Bristol West Quotes

Angela Carter...refused to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the whole stigmatized genre, its stock characters and well-known plots, and with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun, soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought them leaping back to life. From her childhood, through her English degree at the University of Bristol where she specialised in Medieval Literature, and her experiences as a young woman on the folk-music circuit in the West Country, Angela Carter was steeped in English and Celtic faerie, in romances of chivalry and the grail, Chaucerian storytelling and Spenserian allegory, and she was to become fairy tale’s rescuer, the form’s own knight errant, who seized hold of it in its moribund state and plunged it into the fontaine de jouvence itself. (from "Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter")

Jamaica was the Ophir of the West of Scotland in those times. Upon its sugar fields and by the agency of its slave labour, Glasgow slowly emerged from its primeval state of small borough town, to be a business centre, rivalling and soon surpassing Bristol in its West India trade.

1 say to the leaders of this great country, why not allow your people the same privileges we in the West take for granted? You can start by releasing Anatoly Babakov and allowing his book to be published. That is, if you have nothing to fear from the torch of freedom. 1 will not rest until 1 can buy a copy of Uncle Joe at Hatchards on Piccadilly, Doubleday on Fifth Avenue, Dymocks in Sydney, and George's bookshop in Park Street, Bristol.

Pan, The House of Bernarda Alba, Transform Caithness: Hunter, Be Near Me, Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us, The Bacchae (also Lincoln Center), Elizabeth Gordon Quinn, Home: Glasgow, and Black Watch, which toured internationally and for which he won Olivier and Critics’ Circle awards. He was Associate Director of the Traverse Theatre from 1996 to 2001, Paines Plough from 2001 to 2005, the National Theatre of Scotland from 2005 to 2012, and was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University in the 2010–2011 academic year. JACK THORNE writes for theater, film, television, and radio. His theater credits include Hope and Let the Right One In, both directed by John Tiffany, Junkyard, a Headlong, Rose Theatre Kingston, Bristol Old Vic & Theatr Clwyd co-production, The Solid Life of Sugar Water for the Graeae Theatre Company and the National Theatre,

Who is America named after? Not the Italian merchant and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, but Richard Ameryk, a Welshman and wealthy Bristol merchant. Ameryk was the chief investor in the second transatlantic voyage of John Cabot—the English name of the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto, whose voyages in 1497 and 1498 laid the groundwork for the later British claim to Canada. He moved to London from Genoa in 1484 and was authorized by King Henry VII to search for unknown lands to the west. On his little ship Matthew, Cabot reached Labrador in May 1497 and became the first recorded European to set foot on American soil, predating Vespucci by two years. Cabot mapped the North American coastline from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland. As the chief patron of the voyage, Richard Ameryk would have expected discoveries to be named after him. There is a record in the Bristol calendar for that year: “…on Saint John the Baptist’s day [June 24], the land of America was found by the merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristowe called the Mathew,” which clearly suggests this is what happened. Although the original manuscript of this calendar has not survived, there are a number of references to it in other contemporary documents. This is the first use of the term America to refer to the new continent. The earliest surviving map to use the name is Martin Waldseemüller’s great map of the world of 1507, but it only applied to South America. In his notes Waldseemüller makes the assumption that the name is derived from a Latin version of Amerigo Vespucci’s first name, because Vespucci had discovered and mapped the South American coast from 1500 to 1502. This suggests he didn’t know for sure and was trying to account for a name he had seen on other maps, possibly Cabot’s. The only place where the name “America” was known and used was Bristol—not somewhere the France-based Waldseemüller was likely to visit. Significantly, he replaced “America” with “Terra Incognita” in his world map of 1513. Vespucci never reached North America. All the early maps and trade were British. Nor did he ever use the name of America for his discovery. There’s a good reason for this. New countries or continents were never named after a person’s first name, but always after the second (as in Tasmania, Van Diemen’s Land, or the Cook Islands). America would have become Vespucci Land (or Vespuccia) if the Italian explorer had consciously given his name to it.

A Horrid History of Christmas: Horrible Happening & Frightening Festivities Bristol Murders Cornish Murders (with John Van der Kiste) Dorset Murders Hampshire Murders Herefordshire Murders More Bristol Murders More Cornish Murders (with John Van der Kiste) More Hampshire Murders More Somerset Murders (with John Van der Kiste) Murder by Poison: A Casebook of Historic British Murders Oxfordshire Murders Shropshire Murders Somerset Murders (with John Van der Kiste) West Country Murders (with John Van der Kiste)

I finally persuaded the University of the West of England (UWE) (which was the less academic version of Bristol University) to offer me a place studying modern languages. (Incidentally, I had only pulled this off by going down there in person and begging the admissions lady for a place, face-to-face, after sitting outside her office all day. This was becoming a familiar pattern. Well, at least, I have always been persistent.) I wasn’t allowed to study purely Spanish, which I loved, so I had to do German and Spanish. My run-in with the beautiful German Tatiana had led me to believe that the German language might be as beautiful as her. Boy, was I wrong. The language is a pig to learn. This became the first nail in the coffin of my university experience.

Crimping or Shanghaiing was the act of kidnapping unsuspecting men to serve aboard ships usually destined to sail to the far east. In most cases this happened on the waterfront of cities such as London, Bristol and Hull in England and San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Port Townsend on the West Coast and New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore on the on the East Coast of the United States. Portland, Oregon. In the mid-19th century eventually became the most infamously known city for shanghaiing. People engaged in this form of kidnapping were known as crimps and those members of a ship’s crew that were acquired in this way were referred to as being part of a ships “press gang.” This term had its origin Great Britain's Royal Navy. The need for Shanghaiing grew from shortage of sailors first in the British navy in England and then on merchant ships sailing on the lengthy trade routes primarily to China. With many seamen jumping ship along the west coast and joining the California Gold Rush it developed a cottage industry for boarding masters known as crimps, who found crews for ships. Being paid for every person they delivered there was a strong incentive to find as many seamen as possible and for this they were paid what was named blood money. Records show that these crimps could receive a percentage of the man’s pay or in some cases thousands of dollars of advance pay against the seaman’s pay for the voyage. In 1884 the practice of Crimping or Shanghaiing was curtailed when the Dingley Act came into effect. This law prohibited the taking advantage of the seamen, although some loopholes allowed the practice to continue into the 20th century.

Britain's geography is odd. Peterhead is the eastern-most point of mainland Scotland although that puts it further west than Stratford-upon-Avon, which is on the western side of the British Midlands. It's sometimes difficult to believe that east coast Edinburgh and Dundee are both farther west than west coast Bristol.