Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Murray, Les (Leslie Allan Murray), 1938–2019, Australia's leading poet of the late 20th and early 21st cent., B.A. Univ. of Sydney, 1969. Son of an impoverished dairy farmer, he grew up in New South...

(Encyclopedia) Scotland, Free Church of, the secessionist Presbyterian church established as a result of the great disruption of 1843 in the Church of Scotland. The cause of the separation lay in the demand of the l...

(Encyclopedia) Prime Ministers of Great Britain 1 The modern party system did not evolve until the end of the 18th cent. ...

(Encyclopedia) homicide hŏmˈəsīd [key], in law, the taking of human life. Homicides that are neither justifiable nor excusable are considered crimes. A criminal homicide committed with malice is known as murder,...

(Encyclopedia) Labour party, British political party, one of the two dominant parties in Great Britain since World War I. Harold Wilson, who became leader on Gaitskell's death in 1963, was able to lead the party t...

(Encyclopedia) Mackintosh, Charles Rennie măkˈəntŏshˌ [key], 1868–1928, Scottish architect, artist, and furniture designer. Probably the greatest architect and designer Scotland has produced, he attempted to ...

(Encyclopedia) Shostakovich, Dmitri dyĭmēˈtrē shŏstŏkôˈvĭch [key], 1906–75, Russian composer, b. St. Petersburg. Shostakovich studied at the Leningrad Conservatory (1919–25). The early success of his Fi...

(Encyclopedia)  Flynt, Larry Claxton, Jr., 1942-2021, American magazine publisher, b. Lakeville, Ky. Flynt was the son of a sharecropper, and dropped out of school at...

(Encyclopedia) social science, term for any or all of the branches of study that deal with humans in their social relations. Often these studies are referred to in the plural as the social sciences. Although human s...

(Encyclopedia) Styron, William, 1925–2006, American novelist, b. Newport News, Va., grad. Duke, 1947. His fiction is often powerful, deeply felt, poetic, and elegiac. He became well known for his novel The Confess...