title: Snorri Sturluson

text: When Snorri arrived in Norway for the second time, it was clear to the king that he was no longer a reliable agent. The conflict between Haakon and Skúli was beginning to escalate into civil war. Snorri stayed with the jarl, or chieftain, and his son and the jarl made him a jarl hoping to command his allegiance. In August 1238, Sighvatur and four of his sons (Sturla, Markús, Kolbeinn, and Þórður Krókur, the latter two being executed after the battle), were killed at the Battle of Örlygsstaðir in Iceland against Gissur Þorvaldsson and Kolbein the Young, chiefs whom they had provoked. Snorri, Órækja, and Þorleifur requested permission to return home. As the king now could not predict Snorri's behavior, permission was denied. He was explicitly ordered to remain in Norway on the basis of his honorary rank. Skúli on the other hand gave permission and helped them book passage.


title: Snorri Sturluson

text: Snorri must have had his own ideas about the king's position and the validity of his orders, but at any rate he chose to disobey them; his words according to "Sturlunga saga", 'út vil ek' (literally 'out want I', but idiomatically 'I will go home'), have become proverbial in Icelandic. He returned to Iceland in 1239. The king was distracted by the necessity to confront Skúli, who declared himself king in 1239. He was defeated militarily and killed in 1240. Meanwhile, Snorri resumed his chieftainship and made a bid to crush Gissur by prosecuting him in court for the deaths of Sigvat and Sturla. A meeting of the Althing was arranged for the summer of 1241 but Gissur and Kolbein arrived with several hundred men. Snorri and 120 men formed around a church. Gissur chose to pay fines rather than to attack.


title: Snorri Sturluson

text: Meanwhile, in 1240, after the jarl's defeat, but before his removal from the scene, Haakon sent two agents to Gissur bearing a secret letter with orders to kill or capture Snorri. Gissur was being invited now to join the unionist movement, which he could accept or refuse, just as he pleased. His initial bid to take Snorri at the Althing failed.


title: Snorri Sturluson

text: Hallveig died of natural causes. When the family bickered over the inheritance, Hallveig's sons, Klaeing and Orm, asked assistance from their uncle Gissur. Holding a meeting with them and Kolbein the Younger, Gissur brought out the letter. Orm refused. Shortly after, Snorri received a letter in cipher runes warning him of the plot, but he could not understand them.


title: Snorri Sturluson

text: Gissur led seventy men on a daring raid to his house, achieving complete surprise. Snorri Sturluson was assassinated in his house at Reykholt in autumn of 1241. It is not clear that he was given the option of surrender. He fled to the cellar. There, Símon knútur asked Arni the Bitter to strike him. Then Snorri said: "Eigi skal höggva!"—"Do not strike!" Símon answered: "Högg þú!" — "You strike now!" Snorri replied: "Eigi skal höggva!"—"Do not strike!" and these were his last words.


title: Snorri Sturluson

text: This act was not popular in either Iceland or Norway. To diminish the odium, the king insisted that if Snorri had submitted, he would have been spared. The fact that he could make such an argument reveals how far his influence in Iceland had come. Haakon went on suborning the chiefs of Iceland. In 1262, the Althing ratified union with Norway and royal authority was instituted in Iceland. Each member swore an oath of personal loyalty to the king, a practice which continued as each new king came to the throne, until absolute and hereditary monarchy was formally accepted by the Icelanders in 1662.


title: Snorri Sturluson

text: Snorri Sturluson's writings provide information and indications concerning persons and events influencing the peoples inhabiting North Europe during periods for which relevant information is scarce: thus, for example, he can be used to illuminate relations between England and Scandinavia during the 10th and 11th centuries. Snorri is considered a figure of enduring importance in this regard, Halvdan Koht describing his work as "surpassing anything else that the Middle Ages have left us of historical literature". He also provided an early account of the discovery of Vinland.


title: Snorri Sturluson

text: To an extent, the legacy of Snorri Sturluson also played a role in politics long after his death. His writings could be used in support of the claims of later Norwegian kings concerning the venerability and extent of their rule. Later, "Heimskringla" factored in establishing a national identity during the Norwegian romantic nationalism in mid-19th century.


title: Snorri Sturluson

text: Icelandic perception of Snorri in the 20th century and to date has been colored by the historical views adopted when they sought to sever their ties with Denmark, any revision of which still has strong nationalistic sentiments to contend with. To serve such views, Snorri and other leading Icelanders of his time are sometimes judged with some presentism, on the basis of concepts that came into vogue only centuries later, such as state, independence, sovereignty, and nation.


title: Snorri Sturluson

text: Jorge Luis Borges and María Kodama studied and translated the "Gylfaginning" to Spanish, providing a biographic account of Snorri at the prologue.


title: Snorri Sturluson

text: "Nine worlds I remember", one of the epigraphs to chapter IV of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos", is a quotation from Snorri's "Edda".


title: Demisexuality

text: Demisexuality is a term in which an individual does not experience primary sexual attraction – the type of attraction that is based on immediately observable characteristics such as appearance or smell and is experienced immediately after a first encounter. They can only experience secondary sexual attraction – the type of attraction that happens after knowing someone for a while. The amount of time that a demisexual individual needs to know another person before developing sexual attraction towards them varies from person to person. It is generally categorised on the asexuality spectrum.


title: Demisexuality

text: The term was coined on the Asexual Visibility and Education Network Forums in February 2006. Based on the theory that allosexuals experience both primary and secondary sexual attraction and asexuals do not experience either, the term "demisexuals" was proposed for people who experience one without the other.


title: Demisexuality

text: Demisexuality, as a component of the asexuality spectrum, is included in queer activist communities such as GLAAD and The Trevor Project, and itself has finer divisions.


title: Demisexuality

text: Post-doctorate research on the subject has been done since at least 2013, and podcasts and social media have also raised public awareness of the sexual orientation. Some public figures, such as Michaela Kennedy-Cuomo, who have come out as demisexual have also raised awareness, though they typically face some degree of ridicule for their sexuality.


title: Demisexuality

text: The word gained entry to the Oxford English Dictionary in March 2022, with its earliest usage (as a noun) dating to 2006.


title: Demisexuality

text: A common general definition of demisexuality states that "demisexuality is a sexual orientation in which a person feels sexually attracted to someone only after they've developed a close/strong emotional bond with them". This definition of demisexuality has been criticized, as demisexuals are capable of developing sexual attraction towards people they do not have a close bond with and even towards people they do not personally know.


title: Demisexuality

text: This means sexual attraction for demisexuals can be one-sided and not necessarily forming from a bond they share with another person.


title: Demisexuality

text: How much demisexuals need to know about a person before they feel sexually attracted to them varies from person to person. There is no specific timeline on how long it takes either. There is also no way to determine what qualifies as a close or strong bond, which causes confusion.


title: Demisexuality

text: Demisexuals can enjoy a person's presence or be attracted to some of their qualities without having an interest in dating them or building a romantic relationship with them.


title: Demisexuality

text: After secondary sexual attraction is developed, demisexuals are not only aroused by personality traits. They also may or may not experience arousal or desire based on the physical traits of the persons they already experience secondary sexual attraction towards.


title: Demisexuality

text: A common misconception is that demisexual individuals cannot engage in casual sex. It is important to note that being demisexual refers to how an individual experiences sexual attraction, it is not stating a choice or an action, but is describing a feeling. While it is common for demisexuals not to desire sex without feeling sexually attracted to the other person, it is not a rule individuals have to fall into to be considered demisexual. Demisexuals can choose if they want to engage in casual sex even without experiencing sexual attraction towards said person.


title: Demisexuality

text: Another common misconception is that demisexuals disregard people's physical appearance. This confusion stems from the fact that demisexuals do not experience primary sexual attraction based on instantly available information, such as appearance. However, demisexuals do experience aesthetic attraction and can have an aesthetic preference. An aesthetic attraction is an attraction to another person's appearance that is not connected to any sexual or romantic desire; it is so called because of similarity to other aesthetic desires.


title: Demisexuality

text: While it is common for demisexuals not to give much importance to appearances when choosing a partner, it is not a rule individuals have to fall into to be considered demisexual.


title: Demisexuality

text: It is also a myth that demisexuality is a sign of low sex drive. Once demisexual people are in a sexual relationship, they have varying levels of sex drive. Demisexuality only refers to the type of attraction that person feels, not how often they have sex.


title: Demisexuality

text: Demisexuality also is not related to a moral or religious belief about sex. It is a sexual orientation, not a choice.


title: Demisexuality

text: Demisexuals can be attracted to fictional characters; it is common for demisexuals to be attracted to a character played by an actor but to experience no attraction to the actor themselves when out of character.


title: Demisexuality

text: Demisexuals, gray-asexual and asexual individuals (commonly referred to as "aces") often use the terms "favorable", "neutral" or "indifferent", "averse", or "repulsed" to describe how they feel about sex. Nonetheless, these terms can be used by anyone, regardless if they are asexual or not.


title: Demisexuality

text: Generally, these terms are used to refer to someone's opinion about engaging in activities themselves. However, they might also be used to describe how they feel reading, watching, hearing about, or imagining these activities. The term "-repulsed" in particular is often used to refer to one's feelings about engaging in activities or being around those activities. One's feelings can vary depending on the situation or other factors such as identity, societal context, common social understanding or intent of actions, or comfort level with another individual. For example, someone who is aegosexual may enjoy thinking about sexual activities involving others, but if they imagined being personally involved in those activities, they may feel sex-repulsed.


title: Demisexuality

text: Demisexuality is a common theme (or trope) in romantic novels that has been termed 'compulsory demisexuality'. Within fictitious prose, the paradigm of sex being only truly pleasurable when the partners are in love is a trait stereotypically more commonly associated with female characters. The intimacy of the connection also allows for an exclusivity to take place.


title: Jason Everman

text: Jason Mark Everman (born October 16, 1967) is an American musician and soldier who played guitar with Nirvana and Mind Funk, and bass in Soundgarden and OLD. He later served tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan with the U.S. Army as an Army Ranger and Green Beret. As of May 2017, Everman plays the guitar in a military veteran band called Silence and Light.


title: Jason Everman

text: In a 2013 interview with "The New York Times Magazine", Everman said when asked about his birth, "My birth certificate says Kodiak, but I'm pretty sure it was Ouzinkie, where my parents lived in a two-room cabin with a pet ocelot named Kia." His parents had moved to the remote Spruce Island to, as guitarist and writer Clay Tarver put it, "get back to nature", but their marriage did not "work out". His mother left with Jason when he was a toddler, moved to Washington, and remarried to a former Navy serviceman; the family eventually settled in Poulsbo, across Puget Sound from Seattle.


title: Jason Everman

text: According to Everman's half-sister, with whom he grew up, "My mother was extremely depressed, an artistic genius who was also a pill-popping alcoholic. Jason and I learned to walk on eggshells and really learned to take care of ourselves." After an incident in which he and a friend blew up a toilet with an M-80 firecracker, his grandmother put him in therapy sessions to deal with his emotional issues. Everman began playing guitar during the therapy sessions; he initially picked up one of the guitars the therapist kept around his office, and the therapist then decided to play with him, hoping it would help him open up. He went on to play in several bands during his high school years. Also, he reestablished contact with his biological father, who by that time owned a fishing boat in Alaska, and worked several seasons on the boat. Prior to joining with Nirvana, he played guitar in a local band called Stonecrow with future Nirvana drummer Chad Channing.


title: Jason Everman

text: Everman joined Nirvana in February 1989 as a second guitarist. He is listed as being second guitarist on Nirvana's "Bleach" and appears on the cover, but did not actually play on any of the tracks. Nirvana founder Kurt Cobain said the credit was a token of thanks to Everman for paying a fee of $606.17 to record the album. On the 2009 remastered edition of "Bleach", Everman is no longer credited but can still be seen on the front cover and he is given special thanks in the booklet.


title: Jason Everman

text: Everman toured with Nirvana the summer of 1989 in support of "Bleach". He can be heard playing guitar on "Trust No-One", an unofficial release of a live performance in Boston. Cobain had broken his guitar the previous night and only provided vocals, leaving the guitar playing to Everman. Everman can also be seen in the bootleg video of Nirvana playing an "in store" performance at Rhino Records in Los Angeles on June 23, 1989. During his time with Nirvana, he could sometimes be seen using Fender guitars, generally the Fender Telecaster. Nirvana fired Everman after the tour ended due to his moodiness.


title: Jason Everman

text: A two-song Nirvana session featuring Everman on guitar is available, albeit in separate releases. A Kiss cover called "Do You Love Me?" was released on the 1990 Hard to Believe: A Kiss Covers Compilation, and "Dive" was released on 2004's "With the Lights Out". Both tracks were recorded at The Evergreen State College's 24-track studio in June 1989.


title: Jason Everman

text: Everman next joined Soundgarden in 1990 as Hiro Yamamoto's temporary successor on bass. In April of that year, he played on the band's cover of The Beatles' "Come Together", which appeared on an EP called "Loudest Love". Everman appeared in Soundgarden's "Louder Than Live" home video. Everman left immediately after Soundgarden completed its promotional tour for "Louder Than Love" in mid-1990 to play bass for the band OLD (Old Lady Drivers) and Soundgarden found Yamamoto's ultimate successor, bassist Ben Shepherd. Later, in 1993, he played guitar in Mind Funk.


title: Jason Everman

text: In September 1994, influenced by Renaissance icon Benvenuto Cellini (who stated that a well-rounded man is an artist, warrior and philosopher), he left Mind Funk to join the United States Army, subsequently serving with the Army's 2nd Ranger Battalion and later with the Special Forces, serving tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. After completing his service, he took a break from the military and lived in New York City where he briefly worked as a bike messenger. He then traveled to Tibet and worked and studied in a Buddhist monastery before returning to the U.S. He reentered the Army when offered the chance to join Special Forces.


title: Jason Everman

text: After receiving an honorable discharge in 2006, Everman went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Columbia University School of General Studies on May 20, 2013. General Stanley A. McChrystal wrote a letter of recommendation for his application. In September 2010, Everman conducted an interview with Music Life Radio detailing his life. He also briefly appears in a 2010 documentary on Motörhead frontman Lemmy where he described Motorhead as "Good go-to-war music."


title: Jason Everman

text: In July 2013, "The New York Times" published a portrait on Everman, written by guitarist and writer Clay Tarver. The article features interviews with Everman, his family members, former band colleagues, music industry people, and soldiers. A 2014 "The Daily Beast" interview mentions that Everman was invited to attend Nirvana's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, that he lives in New York, has participated in writing workshops and "still goes overseas regularly, working as a consultant for the military."


title: Jason Everman

text: According to his biography on the homepage for The Pat Tillman Foundation, of which he is a member, Everman is currently pursuing a Master's in Military History from Norwich University.


title: Jason Everman

text: In May 2017 Everman met fellow veteran Brad Thomas in New York and the two decided to start a band. By July the band, named Silence & Light, had a complete lineup consisting of military veterans with Everman playing the guitar. They began recording an album in January 2019 in Van Nuys California. One song was released in October 2019 and the complete album was released in December 2019. The band's profits are dedicated to helping members of the Special Operations Community, the Military, and First Responders. The band says they consider their genre to be modern rock.


title: Ahab

text: Ahab (; "Aḫâbbu" ["a-ḫa-ab-bu"]; "Achaáb"; ) was the seventh king of Israel, the son and successor of King Omri and the husband of Jezebel of Sidon, according to the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible presents Ahab as a wicked king, particularly for condoning Jezebel's influence on religious policies and his principal role behind Naboth's arbitrary execution.


title: Ahab

text: The existence of Ahab is historically supported outside the Bible. Shalmaneser III of Assyria documented in 853 BC that he defeated an alliance of a dozen kings in the Battle of Qarqar; one of these was Ahab. He is also mentioned on the inscriptions of the Mesha Stele.


title: Ahab

text: Ahab became king of Israel in the thirty-eighth year of King Asa of Judah, and reigned for twenty-two years, according to 1 Kings. William F. Albright dated his reign to 869–850 BC, while Edwin R. Thiele offered the dates 874–853 BC. Most recently, Michael Coogan has dated Ahab's reign to 871–852 BC.


title: Ahab

text: King Omri, Ahab's father and founder of the short-lived Omri dynasty, seems to have been a successful military leader; he is reported in the text of the Moabite Mesha Stele to have "oppressed Moab for many days." During Ahab's reign, Moab, which had been conquered by his father, remained tributary. Ahab was allied by marriage with Jehoshaphat, who was king of Judah. Only with Aram-Damascus is he believed to have had strained relations, though the two kingdoms also shared an alliance for some years.


title: Ahab

text: Ahab married Jezebel, the daughter of the King of Tyre. tells the story of Ahab and Jezebel, and indicates that Jezebel was a dominant influence on Ahab, persuading him to abandon Yahweh and establish the religion of Baal in Israel. Ahab lived in Samaria, the royal capital established by Omri, and built a temple and altar to Baal there. These actions were said to have led to severe consequences for Israel, including a drought that lasted for several years and Jezebel's fanatical religious persecution of the prophets of Yahweh, which Ahab condoned. His reputation was so negative that in 1 Kings 16:34, the author attributed to his reign the deaths of Abiram and Segub, the sons of Hiel of Bethel, caused by their father's invocation of Joshua's curse several centuries before.


title: Ahab

text: According to , war later erupted between Ahab and king Hadadezer of Aram-Damascus (which the Bible refers to as "Ben-Hadad II") and that Ahab was able to defeat and capture him; however, soon after that, a peace treaty was made between the two and alliance between Israel and Aram-Damascus was formed.


title: Ahab

text: The Battle of Qarqar is mentioned in extra-biblical records, and was perhaps at Apamea, where Shalmaneser III of Assyria fought a great confederation of princes from Cilicia, Northern Syria, Israel, Ammon, and the tribes of the Syrian desert (853 BCE), including Ahab the Israelite ("A-ha-ab-bu Sir-'a-la-a-a") and Hadadezer ("Adad-'idri").


title: Ahab

text: Ahab's contribution was estimated at 2000 chariots and 10,000 men. In reality, however, the number of chariots in Ahab's forces was probably closer to a number in the hundreds (based upon archaeological excavations of the area and the foundations of stables that have been found). If, however, the numbers are referring to allies, they could possibly include forces from Tyre, Judah, Edom, and Moab. The Assyrian king claimed a victory, but his immediate return and subsequent expeditions in 849 BC and 846 BC against a similar but unspecified coalition seem to show that he met with no lasting success.


title: Ahab

text: After some years, Ahab with Jehoshaphat of Judah went to recover Ramoth-Gilead from the Arameans. During this battle, Ahab disguised himself, but he was mortally wounded by an unaimed arrow. The Hebrew Bible says that dogs licked his blood, according to the prophecy of Elijah. But the Septuagint adds that pigs also licked his blood, symbolically making him unclean to the Israelites, who abstained from pork. Ahab was succeeded by his sons, Ahaziah and Jehoram.


title: Ahab

text: Jezebel's death, however, was more dramatic than Ahab's. As recorded in , Jehu had her servants throw Jezebel out of a window, causing her death. The dogs ate Jezebel's body, leaving nothing but her skull, her feet, and the palms of her hands, as prophesied by Elijah.


title: Ahab

text: 1 Kings 16:29 through 22:40 contains the narrative of Ahab's reign. His reign was slightly more emphasised upon than the previous kings, due to his blatant trivialization of the "sins of Jeroboam", which the previous kings of Israel were plagued by, and his subsequent marriage with a pagan princess, the nationwide institution of Baal worship, the persecution of Yahweh's prophets and Naboth's shocking murder. These offenses and atrocities stirred up populist resentment from figures such as Elijah and Micaiah. Indeed, he is referred to by the author of Kings as being "more evil than all the kings before him".


title: Ahab

text: Nonetheless, there were achievements that the author took note of, including his ability to fortify numerous Israelite cities and build an ivory palace. Adherents of the Yahwist religion found their principal champion in Elijah. His denunciation of the royal dynasty of Israel and his emphatic insistence on the worship of Yahweh and Yahweh alone, illustrated by the contest between Yahweh and Baal on Mount Carmel, form the keynote to a period which culminated in the accession of Jehu, an event in which Elijah's chosen disciple Elisha was the leading figure and the Omride Dynasty was brutally defeated.


title: Ahab

text: Ahab was one of the three or four wicked kings of Israel singled out by tradition as being excluded from the future world of bliss (Sanh. x. 2; Tosef., Sanh. xii. 11). Midrash Konen places him in the fifth department of Gehenna, as having the heathen under his charge. Though held up as a warning to sinners, Ahab is also described as displaying noble traits of character (Sanh. 102b; Yer. Sanh. xi. 29b). Talmudic literature represents him as an enthusiastic idolater who left no hilltop in the Land of Israel without an idol before which he bowed, and to which he or his wife, Jezebel, brought his weight in gold as a daily offering. So defiant in his apostasy was he that he had inscribed on all the doors of the city of Samaria the words, "Ahab hath abjured the living God of Israel." Nevertheless, he paid great respect to the representatives of learning, "to the Torah given in twenty-two letters," for which reason he was permitted to reign for twenty-two successive years. He generously supported the students of the Law out of his royal treasury, in consequence of which half his sins were forgiven him. A type of worldliness (Ber. 61b), the Crœsus of his time, he was, according to ancient tradition (Meg. 11a), ruler over the whole world. Two hundred and thirty subject kings had initiated a rebellion; but he brought their sons as hostages to Samaria and Jerusalem. All the latter turned from idolaters into worshipers of the God of Israel (Tanna debe Eliyahu, i. 9). Each of his seventy sons had an ivory palace built for him. Since, however, it was Ahab's idolatrous wife who was the chief instigator of his crimes (B. M. 59a), some of the ancient teachers gave him the same position in the world to come as a sinner who had repented (Sanh. 104b, Num. R. xiv). Like Manasseh, he was made a type of repentance (I Kings, xxi. 29). Accordingly, he is described as undergoing fasts and penances for a long time; praying thrice a day to God for forgiveness, until his prayer was heard (PirḲe R. El. xliii). Hence, the name of Ahab in the list of wicked kings was changed to Ahaz (Yer. Sanh. x. 28b; Tanna debe Eliyahu Rabba ix, Zuṭṭa xxiv.).


title: Ahab

text: Pseudo-Epiphanius ("Opera," ii. 245) makes Micah an Ephraimite. Confounding him with Micaiah, son of Imlah, he states that Micah, for his inauspicious prophecy, was killed by order of Ahab through being thrown from a precipice, and was buried at Morathi (Maroth?; Mic. i. 12), near the cemetery of Enakim (Ένακεὶμ Septuagint rendering of ; ib. i. 10). According to "Gelilot Ereẓ Yisrael" (quoted in "Seder ha-Dorot," i. 118, Warsaw, 1889), Micah was buried in Chesil, a town in southern Judah (Josh. xv. 30). Naboth's soul was the lying spirit that was permitted to deceive Ahab to his death.


title: Ahab

text: Ahab is portrayed by Eduard Franz in the film Sins of Jezebel (1953). He is also the namesake of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick.


title: Iago

text: Iago () is a fictional character in Shakespeare's "Othello" (c. 1601–1604). Iago is the play's main antagonist, and Othello's standard-bearer. He is the husband of Emilia, who is in turn the attendant of Othello's wife Desdemona. Iago hates Othello and devises a plan to destroy him by making him believe that Desdemona is having an affair with his lieutenant, Michael Cassio.


title: Iago

text: The role is thought to have been first played by Robert Armin, who typically played intelligent clown roles like Touchstone in "As You Like It" and Feste in "Twelfth Night".


title: Iago

text: The character's source is traced to Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio's tale "Un Capitano Moro" in "Gli Hecatommithi" (1565). There, the character is simply "the ensign".


title: Iago

text: While no English translation of Cinthio was available in Shakespeare's lifetime, it is possible Shakespeare knew the Italian original, Gabriel Chappuy's 1584 French translation, or an English translation in manuscript. Cinthio's tale may have been based on an actual incident occurring in Venice about 1508.


title: Iago

text: While Shakespeare closely followed Cinthio's tale in composing "Othello", he departed from it in some details. In Cinthio's tale, for example, the ensign suffers an unrequited lust for the Moor's wife, Desdemona, which then drives his vengeance. Desdemona dies in an entirely different manner in Cinthio's tale; the Moor commissions his ensign to bludgeon her to death with a sand-filled stocking. In gruesome detail, Cinthio follows each blow, and, when she is dead, the Moor and his ensign place her lifeless body upon her bed, smash her skull, and then cause the cracked ceiling above the bed to collapse upon her, giving the impression the falling rafters caused her death.


title: Iago

text: The two murderers escape detection. The Moor misses his wife greatly, however, and comes to loathe the sight of his ensign. He demotes him, and refuses to have him in his company. The ensign then seeks revenge by disclosing to "the squadron leader" (the tale's Cassio counterpart) the Moor's involvement in Desdemona's death. The two men denounce the Moor to the Venetian Seignory. The Moor is arrested, transported from Cyprus to Venice, and tortured, but refuses to admit his guilt. He is condemned to exile; Desdemona's relatives eventually execute him. The ensign escapes any prosecution in Desdemona's death, but engages in other crimes and dies after being tortured.


title: Iago

text: Iago is a soldier who has fought beside Othello for several years, and has become his trusted advisor. At the beginning of the play, Iago claims to have been unfairly passed over for promotion to the rank of Othello's lieutenant in favour of Michael Cassio. Iago plots to manipulate Othello into demoting Cassio, and thereafter to bring about the downfall of Othello himself. He has an ally, Roderigo, who assists him in his plans in the mistaken belief that after Othello is gone, Iago will help Roderigo earn the affection of Othello's wife, Desdemona. After Iago engineers a drunken brawl to ensure Cassio's demotion (in Act 2), he sets to work on his second scheme: leading Othello to believe that Desdemona is having an affair with Cassio. This plan occupies the final three acts of the play.


title: Iago

text: He manipulates his wife Emilia, Desdemona's lady-in-waiting, into taking from Desdemona a handkerchief that Othello had given her; he then tells Othello that he had seen it in Cassio's possession. Once Othello flies into a jealous rage, Iago tells him to hide and look on while he (Iago) talks to Cassio. Iago then leads Othello to believe that a bawdy conversation about Cassio's mistress, Bianca, is in fact about Desdemona. Mad with jealousy, Othello orders Iago to kill Cassio, promising to make him lieutenant in return. Iago then engineers a fight between Cassio and Roderigo in which the latter is killed (by Iago himself, double-crossing his ally), but the former merely wounded.


title: Iago

text: Iago's plan appears to succeed when Othello kills Desdemona, who is innocent of Iago's charges. Soon afterwards, however, Emilia brings Iago's treachery to light, and Iago kills her in a fit of rage before being arrested. He remains famously reticent when pressed for an explanation of his actions before he is arrested: "Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word." Following Othello's suicide, Cassio, now in charge, condemns Iago to be imprisoned and tortured as punishment for his crimes.


title: Iago

text: Iago is one of Shakespeare's most sinister villains, often considered such because of the unique trust that Othello places in him, which he betrays while maintaining his reputation for honesty and dedication. Shakespeare contrasts Iago with Othello's nobility and integrity. With 1,097 lines, Iago has more lines in the play than Othello himself.


title: Iago

text: Iago is a Machiavellian schemer and manipulator, as he is often referred to as "honest Iago", displaying his skill at deceiving other characters so that not only do they not suspect him, but they count on him as the person most likely to be truthful.


title: Iago

text: Shakespearean critic A. C. Bradley said that "evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the evil character of Iago", and also states that he "stands supreme among Shakespeare's evil characters because the greatest intensity and subtlety of imagination have gone into his making." The mystery surrounding Iago's actual motives continues to intrigue readers and fuel scholarly debate.


title: Iago

text: In discussing "The Tragedy of Othello", scholars have long debated Iago's role—highlighting the complexity of his character and manipulativeness. Fred West contends that Shakespeare was not content with simply portraying another "stock" morality figure, and that he, like many dramatists, was particularly interested in the workings of the human mind. Thus, according to West, Iago, who sees nothing wrong with his own behaviour, is "an accurate portrait of a psychopath", who is "devoid of conscience, with no remorse". West believes that "Shakespeare had observed that there exist perfectly sane people in whom fellow-feeling of any kind is extremely weak while egoism is virtually absolute, and thus he made Iago".


title: Iago

text: Bradley writes that Iago "illustrates in the most perfect combination the two facts concerning evil, which seem to have impressed Shakespeare the most", the first being that "the fact that perfectly sane people exist in whom fellow-feeling of any kind is so weak that an almost absolute egoism becomes possible to them", with the second being "that such evil is compatible, and even appears to ally itself easily, with exceptional powers of will and intellect". The same critic also famously said that "to compare Iago with the Satan of "Paradise Lost" seems almost absurd, so immensely does Shakespeare's man exceed Milton's Fiend in evil".


title: Iago

text: Weston Babcock, however, would have readers see Iago as "an human being, shrewdly intelligent, suffering from and striking against a constant fear of social snobbery". According to Babcock, it is not malice, but fear, that drives Iago. For, "Iago dates his maturity, as he considers it, his ability to understand the world, from the age at which he recognized every remark to be personally pointed. One only who lacks inner assurance and is so constantly on guard against any hint of his inferiority could so confess himself".


title: Iago

text: John Draper, on the other hand, postulates that Iago is simply "an opportunist who cleverly grasps occasion" (726), spurred on by "the keenest of professional and personal motives". Draper argues that Iago "seized occasions rather than made them". According to his theory, Iago "is the first cause, but events, once under way, pass out of his control". Following this logic, Draper concludes that Iago "is neither as clever nor as wicked as some would think; and the problem of his character largely resolves itself into the question: was he justified in embarking upon the initial stages of his revenge?"


title: Iago

text: Iago has been described as a "motiveless malignity" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This reading would seem to suggest that Iago, much like Don John in "Much Ado About Nothing" or Aaron in "Titus Andronicus", wreaks havoc on the other characters' lives for no ulterior purpose.


title: Iago

text: Léone Teyssandier writes that a possible motive for Iago's actions is envy towards Desdemona, Cassio and Othello; Iago sees them as more noble, generous and, in the case of Cassio, more handsome than he is. In particular, he sees the death of Cassio as a necessity, saying of him that "He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly".


title: Iago

text: Andy Serkis, who in 2002 portrayed Iago at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, wrote in his memoir "Gollum: How We Made Movie Magic", that:


title: Iago

text: Iago reveals his true nature only in his soliloquies, and in occasional asides. Elsewhere, he is charismatic and friendly, and the advice he offers to both Cassio and Othello is superficially sound; as Iago himself remarks: "And what's he then, that says I play the villain, when this advice is free I give, and honest...?"


title: Penguin Books

text: Penguin Books is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other stores for sixpence, bringing high-quality fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. Its success showed that large audiences existed for serious books. It also affected modern British popular culture significantly through its books concerning politics, the arts, and science.


title: Penguin Books

text: Penguin Books is now an imprint of the worldwide Penguin Random House, a conglomerate formed in 2013 by its merger with American publisher Random House, a subsidiary of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Formerly, Penguin Group was wholly owned by British Pearson plc, the global media company which also owned the "Financial Times". When Penguin Random House was formed, Pearson had a 47% stake in the new company, which was reduced to 25% in July 2017. Since April 2020, Penguin Random House has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Bertelsmann. It is one of the largest English-language publishers formerly known as the "Big Six"—now the "Big Five", along with Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster.


title: Penguin Books

text: The first Penguin paperbacks were published in 1935, but at first only as an imprint of The Bodley Head (of Vigo Street, London) with the books originally distributed from the crypt of Holy Trinity Church Marylebone.


title: Penguin Books

text: Anecdotally, Lane recounted how it was his experience with the poor quality of reading material on offer at Exeter railway station that inspired him to create cheap, well designed quality books for the mass market. However the question of how publishers could reach a larger public had been the subject of a conference at Rippon Hall, Oxford in 1934 which Lane had attended. Though the publication of literature in paperback was then associated mainly with poor quality lurid fiction, the Penguin brand owed something to the short-lived Albatross imprint of British and American reprints that briefly traded in 1932.


title: Penguin Books

text: Inexpensive paperbacks did not initially appear viable to Bodley Head, since the deliberately low price of 6d. made profitability seem unlikely. This helped Lane purchase publication rights for some works more cheaply than he otherwise might have, since publishers were convinced of the business's short-term prospects. In the face of resistance from the traditional book trade, it was the purchase of 63,000 books by Woolworths Group that paid for the project outright, confirmed its worth, and allowed Lane to establish Penguin as a separate business in 1936. By March 1936, ten months after the company's launch on 30 July 1935, one million Penguin books had been printed.


title: Penguin Books

text: Only paperback editions were published until the King Penguin series debuted in 1939, and latterly the "Pelican History of Art" was undertaken; these works, considered unsuitable as paperbacks because of their lengths and copious illustrations on art paper, were cloth-bound.


title: Penguin Books

text: Penguin Books Inc was incorporated in 1939 to satisfy US copyright law; and, despite being a late entrant into an already well established paperback market, enjoyed further success under vice president Kurt Enoch with such titles as "What Plane Is That" and "The New Soldier Handbook".


title: Penguin Books

text: The company's expansion saw the hiring of Eunice Frost—first as a secretary, then as editor, and ultimately as a director, who was to have a pivotal influence in shaping the company. In 1945 she was entrusted with the reconstruction of Penguin Inc after the departure of its first managing director, Ian Ballantine.


title: Penguin Books

text: From the outset, design was essential to Penguin's success. Avoiding the illustrated gaudiness of other paperback publishers, Penguin opted for the simple appearance of three horizontal bands, the upper and lower of which were colour-coded according to the series to which the title belonged; this is sometimes referred to as the horizontal grid. In the central white panel, the author and title were printed in Gill Sans, and in the upper band was a cartouche with the legend "Penguin Books". The initial design was created by then 21-year-old office junior Edward Young, who also drew the first version of the Penguin logo. Series such as Penguin Specials and The Penguin Shakespeare had individual designs (by 1937, only S1 and B1-B18 had been published).


title: Penguin Books

text: The colour schemes included: orange and white for general fiction, green and white for crime fiction, cerise and white for travel and adventure, dark blue and white for biographies, yellow and white for miscellaneous, red and white for drama; and the rarer purple and white for essays and belles lettres and grey and white for world affairs. Lane actively resisted the introduction of cover images for several years. Some recent publications of literature from that time have duplicated the original look.


title: Penguin Books

text: The Second World War saw Penguin emerge as a national institution. Though it had no formal role in the war effort, it was integral to it thanks to the publication of such bestselling manuals as "Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps" and "Aircraft Recognition," and supplying books for the services and British POWs. In the war's six years, it printed some 600 titles and started 19 new series. At a time of enormous increase in the demand for books, Penguin enjoyed a privileged place among its peers.


title: Penguin Books

text: Paper rationing was the besetting problem of publishers in wartime, with the fall of France cutting off supply of esparto grass, one of the constituents of the pulp Penguin used. When rationing was introduced in March 1940, the Ministry of Supply allocated a quota to each publisher as a percentage of the amount that firm used between August 1938 and August 1939. This was particularly advantageous to Penguin, who, as a volume printer, was very successful that year. Further, in a deal with the Canadian Government, Penguin agreed to exclusively publish editions for their armed forces, for which they were paid in tons of paper.


title: Penguin Books

text: By January 1942 the Book Production War Economy Agreement regulations came into force which determined rules on paper quality, type size and margins. Consequently Penguin eliminated dust jackets, trimmed margins and replaced sewn bindings with metal staples. Aside from the noticeable deterioration in paperbacks' appearance, it became a practical impossibility to publish books of more than 256 pages, resulting in some titles falling out of print for want of material. In addition to their paper allocation, in 1941 Penguin secured a deal with the War Office, through Bill William's connections with ABCA and CEMA, to supply the troops with books through what was known as the Forces Book Club. Penguin received 60 tons a month from Paper Supply in return for 10 titles a month in runs of 75,000 at 5d.


title: Penguin Books

text: Originally, every paperback carried the message, "FOR THE FORCES – Leave this book at a Post Office when you have read it, so that men and women in the Services may enjoy it too" at the bottom of the back cover, inviting the reader to take advantage of the Royal Mail's free transmission of books to the forces. However, demand exceeded supply on the home front, leading Lane to seek a monopoly on army books made specifically for overseas distribution. Their established paper supply put Penguin in an especially strong position after the war as rationing continued. For this reason, and for the popular prestige the company enjoyed, many of Penguin's competitors had no choice but to concede paperback reprint rights to it.


title: Penguin Books

text: In 1945, Penguin began what would become one of its most important branches, the Penguin Classics, with a translation of Homer's "Odyssey" by E. V. Rieu. Between 1947 and 1949, the German typographer Jan Tschichold redesigned 500 Penguin books, and left Penguin with a set of influential rules of design principles brought together as the "Penguin Composition Rules", a four-page booklet of typographic instructions for editors and compositors. Tschichold's work included the woodcut illustrated covers of the classics series (also known as the medallion series), and with Hans Schmoller, his eventual successor at Penguin, the vertical grid covers that became the standard for Penguin fiction throughout the 1950s. By this time the paperback industry in the UK had begun to grow, and Penguin found itself in competition with then fledgeling Pan Books. Many other series were published such as the "Buildings of England", the "Pelican History of Art" and "Penguin Education".


title: Penguin Books

text: In 1949, Harry F. Paroissien (who had been Sir Allen Lane's deputy) was sent by him to the United States to set up Penguin Books in Baltimore, Maryland.


title: Penguin Books

text: By 1960, a number of forces were to shape the direction of the company, the publication list and its graphic design. On 20 April 1961, Penguin became a publicly listed company on the London Stock Exchange; consequently, Allen Lane had a diminished role at the firm though he was to continue as Managing Director. New techniques such as phototypesetting and offset-litho printing were to replace hot metal and letterpress printing, dramatically reducing cost and permitting the printing of images and text on the same paper stock, thus paving the way for the introduction of photography and novel approaches to graphic design on paperback covers. In May 1960, Tony Godwin was appointed as editorial adviser, rapidly rising to Chief Editor from which position he sought to broaden the range of Penguin's list and keep up with new developments in graphic design. To this end, he hired Germano Facetti in January 1961, who was to decisively alter the appearance of the Penguin brand. Beginning with the crime series, Facetti canvassed the opinion of a number of designers including Romek Marber for a new look to the Penguin cover. It was Marber's suggestion of what came to be called the Marber grid along with the retention of traditional Penguin colour-coding that was to replace the previous three horizontal bars design and set the pattern for the design of the company's paperbacks for the next twenty years. Facetti rolled out the new treatment across the Penguin line starting with crime, the orange fiction series, then Pelicans, Penguin Modern Classics, Penguin Specials, and Penguin Classics, giving an overall visual unity to the company's list. A somewhat different approach was taken to the Peregrine, Penguin Poets, Penguin Modern Poets, and Penguin Plays series. There were over a hundred different series published in total.


title: Penguin Books

text: Just as Lane well judged the public's appetite for paperbacks in the 1930s, his decision to publish "Lady Chatterley's Lover" by D. H. Lawrence in 1960 boosted Penguin's notoriety. The novel was at the time unpublished in the United Kingdom and the predicted obscenity trial, "R v Penguin Books Ltd", not only marked Penguin as a fearless publisher, it also helped drive the sale of at least 3.5 million copies. Penguin's victory in the case heralded the end to the censorship of books in the UK, although censorship of the written word was only finally defeated after the "Inside Linda Lovelace" trial of 1978.


title: Penguin Books

text: By the end of the 1960s Penguin was in financial trouble, and several proposals were made for a new operating structure. These included ownership by a consortium of universities, or joint ownership by the Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, but none of them came to anything. Sir Allen Lane died on 7 July, and six weeks later, Penguin was acquired by Pearson PLC on 21 August 1970. A new emphasis on profitability emerged and, with the departure of Facetti in 1972, the defining era of Penguin book design came to an end.


title: Penguin Books

text: In 1985, Penguin purchased British hardback publisher Michael Joseph and in 1986, Hamish Hamilton. After these acquisitions, Penguin moved its offices to central London (27 Wrights Lane, W8 5TZ). Thus 'Harmondsworth' disappeared as the place of publication after half a century. (The warehouse at Harmondsworth would remain in operation until 2004.)


title: Penguin Books

text: Also in 1986, Penguin purchased American publisher New American Library (NAL) and its hard-cover affiliate E. P. Dutton. New American Library had originally been Penguin U.S.A. and had been spun off in 1948 because of the high complexity of import and export regulations. Penguin repurchased it in order to extend its reach into the US market, and NAL saw the move as a way to gain a hold in international markets.


title: Penguin Books

text: Penguin published Deborah Lipstadt's book "Denying the Holocaust", which accused David Irving of Holocaust denial. Irving sued Lipstadt and Penguin for libel in 1998 but lost in a much publicised court case. Other titles published by Penguin which gained media attention, and controversy, include "Massacre" by Siné, "Spycatcher", which was suppressed in the UK by the government for a time, and "The Satanic Verses", leading to its author Salman Rushdie having to go into hiding for some years after Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a "Fatwā", an edict amounting to a sentence of death against him.


title: Penguin Books

text: In 2006, Penguin attempted to involve the public in collaboratively writing a novel on a wiki platform. They named this project A Million Penguins. On 7 March 2007, the Penguin Books UK blog announced that the project had come to an end.


title: Penguin Books

text: In 2014, the Penguin Hotline was created by Madeline McIntosh. An orange commemorative plaque was unveiled at Exeter train station in May 2017 to mark Lane's significant contribution to the publishing industry.


title: Penguin Books

text: Consonant with Penguin's corporate mission to bring canonical literature to the mass market, the company first ventured into publishing the classics in May 1938 with the issue of "Penguin Illustrated Classics". The savings from the author's payments on these royalty-free titles were instead invested in commissioning woodcut engravings from Robert Gibbings and his circle emanating from the Central School of Arts and Crafts. The books were distinct from the rest of the Penguin marque in their use of a vertical grid (anticipating Tschichold's innovation of 1951) and albertus typeface. The series was not a financial success and the list ceased after just ten volumes the same year it began. Penguin returned to classics with the printing of E. V. Rieu's translation of Homer's "Odyssey" in 1946, which went on to sell three million copies.


title: Penguin Books

text: Penguin's commercial motivation was, as ever, populist; rendering the classics in an approachable modern English was therefore a difficult task whose execution did not always satisfy the critics. Dr Rieu said of his work that "I have done my best to make Homer easy reading for those who are unfamiliar with the Greek world." He was joined in 1959 by Betty Radice who was first his assistant then, after his retirement in 1964, she assumed the role of joint editor with Robert Baldick. As the publisher's focus changed from the needs of the marketplace to those of the classroom the criticism became more acute, Thomas Gould wrote of the series "most of the philosophical volumes in the Penguin series are bad – some very bad indeed. Since Plato and Aristotle are the most read philosophers in the world today, and since some of these Penguin translations are favourites among professional philosophers in several countries, this amounts to a minor crisis in the history of philosophy."


title: Penguin Books

text: The imprint publishes hundreds of classics from the Greeks and Romans to Victorian Literature to modern classics. For nearly twenty years, variously coloured borders to the front and back covers indicated the original language. The second period of design meant largely black covers with a colour illustration on the front. In 2002, Penguin announced it was redesigning its entire catalogue, merging the original Classics list (known in the trade as "Black Classics") with what had been the old Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics list, though the silver covers for the latter have so far been retained for most of the titles. Previously this line had been called 'Penguin Modern Classics' with a pale green livery.


title: Penguin Books

text: The redesign – featuring a colourful painting on the cover, with black background and orange lettering – was well received. However, the quality of the paperbacks themselves seemed to decrease: the spines were more likely to fold and bend. The paperbacks are also printed on non-acid-free pulp paper, which, by some accounts, tends to yellow and brown within a couple of years.


title: Penguin Books

text: The text page design was also overhauled to follow a more closely prescribed template, allowing for faster copyediting and typesetting, but reducing the options for individual design variations suggested by a text's structure or historical context (for example, in the choice of text typeface). Prior to 2002, the text page typography of each book in the Classics series had been overseen by a team of in-house designers; this department was drastically reduced in 2003 as part of the production costs. The in-house text design department still exists, albeit much smaller than formerly. Recent design work includes the Penguin Little Black Classic series, designed by Claire Mason.


title: Penguin Books

text: Lane expanded the business in 1937 with the publication of George Bernard Shaw's "The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism" under the Pelican Books imprint, an imprint designed to educate the reading public rather than entertain. Recognising his own limitations Lane appointed V. K. Krishna Menon as the first commissioning editor of the series, supported by an advisory panel consisting of Peter Chalmers Mitchell, H. L. Bales and W. E. Williams. Several thousand Pelicans were published over the next half-century and brought high quality accounts of the current state of knowledge in many fields, often written by authors of specialised academic books. (The Pelican series, in decline for several years, was finally discontinued in 1984.)


title: Penguin Books

text: "Aircraft Recognition" (S82) by R. A. Saville-Sneath, was a bestseller. In 1940, the children's imprint Puffin Books began with a series of non-fiction picture books; the first work of children's fiction published under the imprint was Barbara Euphan Todd's "Worzel Gummidge" the following year. Another series that began in wartime was the "Penguin Poets": the first volume was a selection of Tennyson's poems (D1) in 1941. Later examples are "The Penguin Book of Modern American Verse" (D22), 1954, and "The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse" (D108), 1968. J. M. Cohen's "Comic and Curious Verse" appeared in three volumes over a number of years.


title: Penguin Books

text: Pelican Books was relaunched as a digital imprint in 2014, with four books published simultaneously on 1 May: "Economics: A User's Guide" by Ha-Joon Chang, "The Domesticated Brain" by the psychologist Bruce Hood, "Revolutionary Russia" by Orlando Figes and "Human Evolution" by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar.


title: Penguin Books

text: In 1965 Penguin entered the field of educational publishing, Allen Lane's aim being to carry the radical and populist spirit of Pelicans into the schoolbook market. His final major initiative, the division was established as a separate publishing operation from Harmondsworth, and based in West Drayton in Middlesex. During its nine-year life it had a major impact on school books, breaking new ground in their concept and design and strongly influencing other publishers’ lists.


title: Penguin Books

text: Among the most successful and influential series were Voices and Junior Voices, Connexions, and the Penguin English Project. Alongside these and other series, the imprint continued another Penguin tradition by producing Education Specials, titles which focussed on often controversial topics within education and beyond. They included highly topical books such as "The Hornsey Affair" and "Warwick University Ltd", reflecting the student unrest of the late 1960s and contributing to the intense national debate about the purpose of higher education. Other titles featured the radical and influential ideas about schooling propounded by writers and teachers from America and elsewhere.


title: Penguin Books

text: Penguin Education also published an extensive range of Readers and introductory texts for students in higher education, notably in subjects such as psychology, economics, management, sociology and science, while for teachers it provided a series of key texts such as "Language, the Learner and the School" and "The Language of Primary School Children". Following Allen Lane's death in 1970 and the takeover the same year by Pearson Longman, the division discontinued publishing school books and was closed in March 1974. More than 80 teachers, educational journalists and academics signed a letter to the Times Educational Supplement regretting the closure of the influential imprint.


title: Penguin Books

text: In November 1937, Penguin inaugurated a new series of short, polemical books under the rubric of "Penguin Specials" with the publication of Edgar Mowrer's "Germany Puts the Clock Back". Their purpose was to offer in-depth analysis of current affairs that would counter the perceived bias of the newspapers in addition to being the company's response to the popularity of Gollancz's Left Book Club. Whereas the Left Book Club was avowedly pro-Soviet, Penguin and Lane expressed no political preference as their editorial policy, though the widespread belief was that the series was left-leaning since the editor was the communist John Lehmann and its authors were, with a few exceptions, men of the left. Speed of publication and delivery (a turnaround of weeks rather than months) were essential to the topicality and therefore success of the Specials, Genevieve Tabouis's anti-appeasement tract "Blackmail or War" sold over 200,000 copies for example. However even this immediacy did not prevent them being overtaken by events: Shiela Grant Duff's "Europe and the Czechs" only made it onto the bookstands on the day of the Munich agreement, but nevertheless went on to be a bestseller. Thirty-five Penguin Specials were published before the outbreak of war, including two novels Hašek's "Good Soldier Schweik" and Bottome's "The Mortal Storm"; they collectively made a significant contribution to the public debate of the time, with many of the more controversial titles being the subject of leading articles in the press.


title: Penguin Books

text: After a hiatus between 1945 and 1949, the "Penguin Specials" continued after the war under the editorship of first Tom Maschler, then after 1961 Tony Godwin. The first title in the revived series was William Gallacher's "The Case for Communism". Godwin initiated the "What's Wrong with Britain" series of Specials in the run up to the 1964 election, which constituted a platform for the New Left's brand of cultural analysis that characterised the leftist political radicalism of the 1960s. Indeed, Penguin Books contributed to the funds that set up Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964. This brief period of revival for Penguin Specials in contributing to the national dialogue was not sustained after the departure of Godwin in 1967, and with the rise in television journalism the Specials series declined in significance through the 1970s and 1980s. The last Special was published in 1988 with Keith Thompson's "Under Siege: Racism and Violence in Britain Today".


title: Penguin Books

text: In December 2011, Penguin launched nine titles as 'Penguin Shorts' which featured the iconic tri-band covers. These books were novellas and short length works of fiction and/or memoirs. In 2012 they became known as Penguin Specials following an agreement with The Economist made in March of that year. These works focused on the kind of topical journalism that was a feature of the original Penguin Specials. Subsequent Penguin Specials released in 2012 and 2013 continued to include both fiction, including the publication of the works shortlisted for the Monash Undergraduate Prize 2012, and topical journalism. Collected columns of cultural critics were also featured.


title: Penguin Books

text: Noel Carrington, an editor at "Country Life" magazine, first approached Lane with the idea of publishing low-cost, illustrated non-fiction children's books in 1938. Inspired by the Editions Père Castor books drawn by Rojan and the technique of autolithography used in the poster art of the time, Carrington's suggestion for what was to become the "Puffin Picture Book" series was adopted by Penguin in 1940 when, as Lane saw it, evacuated city children would need books on farming and natural history to help adjust to the country. The first four titles appeared in December 1940; "War on Land", "War at Sea", "War in the Air" and "On the Farm", and a further nine the following year. Despite Lane's intention to publish twelve a year paper and staff shortages meant only thirteen were issued in the first two years of the series. The Picture Books' 120 titles resulted in 260 variants altogether, the last number 116 Paxton Chadwick's "Life Histories", was issued "hors série" in 1996 by the Penguin Collector's Society.


title: Penguin Books

text: Inexpensive paperback children's fiction did not exist at the time Penguin sought to expand their list into this new market. To this end Eleanor Graham was appointed in 1941 as the first editor of the "Puffin Story Books" series, a venture made particularly difficult due to the resistance of publishers and librarians in releasing the rights of their children's books. The first five titles ("Worzel Gummidge", "Cornish Adventure", "The Cuckoo Clock", "Garram the Hunter" and "Smokey)" were published in the three horizontal stripes company livery of the rest of the Penguin output, a practice abandoned after the ninth volume when full-bleed colour illustrated covers were introduced, a fact that heralded the much greater design freedom of the Puffin series over the rest of Penguin's books.


title: Penguin Books

text: Graham retired in 1961 and was replaced by Kaye Webb who presided over the department for 18 years in a period that saw greatly increased competition in the children's market as well as a greater sophistication in production and marketing. One innovation of Webb's was the creation of the Puffin Club in 1967 and its quarterly magazine "Puffin Post", which at its height had 200,000 members. The Puffin authors' list added Arthur Ransome, Roald Dahl and Ursula K. Le Guin during Webb's editorship and saw the creation of the Peacock series of teenage fiction.


title: Penguin Books

text: Tony Lacey took over Webb's editorial chair in 1979 at the invitation of Penguin managing director Peter Mayer when Puffin was one of the few profitable divisions of the beleaguered company. In line with Mayer's policy of more aggressive commercialisation of the Penguin brand Lacey reduced the number of Puffin imprints, consolidated popular titles under the Puffin Classics rubric and inaugurated the successful interactive gamebook series Fighting Fantasy. Complementary to the Puffin Club the Puffin School Book Club, addressed specifically to schools and organisations, grew significantly in this period helping to confirm Puffin market position such that by 1983 one in three Penguin books sold was a Puffin.


title: Penguin Books

text: Nikolaus Pevsner first proposed a series of volumes amounting to a county by county survey of the monuments of England in ten or more books to both the Cambridge University Press and Routledge before the war, however for various reason his plan came to nothing. It was only through his involvement with Penguin that he was in a position to make a similar suggestion to Allen Lane and be accepted. Pevsner described the project of the Buildings of England as an attempt to fill the gap in English publishing for those multi-volume survey of national art familiar on the continent. In particular Georg Dehio's "Handbuch der deutschen Kunstdenkmaler", a topographical inventory of Germany's important historic buildings that was published in five volumes between 1905 and 1912. Though Pevsner's ambition for the series was to educate and inform the general public on the subtleties of English architectural history, the immediate commercial imperative was competition with the Shell Guides edited by John Betjeman of which 13 had been published by 1939. With Lane's agreement in 1945 Pevsner began work personally touring the county that was to be the subject of observation aided by notes drawn up by researchers. The first volume, "Cornwall", appeared in 1951, and went on to produce 46 architectural guidebooks between then and 1974 of which he wrote 32 alone and ten with assistance. As early as 1954 the series was in commercial difficulty and required sponsorship to continue, a grant from the Leverhulme Trust amongst other sources secured its completion. The series continued after Pevsner's death in 1983, financed in part by the Pevsner Books Trust and published by Yale University Press.


title: Penguin Books

text: Pevsner's approach was of "Kunstgeschichte" quite distinct from the antiquarian interest of local and family history typical of English county histories. Consequently, there is little mention of monumental brasses, bells, tracery, the relationship of the building to the landscape. Nor is there much discussion on building techniques, nor industrial architecture, nor on Art Deco buildings, omissions that his critics hold have led to those subjects undervaluation and neglect. Nevertheless, Pevsner's synoptic study brought rigorous architectural history to an appreciative mass audience, and in particular he enlarged the perception of the Victorian achievement in architecture.


title: Penguin Books

text: Wartime paper rationing, which had resulted in a generous allocation to Penguin, also forced the reduction in space for book reviews and advertising in the newspapers and was partly the cause of the folding of several literary journals, consequently left a gap in the magazine market that Lane hoped to fill. In January 1941 the first issue of "Penguin New Writing" appeared and instantly dominated the market with 80,000 copies sold compared to its closest rival, Cyril Connolly's "Horizon", which mustered 3,500 sales in its first edition. "Penguin New Writing"'s editor John Lehmann was instrumental in introducing the British public to such new writers as Lawrence Durrell, Saul Bellow and James Michie. Yet despite popular and critical success further rationing and, after 1945 declining sales, led monthly publication to become quarterly until the journal finally closed in autumn 1950 after 40 issues.


title: Penguin Books

text: Though "New Writing" was the most durable of Penguin's periodicals it wasn't the publisher's only foray into journalism with "Russian Review", "Penguin Hansard" and "Transatlantic" begun during the war, and "Penguin Film Review", "Penguin Music Magazine", "New Biology" (1945 - 1960), "Penguin Parade", "Penguin Science Survey" and "Penguin Science News" having brief runs after 1945.


title: Penguin Books

text: Penguin's Australian subsidiary released the Popular Penguins series late in 2008. The series has its own website. It was intended to include 50 titles, many of which duplicate those on the Penguin Celebrations list but this was reduced to 49 titles as one of the 50, "Hegemony or Survival" by Noam Chomsky, had to be withdrawn after its initial release as Penguin discovered they no longer held the rights to it.


title: Penguin Books

text: Popular Penguins are presented as a return to Lane's original ethos good books at affordable prices. They have been published with a cover price of A$9.95, less than half of the average price of a paperback novel in Australia at the time of release.


title: Penguin Books

text: Popular Penguins are presented in a more "authentic" interpretation of the Penguin Grid than that of the Celebrations series. They are correct size, when compared to an original 'grid-era' Penguin, and they use Eric Gill's typefaces in a more or less exact match for Jan Tschichold's "tidying" of Edward Young's original three panel cover design. The covers are also printed on a card stock that mirrors the look and feel of 1940s and 50s Penguin covers. On the other hand, all of the Popular Penguins series are in Penguin Orange, and not colour-coded in the manner of the original designs and the "Celebrations" titles.


title: Penguin Books

text: In July 2009, another 50 Popular Penguins were released onto the Australian and New Zealand markets. A further 10 titles written by New Zealand authors were released in March 2010. Another 75 titles were released in Australia in July 2010 to mark Penguin's 75th anniversary.


title: Penguin Books

text: King Penguin Books was a series of pocket-sized monographs published by Penguin Books between 1939 and 1959. They were in imitation of the Insel-Bücherei series published in Germany by Insel Verlag from 1912 onwards, and were pioneer volumes for Penguins in that they were their first volumes with hard covers and their first with colour printing.


title: Penguin Books

text: The books originally combined a classic series of colour plates with an authoritative text. The first two volumes featured sixteen plates from John Gould's "The Birds of Great Britain" (1873) with historical introduction and commentary on each plate by Phyllis Barclay-Smith, and sixteen plates from Redouté's "Roses" (1817–24) with historical introduction and commentary by John Ramsbottom. The third volume began the alternative practice of colour plates from a variety of sources.


title: Penguin Books

text: Some of the volumes, such as Nikolaus Pevsner's "Leaves of Southwell" (1945) or Wilfrid Blunt's "Tulipomania" (1950) were pioneering works of scholarship. Others such as "The Bayeux Tapestry" by Eric Maclagan (1943), "Ur : The First Phases" by Leonard Woolley (1946) or "Russian Icons" (1947) by David Talbot Rice were distillations by experts of their own pioneering works. Some volumes by experts went into revised editions, such as "A Book of English Clocks" (1947 and 1950) by R. W. Symonds.


title: Penguin Books

text: Elizabeth Senior edited the series until 1941, after which Nikolaus Pevsner took over and remained editor until the end of the series. The series ran to 76 volumes.


title: Penguin Books

text: The King Penguin imprint was briefly revived in 1981 for a series of contemporary works, chiefly fiction.


title: Penguin Books

text: Allen Lane approached Nikolaus Pevsner in 1945 for a series of illustrated books that would match the success of the King Penguins. Pevsner recalled his response: "Allen said, 'You have done the King Penguins now and we are going on with them, but if you had your way, what else would you do?' I had my answer ready—and the answer was very formidable, because I outlined both "The Pelican History of Art" and "The Buildings of England" on the spot, each about 40 to 50 volumes. Allen said, 'Yes, we can do both,' and that was the end of the meeting." Pevsner's industry quickly bore fruit with the first contracts signed by 1946 for John Summerson's "Architecture in Britain", Anthony Blunt's "Art and Architecture in France", and Rudolf Wittkower's "Italian art and architecture", the first title "Painting in Britain, 1530–1790" by Ellis Waterhouse was issued in 1953. By 1955, Pevsner produced a prospectus for the series announcing the publication of four new volumes and a plan for the rest of the series totalling 47 titles. The ambition of the series exceeded previously published multi-volume histories of art such as André Michel's "Histoire de l'art" (17 vols., 1905–28), the "Propyläen Kunstgeschichte" (25 vols., 1923–35). Forty-one volumes were published by the time Pevsner retired from editing in 1977. His work was continued by Judy Nairn (his editorial assistant on the "Buildings of England") and the medievalist Peter Lasko. Yale University Press acquired the series in 1992 when 45 titles had been completed; by 2004 they had published 21 volumes, mostly revisions of existing editions. New volumes continue to be produced in the 2010s, and new editions of older ones.


title: Penguin Books

text: For Penguin the series was a departure from their commercial mainstay of paperbacks as the histories of art were the first large format, illustrated hardback books they had produced. Despite their relatively high price they were a financial success, yet for Pevsner they were intended primarily as graduate level texts in what was, for the English speaking world, the newly emerging academic discipline of art history. Nevertheless, the series was criticised from within the academy for its evident biases. Many of its authors were German émigrés, consequently there was a methodological preference for the "kunstwissenschaft" practiced in Vienna and Berlin between the wars; a formalism that ignored the social context of art. Moreover, the weight given to some subjects seemed disproportionate to some critics, with seven of its 47 volumes dedicated to English art, a "tributary of the main European current" as the "Burlington Magazine" observed. Though the 1955 plan was never fully executed—the volumes on Greek painting and sculpture, quattrocento painting and cinquecento sculpture were not written—the Pelican History remains one of the most comprehensive surveys of world art published.


title: Penguin Books

text: Mobile bookstore launched by Penguin Books India in collaboration with Ms. Satabdi Mishra and Mr. Akshaya Rautaray.


title: Jerry Only

text: Gerald Caiafa Jr. (born April 21, 1959), better known by his stage name Jerry Only, is an American musician, best known as the bassist for the Misfits and later the vocalist as well. He is the only member to appear in every Misfits lineup.


title: Jerry Only

text: Gerald Caiafa Jr. was born in Lodi, New Jersey. He started The Misfits with Glenn Danzig on vocals and Manny on drums in 1977, just a few months after receiving his first bass as a late Christmas present. He would work at his father's machine shop during the week to help finance the band and play shows on the weekend. This would go on for several years and the band split due to differences between Danzig and the rest of the band. During this downtime, Only and his brother Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein (the guitarist for the Misfits) formed Kryst The Conqueror. In 1995, Only settled a legal battle out of court with co-founder Glenn Danzig, allowing him rights to the Misfits' name on a performing level, while they split the money on merchandising. He reformed the band with Doyle (who played guitar from 1980 to 1983), vocalist Michale Graves, and drummer Dr. Chud.


title: Jerry Only

text: Chud and Graves left the group in 2000 to form Graves. In reaction to the loss of members, Doyle left the Misfits. Graves, Doyle and Chud were replaced on the M25 tour by Dez Cadena, formerly of Black Flag and DC3, on guitar and Marky Ramone, formerly of The Ramones, on drums. Only took up the singing duties from this point till the present date. In early 2005, Marky left the group and Only brought in ex-Misfit and Black Flag drummer ROBO to rejoin the group. A new album was recorded in 2010 in Colorado entitled "The Devil's Rain" which was released in October 2011. A single, "Land of the Dead", was released at the mischief night show 2009 at Starland Ballroom in Sayreville, NJ.


title: Jerry Only

text: In 2013, Only and the Misfits released a new album entitled "DEAD ALIVE!" recorded live at several shows.


title: Jerry Only

text: In 2017, the reunited lineup performed two additional concerts at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas on December 28 and The Forum in Inglewood, California on December 30. They also performed at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey on May 19, 2018.


title: Jerry Only

text: In 1999, Only and the rest of the then Misfits lineup had a brief stint in World Championship Wrestling when they aligned with wrestler Vampiro. Only participated in probably the most memorable match of the Misfits' time when he fought Dr. Death in a steel cage match. Only was dominated in the match but Death was distracted when the rest of the Misfits interfered and attacked his manager Oklahoma (a parody of Jim Ross), pouring barbecue sauce in his eyes. Only won the match after being accidentally Irish whipped through the cage door by Dr. Death.


title: Jerry Only

text: On May 6, 2014, it was announced that Glenn Danzig had filed a lawsuit against Jerry Only, claiming Only registered trademarks for everything Misfits-related in 2000 behind Danzig's back, misappropriating exclusive ownership over the trademarks for himself, including the band's iconic "Crimson Ghost" logo. Danzig claims that this violated a 1994 contract the two had. Danzig says that after registering the trademarks, Only secretly entered into deals with various merchandisers and cut him out of any potential profits in the process. He said that Only has purposefully led merchandisers, including Hot Topic, to believe that they are legally bound not to accept licenses to exploit the Marks from Danzig or his designees, and Only continues to do so. He said that through this, Only has caused merchandisers not to do business with him and it has deceived consumers as to the source of the merchandise which bore the trademarks. Danzig said a vast majority of the Misfits fans associate the trademarks with the 1977–1983 classic Misfits era when Danzig was a member of the band and not with the current era Misfits. Danzig feels that through false advertising and misrepresentations to merchandisers and consumers it has caused him to suffer damages in excess of $75,000. In August 2014, the judge dismissed the case in favor of Only. In 2017, Darkride Films Interview original drummer Manny Martinez said that from what he remembers, there was no Diane Dipiazza or Jimi Battle in the band. Before The Misfits, Mr. Jim, Diane, and Jimi played in a band with Glenn doing covers, but the original Misfits were Glenn Danzig, Manny Martinez, Jerry Only, and Franche Coma.


title: Scrooged

text: Scrooged is a 1988 American Christmas fantasy comedy film directed by Richard Donner and written by Mitch Glazer and Michael O'Donoghue. Based on the 1843 novella "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens, "Scrooged" is a modern retelling that follows Bill Murray as Frank Cross, a cynical and selfish television executive, who is visited by a succession of ghosts on Christmas Eve intent on helping him regain his Christmas spirit. The film also stars Karen Allen, John Forsythe, Bobcat Goldthwait, Carol Kane, Robert Mitchum, Michael J. Pollard, and Alfre Woodard.


title: Scrooged

text: "Scrooged" was filmed on a $32 million budget over three months in New York City and Hollywood. Murray returned to acting for the film after taking a four-year hiatus following the success of "Ghostbusters", which he found overwhelming. Murray worked with Glazer and O'Donoghue on reworking the script before agreeing to join the project. The production was tumultuous, as Murray and Donner had different visions for the film. Murray described his time on the film as "misery", while Donner called Murray "superbly creative but occasionally difficult". Along with Murray's three brothers, Brian, John, and Joel, "Scrooged" features numerous celebrity cameos.


title: Scrooged

text: The film's marketing capitalized on Murray's "Ghostbusters" role, referencing his encounters with ghosts in both films. "Scrooged" was released on November 23, 1988, and grossed over $100 million worldwide. The film received a positive response from test audiences, but was met with a mixed response upon its release from critics who found the film too mean spirited or too sentimental. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Makeup, but lost to the fantasy-comedy film "Beetlejuice".


title: Scrooged

text: Since its release, "Scrooged" has become a regular television Christmastime feature, with some critics calling it an alternative to traditional Christmas films, and others arguing that "Scrooged" was ahead of its time, making it relevant in the modern day. It has appeared on various lists of the best Christmas films.


title: Scrooged

text: IBC Television executive Frank Cross is pushing his company to broadcast an extravagant live production of "A Christmas Carol" on Christmas Eve, making the staff work throughout the holiday. Frank fires executive Eliot Loudermilk for disagreeing with him, and sends cheap IBC-monogrammed towels to most of the people on his Christmas list, including his personal assistant Grace and his brother James, while the powerful and influential people on his list get an expensive four-head hi-fi stereo VCR. Seeing the stress Frank is under with the production, Frank's boss Preston Rhinelander brings in consultant Brice Cummings to provide assistance, though Brice secretly wants Frank's job.


title: Scrooged

text: The night before the show, Frank is visited by the ghost of his mentor Lew Hayward, an unloved miser who died from a heart attack seven years prior. Lew warns him three more ghosts will appear to him over the next day to help Frank avoid the same fate. Before it vanishes, the ghost dials up Claire Phillips, Frank's lost love from years ago. Claire comes to the network to talk to Frank, but Frank does not make time for her and she returns to the homeless shelter where she works.


title: Scrooged

text: As rehearsals start and Frank wraps up his lunch with Preston, Frank is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, appearing as a manic taxi driver. He takes Frank to see his past: how he found solace in television to compensate for a cold and distant father, and how he had fallen in love with Claire but lost her when he prioritized his television career over her.


title: Scrooged

text: After the visit, Frank goes to the shelter to see Claire, hoping to make amends. However, his attitude quickly sours and he shows his contempt for a homeless man named Herman and the shelter workers. He returns to the studio, but not before telling Claire: "If you wanna save someone, save yourself."


title: Scrooged

text: The Ghost of Christmas Present arrives as an ethereal, sweet-voiced fairy who punches, kicks and slaps Frank to focus his attention. She takes him to Grace's apartment, showing his assistant's struggles to support her large family, including her youngest son Calvin who has remained mute since witnessing his father's death. The Ghost then shows him James, spending a humble yet festive Christmas with a group of friends and his wife Wendie. James still defends Frank, despite Frank's cheap gifts and his refusal to share in Christmas celebrations with him. The Ghost leaves him in a utility space under a sidewalk with Herman, who, Frank finds to his shock, has frozen to death.


title: Scrooged

text: Frank desperately tries to escape, breaking through a boarded-up door to end back up on the set of the production. Preston directs Brice to take over rehearsals to give Frank some time off. Retiring to his office, Frank finds a drunken Eliot waiting for him with a shotgun, ready to kill Frank for causing the loss of his job and family. Frank escapes into the elevator where the Grim Reaper-like Ghost of Christmas Future awaits. The Ghost takes him to the future where a now-catatonic Calvin has been institutionalized. Claire has heeded Frank's words and lives a decadent life, now viewing the homeless with disgust. Finally, the Ghost shows Frank's cremation ceremony, with only James and Wendie in attendance. Frightened and remorseful, Frank is further shocked to find himself inside the casket as it is about to be incinerated; he breaks his way out, ending up out of the elevator and facing Eliot, so elated to be alive that he is oblivious to the fact that Elliot is still trying to kill him. Frank's completely changed demeanor surprises Eliot, particularly when Frank offers him a high-level executive position.


title: Scrooged

text: With Eliot's help, Frank returns to the production set, secures Brice in the control room, and breaks into the show's live broadcast to speak of his new appreciation for life. He apologizes on-air to Grace, James, and the cast and crew, and makes a passionate plea to Claire to come back to him. Claire sees this at the shelter and heads for the network with the help of the Ghost of Christmas Past. As Frank and Claire reunite, Calvin comes up to Frank and speaks for the first time, reminding him to say the words "God bless us, everyone", much to Grace's elation.


title: Scrooged

text: Frank leads the crew in singing "Put a Little Love in Your Heart", and sees Lew, the three Ghosts, and the ghost of Herman smiling and waving back to him while singing along as the credits roll. Then Frank instructs the people in the theater to sing along. James then quotes "My brother the King of Christmas".


title: Scrooged

text: "Scrooged" features a number of cameos.Within the live ICB Christmas Special include John Houseman as the narrator, Buddy Hackett as Ebenezer Scrooge, Mary Lou Retton as "Tiny Tim" Cratchit, Jamie Farr as Jacob Marley, Pat McCormick as the Ghost of Christmas Present. and Chaz Conner Jr. as the Ghost of Christmas Future (TV), Paul Shaffer, Larry Carlton, and David Sanborn as the Street Musicians, and "Solid Gold" Dancers as the Scroogettes. Lee Majors as himself as the star of the IBC Christmas action special "The Night the Reindeer Died", and similarly for Robert Goulet. Miles Davis appears as himself.


title: Scrooged

text: Anne Ramsey and her husband Logan Ramsey cameo as Eva and Billy, Herman's friends at the homeless shelter.


title: Scrooged

text: "Scrooged" was filmed on a $32 million budget over three-and-a-half months on sets in Hollywood. Exterior shots of the IBC building were filmed outside of the Seagram Building in New York City. Murray considered himself "rusty" after having left acting for four years following the release of "Ghostbusters". He described the success of that film as a phenomenon that would forever be his biggest success, compounded by the failure of "The Razor's Edge" (1984) made him feel "radioactive" and resulted in him avoiding making movies temporarily.


title: Scrooged

text: Murray had the opportunity to work on "Scrooged" over two years earlier but was enjoying his break from work. When he did feel a desire to return to acting, he said the "scripts were just not that good", and he returned to the "Scrooged" project as he found the idea of making a funny Scrooge appealing. Murray was paid $6 million for his role. Producer Art Linson justified the figure, by saying that for each year Murray stayed away from films, his audience draw and therefore fee potentially increased. At the time, Linson said that aside from Eddie Murphy, Murray's was the only other name that could draw $10 million of tickets in the opening three to four days.


title: Scrooged

text: Murray wanted several changes to the script once he joined the project; among other changes, the romantic plot with Karen Allen's Claire was expanded, and the family scenes were reworked as Murray felt they were "off". Murray worked with scriptwriters, Michael O'Donoghue and Mitch Glazer (whom Murray had previously worked with on "Saturday Night Live") until Murray was confident enough to begin filming. O'Donoghue and Glazer found the film's denouement, in which Murray reveals his redemption live on TV, to be the most difficult to write. They settled on the example of Christmas Eve in New York, where people are nice to each other for one night, believing it to be a "miracle we could live with".


title: Scrooged

text: Murray was concerned with how he should portray the scene, with Glazer telling him to follow the script. Wanting a central acting moment, however, Murray gave an emotional and manic performance, deviating from his marked positions and improvising his speech. Glazer and O'Donoghue thought that the actor was suffering a mental breakdown. After he was finished, the crew applauded Murray, but O'Donoghue remarked "What was that? The Jim Jones hour?" Donner turned and punched O'Donoghue in the arm, leaving him bruised for a week.


title: Scrooged

text: In a 1989 interview, Murray said, "He shot a big, long, sloppy movie", describing how a lot of filmed content was not present in the film's final cut. For his part, O'Donoghue later said that Donner did not understand comedy, omitting the script's subtler elements for louder and faster moments. He estimated that only 40% of his and Glazer's original script made it into the final film and the surviving content was "twisted". The final cut of the film runs for 97 minutes.


title: Scrooged

text: The production was rife with conflict between Murray and Donner. In a 1990 interview with Roger Ebert, Murray said that "Scrooged" "could have been a really, really great movie. The script was so good... He [Donner] kept telling me to do things louder, louder, louder. I think he was deaf." In a later 1993 interview, Murray said that he and Donner had different visions for the type of film "Scrooged" would become, adding that there was potentially only one take in the finished film that was his.


title: Scrooged

text: He described the experience as having a "fair amount of misery" and said "That's a tough one; I still have trouble talking about ["Scrooged"]", describing working on a "dusty, smelly, and smokey" set, feeling alone, and even coughing up blood due to the fake snow being used. He also admitted to feeling pressure from being the solo star of a film compared to previous productions like "Ghostbusters", as he was on set mostly every day where some actors would make brief cameos requiring only a day or two of work.


title: Scrooged

text: Donner himself said that he had never worked with Murray before and met up with him for drinks before accepting the project to see if they would get along; they did. The director was more positive about their relationship, describing Murray as "superbly creative but occasionally difficult - as difficult as any actor." Donner said that Murray was always in a working mindset on set, believing it made him tired, so the crew would do "silly things" to improve morale. Donner had not worked with an improvisational comedian like Murray before, who ad-libbed many of his lines, saying "you don't direct [Murray], you pull him back".


title: Scrooged

text: Bill Murray said that "being the meanest person in the world" as Frank Cross was fun. He described his challenge as having an edge but then completing Cross' transformation into a decent person at the end. Murray said "being a decent person is not that hard. But acting like one is." Carol Kane's ghost was intended to have a body double for ballet scenes until set designer saw Kane rehearsing the dance and convinced Donner that the resulting scene would be funnier with Kane's "horrible" dancing.


title: Scrooged

text: Donner and Murray said that Kane would sometimes experience long crying periods during filming, caused by frustration over her violent scenes. Murray also endured some physical pain during his encounters with Kane's character, insisting that she actually hit him during their scenes together, and at one point tearing the inside of his lip when Kane pulled his lip too hard. Kane herself said "I hit Bill Murray with a toaster, and with my wings, and I kicked him in areas that weren't pleasant for him. I had fun. I don't think it was as fun for Bill, because he was the victim! I did what the stunt people told me, but when I had to flap my wings in his face, I really couldn't control them."


title: Scrooged

text: The film also features Murray's three brothers; Joel Murray cameos as a party guest, Brian Doyle-Murray plays Frank's father, and John Murray plays his on-screen brother James. The film also features the final appearance of the Solid Gold Dancers. Comedian Sam Kinison was considered for the role of the Ghost of Christmas Past before it went to musician David Johansen, a personal friend of Murray's. Robert Mitchum cameos as Frank's boss Preston Rhinelander; the actor was not interested in the small role, but Donner asked him to meet with Murray, who convinced him to take the part. Lee Majors cameos as himself in the film after being contacted directly by Donner. Majors appears in the opening scene helping to save Santa Claus. Majors was armed with a stripped-down M134 Minigun, the same one featured in "Predator", which he found difficult to carry due to its weight.


title: Scrooged

text: In 1989, A&M Records released the soundtrack to "Scrooged", which features nine songs. Seven of the songs were released as singles: Put a Little Love in Your Heart (October 1988), "The Love You Take" (December 1988), "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)" December 1988 "We Three Kings of Orient Are", A Wonderful Life,


title: Scrooged

text: The rendition of "Put a Little Love in Your Heart" by Al Green and Annie Lennox spent 17 weeks in the U.S. music charts, peaking at number 9 on January 14, 1989.


title: Scrooged

text: The film's marketing made references to Murray's role in "Ghostbusters", with taglines including "Bill Murray is back among the ghosts, only this time, it's three against one". "Scrooged" premiered in Los Angeles, California on November 17, 1988, followed by its public release on November 23, 1988.


title: Scrooged

text: "Scrooged" was a moderate box office hit on release in the United States. It earned $18.6 million during its release over its Thanksgiving-extended opening weekend in the United States at 1,262 theaters. It was the highest earning film that weekend, ahead of "The Land Before Time" ($8.1 million) and "Oliver & Company" ($6.3 million), both in their second weekend, and made "Scrooged" the fourth highest-opening weekend of the year.


title: Scrooged

text: The second weekend saw an over 40% drop, taking $7.5 million. Over the Christmas holiday period itself, the film had fallen to ninth place, behind "The Land Before Time" and "Oliver & Company". The film left theaters after eight weeks with a total gross of $60.3 million, making it the 13th highest-grossing film of 1988.


title: Scrooged

text: The DVD version was scheduled for re-release on October 31, 2006 as the "Yule Love It!" edition. This version was to include commentary by Donner, "On the set with Bill Murray", Murray's message from the ShoWest exhibitors convention, and other featurettes including "The Look of "Scrooged"", "Updating Ebeneezer", "Bringing the Ghosts to Life" and "Christmas to Remember". Although Paramount promoted the "Yule Love It!" edition with images of a custom DVD case and a retail price as late as September that year, it missed its release date and it remains unreleased. The reason for this has not been disclosed.


title: Scrooged

text: "Scrooged" was released on Blu-ray on November 1, 2011. The release featured a 1080p resolution transfer of the original film and DTS HD Master Audio 5.1 quality sound. The release was criticized for only including the film's theatrical trailer, with Collider's Phil Brown saying "there must be some incredible behind-the-scenes stories to tell."


title: Scrooged

text: Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a score of 69% based on 49 critics. The critics' consensus reads, ""Scrooged" gets by with Bill Murray and a dash of holiday spirit, although it's hampered by a markedly conflicted tone and an undercurrent of mean-spiritedness."


title: Scrooged

text: Pre-release audience screenings in Summer 1988 were positive, with 93% of those surveyed rating the film as "very good", the highest rating studio Paramount Pictures had received at the time. Press screenings nearer to release however were met with responses ranging from ovations to disgruntlement. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Scrooged

text: On release, reviews were similarly mixed. Roger Ebert called it one of the most "disquieting, unsettling films to come along in quite some time", saying that it portrays pain and anger more than comedy. "Empire"s William Thomas called it a slick and cynical update of Dickens’s tale, but that it is only funny when Murray's character is being a "complete bastard". "The Washington Post"s Joe Brown said that it was a "sprawling mess", but that he liked it. Brown said that "Scrooged" was unlikely to become a seasonal tradition like "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) and "Miracle on 34th Street" (1947), considering that it would age poorly and either scare or be too adult for child audiences.


title: Scrooged

text: The "Los Angeles Times"s Sheila Benson said the film's opening is its high-point, featuring the parody IBC lineup of "Robert Goulet's Cajun Christmas" and "The Night the Reindeer Died", but as the film progresses the laughs become more sporadic and the tone becomes darker. Benson said that the film is a "mass of sharp, well-deserved paper cuts" to the entertainment industry, citing Murray's character whose life knowledge is based on the Golden Age of Television, and Mitchum's character who wants to add elements to the network shows that attract pet audiences, but Benson lamented that these details were never expanded upon.