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Woolf, Virginia

(Encyclopedia)Woolf, Virginia, 1882–1941, English novelist and essayist, b. Adeline Virgina Stephen; daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen. A successful innovator in the form of the novel, she is considered a significan...

tower

(Encyclopedia)tower, structure, the greatest dimension of which is its height. Towers have belonged to two general types. The first embodies practical uses such as defense (characteristic of the Middle Ages), to ca...

Douglas-Home, Alexander Frederick, Baron Home of the Hirsel

(Encyclopedia)Douglas-Home, Alexander Frederick, Baron Home of the Hirsel dŭgˈləs-hyo͞om [key], 1903–95, British politician. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he was elected to the House of Commons in 1931 as a Co...

Lytton, Victor Alexander George Robert Lytton, 2d earl of

(Encyclopedia)Lytton, Victor Alexander George Robert Lytton, 2d earl of, 1871–1947, British diplomat, son of Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st earl of Lytton. He was undersecretary of state for India (1920–22) a...

apostrophe, figure of speech

(Encyclopedia)apostrophe, figure of speech in which an absent person, a personified inanimate being, or an abstraction is addressed as though present. The term is derived from a Greek word meaning “a turning away...

Barnes, Barnabe

(Encyclopedia)Barnes, Barnabe, 1569?–1609, English poet. His major work is Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593), a collection of sonnets, madrigals, elegies, and odes. He also wrote A Divine Century of Spiritual S...

Barrow, Isaac

(Encyclopedia)Barrow, Isaac, 1630–77, English mathematician and theologian. His method of finding tangents prefigured the differential calculus developed by Isaac Newton. He was professor of mathematics at Cambri...

Epirus

(Encyclopedia)Epirus ĕpīˈrəs [key], ancient country of Greece, on the Ionian Sea and W of Macedon and Thessaly, a region now occupied by NW Greece and S Albania. At the time of Homer, Epirus was known as the ho...

Comstock Lode

(Encyclopedia)Comstock Lode, richest known U.S. silver deposit, W Nevada, on Mt. Davidson in the Virginia Range. It is said to have been discovered in 1857 by Ethan Allen Grosh and Hosea Ballou Grosh, sons of a Pen...

Endo, Shusaku

(Encyclopedia)Endo, Shusaku shəsäˈko͝o ĕnˈdō [key], 1923–1996, one of the finest 20th-century Japanese novelists, b. Tokyo. Baptized a Roman Catholic at 11, he is often compared to Graham Greene for his de...