower and Upper Sixth. At the end of the schooling, students sit for Brunei-Cambridge GCE A Level. Students may also opt to take Advanced Subsidiary Level or AS Level halfway at the end of Lower Sixth or halfway through Upper Sixth. Sixth form is not compulsory, but a preferable choice for students wishing to continue in academic studies leading to university level.

In some college preparatory schools in the United States, such as The Hill School, Woodberry Forest School, Ethical Culture Fieldston School, Kent School, Pomfret School, The Church Farm School, The Haverford School, Portsmouth Abbey School and more, sixth form refers to the final year of education prior to college. It is the equivalent of twelfth grade in the US education system.

title: Sixth form


text:
Wikipedia:Images with missing articles

Several pages on the web offer their public domain images in a long list. To avoid checking these lists again and again for matching wikipedia articles, here's a list of specific images with missing articles. If you see that one of these articles exists, please add the image from the external link, and remove it from this list.

 * List of PD images from lib.utexas.edu (not uploaded yet) — Done.
 * Portraits from the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, in the public domain by age

title: Wikipedia:Images with missing articles