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Hankey, Maurice Pascal Alers Hankey, 1st Baron

(Encyclopedia)Hankey, Maurice Pascal Alers Hankey, 1st Baron, 1877–1963, British soldier and civil servant. Educated at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, he served in the Royal Marines artillery (1895–1901) a...

Vittorini, Elio

(Encyclopedia)Vittorini, Elio ĕˈlyō vēt-tōrēˈnē [key], 1908–66, Italian novelist, b. Syracuse, Sicily. Between 1934 and 1941 Vittorini translated the works of D. H. Lawrence, Poe, Faulkner, Hemingway, T. ...

Smith, Stevie

(Encyclopedia)Smith, Stevie (Margaret Florence Smith), 1902–71, English poet and novelist, b. Hull, Yorkshire. At first unnoticed as a poet, she worked in a London publisher's office until 1953. Steadily gaining ...

Ginsburg, Ruth Bader

(Encyclopedia)Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 1933–2020, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1993–2020), b. Brooklyn, N.Y., as Joan Ruth Bader. A graduate (1954) of Cornell, she attended Harvard Law School, then...

Kahn, Louis Isadore

(Encyclopedia)Kahn, Louis Isadore , kän [key], 1901–74, American architect, b. Estonia. He and his family moved to Philadelphia in 1905, and he later studied at the Univ. of Pennsylvania. From the 1920s through ...

Rowling, J. K.

(Encyclopedia)Rowling, J. K. (Joanne Kathleen Rowling) rōlˈibreve;ing [key], 1965–, English author known for her popular children's books. While unemployed she completed Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone...

Lowell, Robert

(Encyclopedia)Lowell, Robert (Robert Traill Spence Lowell 4th), 1917–77, American poet and translator, widely considered the preeminent American poet of the mid-20th cent., b. Boston, grad. Kenyon College (B.A., ...

foreign exchange

(Encyclopedia)foreign exchange, methods and instruments used to adjust the payment of debts between two nations that employ different currency systems. A nation's balance of payments has an important effect on the ...

Mosby, John Singleton

(Encyclopedia)Mosby, John Singleton môzˈbē [key], 1833–1916, Confederate partisan leader in the American Civil War, b. Edgemont, Va. He was practicing law in Bristol, Va., when the Civil War broke out. Mosby s...

Luce, Henry Robinson

(Encyclopedia)Luce, Henry Robinson, 1898–1967, American publisher, b. Tengchow (now Penglai), China, the son of a Presbyterian missionary. After studying at Yale and Oxford, he worked (1921–22) as a reporter on...