title: Hackney carriage

text: In London, hackney-carriage drivers have to pass a test called The Knowledge to demonstrate that they have an intimate knowledge of the geography of London streets, important buildings, etc. Learning The Knowledge allows the driver to become a member of the Worshipful Company of Hackney Carriage Drivers. There are two types of badge, a yellow one for the suburban areas and a green one for all of London. The latter is considered far more difficult. Drivers who own their cabs as opposed to renting from a garage are known as "mushers" and those who have just passed the "knowledge" are known as "butter boys". There are currently around 21,000 black cabs in London, licensed by the Public Carriage Office.


title: Hackney carriage

text: Elsewhere, councils have their own regulations. Some merely require a driver to pass a DBS disclosure and have a reasonably clean driving licence, while others use their own local versions of London's The Knowledge test.


title: Hackney carriage

text: Oil millionaire Nubar Gulbenkian owned an Austin FX3 Brougham Sedanca taxi, with custom coachwork by FLM Panelcraft Ltd as he was quoted "because it turns on a sixpence whatever that is." Gulbenkian had two such taxis built, the second of which was built on an FX4 chassis and was sold at auction by Bonhams for $39,600 in 2015. Other celebrities are known to have used hackney carriages both for their anonymity and their ruggedness and manoeuvrability in London traffic. Users included Prince Philip, whose cab was converted to run on liquefied petroleum gas, author and actor Stephen Fry, and the Sheriffs of the City of London. A black cab was used in the band Oasis's video for the song "Don't Look Back in Anger." Black cabs were used as recording studios for indie band performances and other performances in the Black Cab Sessions internet project.


title: Hackney carriage

text: "Ghosthunting With..." featured a black cab owned by host of the show, Yvette Fielding. Bez of the Happy Mondays owns one, shown on the UK edition of "Pimp My Ride". Noel Edmonds used a black cab to commute from his home to the "Deal or No Deal" studios in Bristol. He placed a dressed mannequin in the back so that he could use special bus/taxi lanes, and so that people would not attempt to hail his cab.


title: Hackney carriage

text: Between 2003 and 1 August 2009 the London taxi model TXII could be purchased in the United States. Today there are approximately 250 TXIIs in the US, operating as taxis in San Francisco, Dallas, Long Beach, Houston, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Newport, Rhode Island, Wilmington, North Carolina and Portland, Oregon. There are also a few operating in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The largest London taxi rental fleet in North America is in Wilmington, owned by The British Taxi Company. There are London cabs in Saudi Arabia, Romania, South Africa, Lebanon, Egypt, Bahrain and Cyprus, and in Israel, where a Chinese-made version of LTI's model TX4 built by Geely Automobile is available. In February 2010, a number of TX4s started operating in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, and are known as London Taxi.


title: Hackney carriage

text: Singapore has used London-style cabs since 1992; starting with the "Fairway". The flag-down fares for the London Taxis are the same as for other taxis. SMRT Corporation, the sole operator, had by March 2013 replaced its fleet of 15 ageing multi-coloured (gold, pink, etc.) taxis with new white ones. They are the only wheelchair-accessible taxis in Singapore, and were brought back following an outcry after the removal of the service.


title: Hackney carriage

text: By 2011 a thousand of a Chinese-made version of LTI's latest model, TX4, had been ordered by Baku Taxi Company. The plan is part of a program originally announced by Azerbaijan's Ministry of Transportation to introduce London cabs to the capital, Baku. The move was part of a £16 million agreement between the London Taxi Company and Baku Taxi Company.


title: Hackney carriage

text: Although the LEVC TX is more expensive and exceeds the Japanese size classifications to gain the tax advantages Japanese livery drivers enjoy with the similarly designed but smaller Toyota JPN Taxi, Geely has attempted to break into the Japanese market. Alternatively, while the Toyota JPN Taxi doesn't meet the passenger capacity or turning radius Conditions of Fitness required by Transport for London, it does meet the emissions and accessibility requirements that may make it an ideal option for cities outside of London without the seating requirements or as a private hire vehicle while still envoking the familiar black cab profile.


title: Hackney carriage

text: The unique body of the London taxi is occasionally wrapped with all-over advertising, known as a "livery".


title: Hackney carriage

text: In October 2011 the company Eyetease Ltd. introduced digital screens on the roofs of London taxis for dynamically changing location-specific advertising.


title: Hackney carriage

text: On 14 December 2010, Mayor of London Boris Johnson released an air quality strategy paper encouraging phasing out of the oldest of the LT cabs, and proposing a £1m fund to encourage taxi owners to upgrade to low-emission vehicles. From 2018, all newly licensed taxis in London must be zero emission capable.


title: Hackney carriage

text: In 2017, the LEVC TX was introduced - a purpose built hackney carriage, built as a plug-in hybrid range-extender electric vehicle. By April 2022, over 5,000 TX's had been sold in London, around a third of London's taxi fleet. In October 2019 the first fully electric cab since the Bersey in 1897, the Dynamo Taxi, was launched with an 187-mile range and with the bodywork based on Nissan's NV200 platform.


title: Hackney carriage

text: 2011 saw the launch of many digital hailing applications for hackney carriages that operate through smartphones, including GetTaxi and Hailo. Many of these applications also facilitate payment and tracking of the taxicabs.


title: Hackney carriage

text: Laws about the definition, licensing and operation of hackney carriages have a long history. The most significant pieces of legislation by region are:


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: The CASA C-212 Aviocar is a turboprop-powered STOL medium cargo aircraft designed and built by the Spanish aircraft manufacturer Construcciones Aeronáuticas SA (CASA). It is designed for use by both civil and military operators.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: The C-212 was developed during the 1960s in response to the Spanish Air Force's need to replace much of its transport aircraft fleet and was designed to perform numerous roles, including ambulance aircraft, paratroop carrier, and utility transport. The first prototype made its maiden flight on 26 March 1971, and an order was secured from the Spanish Air Force three years thereafter. Several other customers emerged, initially from the military sector but, due to the interest of civilian airliners, CASA developed a dedicated civil version of the C-212 as well. Production of the type at the Seville facility would continue for 40 years, with 483 aircraft produced.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: Indonesia emerged as a key early customer for the C-212. During 1975, the Indonesian aircraft company IPTN successfully secured the rights to license-produce the aircraft in Bandung, Indonesia. CASA assisted the establishment of a production line there that, by 2000, had constructed a total of 95 NC-212s. The majority of Indonesian-built aircraft were sold to domestic customers, although some exports were also recorded in the Asian market. During February 2013, it was announced that Airbus (the successor company to CASA) had agreed terms with PTDI (IPTN's successor) to fully transfer production of the C-212 to Indonesia. For a time, PTDI produced both the NC-212-200 and the -400 upgrade, which were equipped with new digital avionics and autopilot, and featured a redesigned cabin that could accommodate up to 28 passengers.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: By December 2012, there were 92 operators of the C-212 around the world. These operators included numerous charter and short-haul aviation companies as well as various national air services, which commonly used as a transport, surveillance aircraft, and for search and rescue. The C-212 has been a popular aircraft among skydivers and smokejumpers due to its uncommon rear ramp arrangement amongst its competitors. In particular, the Australian airline Skytraders has used a number of C-212s to support Australian scientific research teams across Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: During the late 1960s, the Spanish Air Force was operating a number of outdated piston-engined transports, including the three-engined Junkers Ju 52 and two-engined Douglas C-47. Seeking to fulfil the Spanish Air Force's needs to modernise its transport force, the Spanish aircraft manufacturer Construcciones Aeronáuticas SA (CASA) developed a proposed aircraft, designated "C-212". This was a twin-engined 18-seat transport aircraft that would be capable of performing in a variety of military roles, including passenger transport, ambulance aircraft and paratroop carrier, while also being suitable for use by civil operators. On 26 March 1971, the first prototype conducted its maiden flight. During 1974, the Spanish Air Force decided to purchase the C-212, which had acquired the name "Aviocar", in order to update its fleet.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: Several airlines expressed interest in the type, particularly in light of its success with military operators, thus CASA decided to pursue development of a dedicated commercial version of the C-212. During July 1975, the first examples of which was delivered. During 1997, the improved -400 model was introduced, featuring a glass cockpit and more powerful Honeywell TPE331 engines. By August 2006, a total of 30 CASA-built C-212s of all variants reportedly remained in airline service with various operators around the world.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: During July 2010, Domingo Urena-Raso, CEO of Airbus Military, stated that the company could no longer afford to produce the C-212 in Europe. Production of the type at Airbus' Seville facility was progressively slowed to only four aircraft in two years. During December 2012, the final Spanish-assembled C-212 was delivered to its end customer, the Vietnam Marine Police. By the time of the line's shutdown, 477 aircraft have been produced for 92 operators.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: During 1975, the Indonesian aircraft company IPTN successfully negotiated terms with CASA to produce up to 108 C-212s under license in Indonesia. Accordingly, IPTN and Nurtanio became involved in the manufacturing of their own C-212s, with assembly being performed at IPTN's facility in Bandung, Indonesia. CASA provided technical assistance in establishing their production line, sending a delegation of technicians to Bandung to train local personnel; the relative simplicity of the C-212's design was credited with greatly aiding this process.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: Under the terms of the license, IPTN was permitted to sell the aircraft throughout the Asian market. Despite this, the majority of Indonesian-made NC-212s were typically sold to domestic customers; by 1986, only six aircraft had reportedly been exported. By 2000, a total of 95 NC-212s has been completed. By this point, production of the type had become a secondary priority to other ventures, such as the larger CASA/IPTN CN-235. IPTN also undertook development of more advanced versions of the aircraft. Between 2004 and 2008, all of the jigs and fixtures necessary to produce the "NC212-400" were supplied by Airbus and installed at Bandung, enabling Indonesia to become the single-source manufacturer of this model. An extension to the licensing agreement was also made in 2006.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: During July 2011, Airbus announced an agreement to strategically collaborate with PTDI (IPTN's successor) on the C-212. Under the terms of this agreement, Airbus undertook an 18-month first phase of support to PTDI, after which it stated it would provide PTDI an increasing high-value industrial activity, including C-212 upgrades and production transference. In February 2013, the arrangement between the two companies was formally extended to transfer production of the C-212 to Indonesia. For a time, PTDI produced both the NC-212-200 and the -400 upgrade, which were equipped with new digital avionics and autopilot, and featured a redesigned cabin that could accommodate up to 28 passengers. During 2014, PTDI stopped producing the -400 series in favour of focusing on the improved NC-212i model.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: The CASA C-212 Aviocar is a turboprop-powered STOL-capable cargo aircraft. In terms of its basic configuration, it has a high-mounted wing, a boxy fuselage, and a conventional tail. The C-212 has been designed to operate in austere environments for extended periods without ground support apparatus. Features such as its STOL performance and rugged landing gear fitted with low-pressure tyres enables it to operate from unpaved fields and under hot-and-high conditions. For greater simplicity, the aircraft's tricycle undercarriage is non-retractable.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: Dependent on configuration, the cabin of the C-212 has a maximum occupancy of between 21 and 28 passengers. In a paratroop configuration, up to 24 paratroopers along with one jumpmaster can be accommodated on foldable sidewall seats, while in a mixed configuration, up to ten soldiers and a single vehicle can be transported. Since the C-212 does not have a pressurized fuselage, it is limited to relatively low-flight-level airline usage (below MSL), and is thus orientated for operations performing short legs and regional airline services.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: During 2013, it was reported that 290 C-212s were flying in 40 countries; Indonesia was the country with the most aircraft of the type, operating 70. It has seen especially wide employment as a commuter airliner and a military aircraft, with its operators including numerous charter and short-haul aviation companies and several national air forces. The C-212 is commonly used as a transport, surveillance aircraft, and for search and rescue.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: The C-212 has also been in the service of the United States Army Special Operations Command, where it is operated under the designation "C-41A" and is commonly used for operations such as troop infiltration and exfiltration, supply drops, and airborne operations. During August 2010, Airbus Military received a contract for the sustainment and modernisation of five C-212-200s operated by the US Army Special Operations Aviation Command (USASOAC). Additional aircraft were both owned and operated by the private military contractor Blackwater; these were active during both the Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan, typically to conduct supply drops to US ground forces active in remote areas of these countries. During the conflict, the planes were piloted by former pilots from 160th "Night Stalkers" Special Operations Regiment.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: One particularly ambitious use of the C-212 was undertaken by the Australian airline Skytraders, which has used its fleet to support Australia’s scientific research assets across Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. Various operators have elected to operate their aircraft amongst inhospitable terrain, such as desert and jungles. On account of its uncommon rear ramp arrangement, the C-212 has a unique selling point amongst its competitors; thus, it became a popular aircraft among skydivers and smokejumpers.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: Stretched version with updated engines (Honeywell TPE331-10R-511C or −512C, rated at 900 shp (671 kW) each), introduced in 1979. The CASA C-212-200 is also a popular skydiving aircraft, known for its large capacity, fast climb, and large tailgate exit ramp.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: Standard production version from 1987 on. Engines were Honeywell TPE331-10R-513C, also rated at continuous (925 shp maximum). The propellers were changed from four-bladed Hartzell composite blade propellers to four-bladed Dowty-Rotol all-metal propellers. Winglets and a larger vertical stabilizer area provide improved performance, and the addition of a nose baggage compartment gives the nose a more streamlined look than the Series 200. Various systems have been incrementally upgraded, including the addition of an integrated autopilot system.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: Upgraded version with TPE331-12JR-701C engines, increased payload and upgraded avionics moved from under the floor to the nose. First flew 4 April 1997, replacing Series 300 in production from 1998. The C-212-400 received Spanish certification in 1998. Between 2004 and 2008, production jigs and fixtures for the NC-212-400 were relocated to Bandung from San Pablo, Spain, and PTDI became the sole manufacturer of the NC-212 family. In 2014, NC-212-200 and NC-212-400 production ended and production moved to the improved NC-212i version.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: Improved version of -400 series, using two Honeywell TPE331-12JR-701C turboprop engines, with maximum output of . The rotor is four-bladed Dowty Rotol R334/4-82-F/13 constant speed propeller with a 2.75 m (110-inch) diameter.


title: CASA C-212 Aviocar

text: As of September 2011, CASA C-212s have been involved in 71 hull-loss incidents with a total of 558 fatalities.


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: Gavin Shane DeGraw (born February 4, 1977) is an American singer-songwriter. DeGraw rose to fame with his song "I Don't Want to Be" from his debut album "Chariot" (2003); the song became the main theme song for The WB drama series "One Tree Hill". Other notable singles from his debut album were "Chariot" and "Follow Through".


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: His second album, "Gavin DeGraw", was released in 2008 and included the top-20 single "In Love with a Girl". In 2009, DeGraw released his third album, "Free". His fourth album, "Sweeter" (2011), spawned the hit single "Not Over You", along with "Soldier" and "Sweeter". In 2013, DeGraw released the album "Make a Move", while in 2016 he released the album "Something Worth Saving".


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: In 2022, he released "Face the River" and a documentary on how he made the record and how he dealt with his parents' death.


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: DeGraw's duet with Colbie Caillat on "We Both Know" for the 2013 film "Safe Haven" received a Grammy Award nomination.


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: Born February 4, 1977, DeGraw grew up in South Fallsburg, New York. His mother, Lynne (née Krieger, 1951–2017), was a detox specialist, and his father, Wayne DeGraw, was a prison guard; he referenced his father's and mother's respective occupations in the song "I Don't Want to Be". His father was of Irish descent and his mother was of Russian Jewish ancestry.


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: DeGraw began singing and playing piano at the age of eight. He has two older siblings: a sister, Neeka, and a brother, Joey (who is also a musician). Growing up in a musical family, he was raised to regard music as part of the fabric of everyday life rather than as a remote show-business ideal.


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: As a teenager, DeGraw experienced a personal epiphany when he discovered Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, whose combination of personal charm and emotional commitment struck a chord in the budding musician. DeGraw played in a local Catskills group called "The People's Band" with his brother Joey and with local musician and vocalist Steven Levine. The band played many of the local hotels and clubs around the Monticello area. On his brother's advice, DeGraw began writing his own songs. He attended Ithaca College on a music scholarship, but found himself spending more time in his dorm room writing songs than attending classes and dropped out after one semester. DeGraw then moved to Boston, where he attended the prestigious Berklee College of Music for two semesters while singing in a rock band and playing solo gigs on the side.


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: After leaving Berklee and relocating to Manhattan in March 1998, DeGraw laid the groundwork for a musical career. Within a few months of his arrival, DeGraw made his way into the Sunday night Ron Grant and Friends open-mike night at Wilson's (the noted Upper West Side restaurant inside the Lucerne hotel). The night manager, Shar Thompson, introduced DeGraw to the club's owner, Debbie Wilson, the next day. Wilson signed on as his manager. DeGraw began developing a reputation in New York's music community. DeGraw eventually signed a record deal with Clive Davis and his J Records imprint, the home of Santana as well as R&B singers Alicia Keys and Angie Stone.


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: In the spring of 2002, DeGraw began work on his debut album. "I wanted to create something that was timeless rather than fashionable", he explained. "I was concerned with developing a sound that wasn't disposable. I didn't want to have too much glitter on me". The adjustment from the live stage to the recording studio was an educational process that gave DeGraw new insight into his work. "It made me think about making records differently," he says. "At first I felt out of my element because you have to learn the language and the science of making a record. It's a real process to get to the point where it doesn't sound like it's a process. We worked at making it breathe". The album, entitled "Chariot", was recorded at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles and produced by Mark Endert.


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: DeGraw rose to fame in 2003 when "I Don't Want to Be" was chosen as the theme song for teen drama "One Tree Hill". "Chariot" was released on July 22, 2003 by J Records. It sold over a million copies and earned platinum certification. In addition to "I Don't Want to Be", the album featured the singles "Follow Through" and "Chariot"; each of the three singles was certified gold after selling more than a million copies. "I Don't Want to Be" peaked at number 10 in the U.S. charts and has been performed on "American Idol" and "Idol Sweden" by various contestants during different seasons. DeGraw went on to release an acoustic version of "Chariot" in 2004. Entitled "Chariot Stripped", the album contained a cover version of Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come".


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: DeGraw's second studio album, the self-titled "Gavin DeGraw", was released on May 6, 2008. Ahead of this, the single "In Love with a Girl" was released on February 12, 2008. The second U.S. single from the album, "Cheated On Me", was released in the U.S. on September 30, 2008. "Gavin DeGraw" debuted at No. 1 on the digital sales chart and ranked at No. 7 on Billboard's Top 200 album chart.


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: DeGraw's "Live From Soho" album, released on November 7, 2008, featured mostly tracks from "Gavin DeGraw".


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: On March 31, 2009, DeGraw's third studio album, "Free", was released. DeGraw made "Free" in less than two weeks at the Brooklyn studio of his producer, Camus Celli. DeGraw included some songs on the album that he wrote very early in his career and that have evolved over time, songs such as "Dancing Shoes" and "Glass". The debut single from the album, "Stay", was released on March 11, 2009. "Free" has been described as "recorded versions of his live favourites".


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: DeGraw's fourth album, "Sweeter", was released on September 20, 2011. The album featured many tracks co-written with other artists. The album's first single, "Not Over You", was co-written and produced by Ryan Tedder and was said to have been inspired by Kyle Craig. "Not Over You" is his first song to reach the top spot on the Adult Pop Songs chart; the single has been certified platinum. "Sweeter" contains collaborations from producers including Butch Walker, Eric Rosse, and Ron Aniello; alongside another co-written title track, ""Sweeter"" with "Andrew Frampton". The album was recorded in many locations including "Blackbird Studios" in Nashville, "Walker's Space" in Venice and the Henson Recording Studios. "Sweeter" is DeGraw's first album released under RCA Records; all three of his previous albums were released under J Records. DeGraw went on to release an acoustic album based mostly on songs from "Sweeter". The "iTunes Session" album features seven tracks and a 30-minute interview.


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: DeGraw sang "Baby It's Cold Outside" with Colbie Caillat on her 2012 "Christmas in the Sand" album. The pair also wrote the song "We Both Know" for the soundtrack of the 2013 film "Safe Haven". The duo received a Grammy Award nomination.


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: On June 18, 2013, DeGraw released "Best I Ever Had", the first single from his fifth studio album. The album, "Make a Move", was released October 15, 2013. During that year, he supported Train across their series of US shows; The Script also appeared in several of those shows.


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: In 2014, DeGraw opened for Billy Joel. DeGraw then released his first greatest hits album "" on October 21, 2014. The album includes the new songs "You Got Me" (featured in the film "Dolphin Tale 2") and "Fire" (released on August 12, 2014).


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: On May 20, 2022, DeGraw's released his seventh studio album "Face the River", with the title track serving as the lead single. August 27 is International Listen to Gavin DeGraw Day.


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: DeGraw appeared in an on-screen role in four "One Tree Hill" episodes. His first appearance was in 2004, during "You Gotta Go There to Come Back"; he was seen singing "I Don't Want to Be" at Karen's Cafe. His second appearance was in season 2 where he sang "Chariot" in episode 17. His third appearance was in the season five finale, "What Comes After the Blues", where he was seen singing "I Don't Want to Be" with Jamie Scott (Jackson Brundage). DeGraw appeared on the show a final time during the series' last episode, in which he sang "Belief", "Soldier" and "I Don't Want to Be" at TRIC's 10th Anniversary party.


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: DeGraw was a contestant on season 14 of ABC's "Dancing with the Stars", which premiered on March 19, 2012. DeGraw and his partner Karina Smirnoff were eliminated from the competition during week 5, following a Dance Duel with castmate Jaleel White and his partner, Kym Johnson.


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: DeGraw and his brother opened The National Underground in December 2007. The National Underground is a roots rock/Americana music bar located in Manhattan's Lower East Side. The venue offers music, food, and drink. The idea for the venue came about because the brothers wanted a place where they could hang out on a regular basis, and where other musicians could come in and listen and learn. "We were picky about the quality of musicians that played there", DeGraw says. "We wanted a place where the players were so good, other musicians were like, 'Wow! I really respect what they're doing.'"


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: On August 8, 2011, DeGraw was hospitalized after being assaulted by several people in Manhattan's East Village after leaving The National Underground. Police reported that a group of men attacked DeGraw early Sunday morning at East 6th Street and First Avenue. He suffered a broken nose, a concussion, two black eyes, and lacerations to his face. Only minutes after the attack, DeGraw was struck by a taxi at 19th Street and First Avenue. DeGraw was taken to Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital Center by ambulance, and he had to cancel a scheduled August 9 performance at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs. In January 2012, DeGraw reported that he had made a full recovery from his injuries.


title: Gavin DeGraw

text: In September 2017, DeGraw's mother, Lynne DeGraw, died of pancreatic cancer. On July 2, 2020, DeGraw's father, John Wayne DeGraw, died after a brief illness.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: Marietta is a city in and the county seat of Cobb County, Georgia, United States. At the 2020 census, the city had a population of 60,972. The 2019 estimate was 60,867, making it one of Atlanta's largest suburbs. Marietta is the fourth largest of the principal cities by population of the Atlanta metropolitan area.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: The origin of the name is uncertain. It is believed that the city was named for Mary Cobb, the wife of the U.S. Senator and Superior Court judge Thomas Willis Cobb. The county is named for Cobb.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: Homes were built by early settlers near the Cherokee town of Big Shanty (now Kennesaw) before 1824. The first plot was laid out in 1833. Like most towns, Marietta had a square (Marietta Square) in the center with a courthouse. The Georgia General Assembly legally recognized the community on December 19, 1834.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: Built in 1838, Oakton House is the oldest continuously occupied residence in Marietta. The original barn, milk house, smokehouse and well house remain on the property. The gardens contain the boxwood parterre from the 1870s. Oakton was Major General Loring's headquarters during the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in 1864.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: Marietta was initially selected as the hub for the new Western and Atlantic Railroad and business boomed. By 1838, roadbed and trestles had been built north of the city. In 1840, political wrangling stopped construction for a time and, in 1842, the railroad's new management moved the hub from Marietta to an area that became Atlanta. In 1850, when the railroad began operation, Marietta shared in the resulting prosperity.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: The businessman and politician John Glover arrived in 1848. A popular figure, Glover was elected mayor when the city incorporated in 1852. Another early resident was Carey Cox, a physician, who promoted a "water cure" that attracted tourists to the area. The Cobb County Medical Society recognizes him as the county's first physician.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: The Georgia Military Institute was built in 1851 and the first bank opened in 1855. During the 1850s, fire destroyed much of the city on three separate occasions.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: In April 1862, James Andrews, a civilian working with the Union Army, came to Marietta, along with a small party of Union soldiers dressed in civilian clothing. The group spent the night in the Fletcher House hotel (later known as the Kennesaw House and now the home of the Marietta Museum of History) located immediately in front of the Western and Atlantic Railroad. Andrews and his men, who later became known as the Raiders, planned to seize a train and proceed north toward the city of Chattanooga, destroying the railroad on their way. They hoped, in so doing, to isolate Chattanooga from Atlanta and bring about the downfall of the Confederate stronghold. The Raiders boarded a waiting train on the morning of April 12, 1862, along with other passengers. Shortly after, the train made a scheduled stop in the town of Big Shanty, now known as Kennesaw. When the other passengers alighted for breakfast, Andrews and the Raiders stole the engine and the car behind it, which carried the fuel. The engine, called "The General", and Andrews' Raiders had begun the episode now known as the Great Locomotive Chase. Andrews and the Raiders failed in their mission. He and all of his men were caught within two weeks, including two men who had arrived late and missed the hijacking. All were tried as spies, convicted and hanged.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: General William Tecumseh Sherman invaded the town during the Atlanta Campaign in summer 1864. In November 1864, General Hugh Kilpatrick set the town ablaze, the first strike in Sherman's March to the Sea. Sherman's troops crossed the Chattahoochee River at a shallow section known as the Palisades, after burning the Marietta Paper Mills near the mouth of Sope Creek.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: The Marietta Confederate Cemetery, with the graves of over 3,000 Confederate soldiers killed during the Battle of Atlanta, is located in the city.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: In 1892, the city established a public school system. It included a Marietta High School for white students. The state of Georgia did not provide a high school for black students until 1924 when Booker T. Washington High School (Georgia) opened in Atlanta, after decades of black citizens requesting educational resources.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: Leo Frank was lynched at 1200 Roswell Road just east of Marietta on August 17, 1915. Frank, a Jewish-American superintendent of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, had been convicted on August 25, 1913, of the murder of one of his factory workers, 13-year-old Mary Phagan. The murder and trial, sensationalized in the local press, portrayed Frank as sexually depraved and captured the public's attention. An eleventh-hour commutation by Governor John Slaton of Frank's death sentence to life imprisonment because of problems with the case against him created great local outrage. A mob threatened the governor to the extent that the Georgia National Guard had to be called to defend him and he left the state immediately with his political career over. Another mob, systematically organized for the purpose, abducted Frank from prison, drove him to Marietta and hanged him. The leaders of the abduction included past, current and future elected local, county and state officials. There were two state legislators, the mayor, a former governor, a clergyman, two former Superior Court justices and an ex-sheriff. In reaction, Jewish activists created the Anti-Defamation League, to work to educate Americans about Jewish life and culture and to prevent anti-Semitism.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: Located near the center of Cobb County, between Kennesaw to the northwest and Smyrna to the southeast. U.S. Route 41 and State Route 3 run through the city northeast of downtown as Cobb Parkway, and Interstate 75 runs parallel to it through the eastern part of Marietta, with access from exits 261, 263, 265, and 267. Downtown Atlanta is to the southeast, and Cartersville is to the northwest.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: According to the United States Census Bureau, Marietta has a total area of , of which is land and , or 0.38%, is water.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: As of the 2020 United States census, there were 60,972 people, 24,554 households, and 13,788 families residing in the city.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: At the 2010 census, there were 56,641 people and 22,261 households. The population density was . There were 25,227 housing units at an average density of . The racial make-up was 52.7% White, 31.5% African American, 0.1% Native American, 3.0% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 9.1% from other races and 3.3% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 20.6% of the population.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: There were 23,895 households, of which 27.8% had children under 18 living with them, 35.4% were married couples living together, 13.8% had a female householder with no husband present, and 45.5% were non-families. 32.8% of all households were made up of individuals, and 6.9% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.39, and the average family size was 3.05.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: 22.4% of the population were under the age of 18, 14.1% from 18 to 24, 39.4% from 25 to 44, 15.7% from 45 to 64 and 8.3% were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 30 years. For every 100 females, there were 101.3 males. For every 101 females age 18 and over, there were 100.3 males.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: Incorporated as a village in 1834 and as a city in 1852, the city of Marietta is organized under a form of government consisting of a Mayor, City Council, and City Manager. The City Council is made up of representatives elected from each of seven single-member districts within the city, and a Mayor elected at-large.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: The City Council is the governing body of the city with authority to adopt and enforce municipal laws and regulations. The Mayor and City Council appoint members of the community to sit on the city's various boards and commissions, ensuring that a broad cross-section of the town is represented in the city government.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: The City Council appoints the City Manager, the city's chief executive officer. The Council-Manager relationship is comparable to that of a Board of Directors and CEO in a private company or corporation. The City Manager appoints city department heads and is responsible to the City Council for all city operations. The City Council also appoints the city attorney who serves as the city's chief legal officer and the City Clerk who maintains all the city's records.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: Terms of office are for four years and the number of terms a member may serve are unlimited. There are seven councilmen, each representing a separate ward.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: The median household income was $40,645 and the median family income was $47,340. Males had a median income of $31,186 and females $30,027. The per capita income was $23,409. About 11.5% of families and 15.7% of the population were below the poverty line. 21.3% of those under age 18 and 10.2% of those aged 65 or over.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: Dobbins Air Reserve Base on the south side of town and a Lockheed Martin manufacturing plant are among the major industries in the city. The Lockheed Georgia Employees Credit Union is based in Marietta.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: According to Marietta's 2010 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, the top employers within the city were:


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: Interstate 75 and U.S. 41 run through the eastern part of the city. State routes 3, 5, and 120 also run through Marietta.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: The CSX freight trains between Atlanta and Chattanooga (Western & Atlantic Subdivision) still run a block west of the town square, past the 1898-built former railroad depot (now the Visitor Center).


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: Into the 1950s the Louisville and Nashville Railroad operated the Midwest-Florida trains, the Cincinnati-Florida "Flamingo" and the Chicago-Florida "Southland", which made daily stops in Marietta Depot. Into the 1960s, the L&N's Chicago & St. Louis-Florida trains, "Dixie Flyer" and "Dixie Limited" also made stops there. The final train was the L&N's St. Louis, Missouri - Evansville, Iindiana - Atlanta "Georgian" which ended service on April 30, 1971. (Until 1968 the train also had a northern leg from Evansville to Chicago.)


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: All of the public schools in Marietta proper are operated by the Marietta City Schools (MCS), while the remainder of the schools in Cobb County, but outside the city limits, is operated by the Cobb County School District, including all of the county's other cities. MCS has one high school, Marietta High School, grades 9-12; a middle school, Marietta Middle School, grades 7 and 8; Marietta Sixth Grade Academy; and several elementary schools: A.L. Burruss, Dunleith, Hickory Hills, Lockheed, Marietta Center for Advanced Academics, Park Street, Sawyer Road, and West Side. Many residents of Marietta attend Cobb County public schools, such as Joseph Wheeler High School and Sprayberry High School. These schools are known to compete fiercely in athletics, especially basketball, as both Wheeler and Marietta High School frequently produce D-1 players. The town of Marietta is also home to the Walker School, a private pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade school. Walker competes in the Georgia High School Association Class A (Region 6) athletic division while Marietta and Wheeler compete in Class AAAAAA (Regions 4 and 5, respectively).


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: The school system employs 1,200 people. MCS is an International Baccalaureate (IB) World School district. In 2008, MCS became only the second IB World School district in Georgia authorized to offer the IB Middle Years Program (MYP) for grades 6-10. MCS is one of only a few school systems nationwide able to provide the full IB (K-12) continuum.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: The Marietta Campus of Kennesaw State University, formerly known as Southern Polytechnic State University (SPSU) before being merged into Kennesaw State, and Life University are located in Marietta, serving more than 20,000 students in more than 90 programs of study.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: The city has six historic districts, some on the National Register of Historic Places (these include Northwest Marietta, Whitlock Avenue, Washington Avenue, and Church-Cherokee Streets). The city's visitor center is located in the historic train depot.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: Downtown is the town square and former location of the county courthouse. The square is the site of several cultural productions and public events, including a weekly farmers' market.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: The Marietta Players perform semi-professional theater year-round. The historic Strand Theatre has been renovated back to its original design and features live theatre, concerts, classic films, and other events. The Marietta/Cobb Museum of Art is in the old Post Office building.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: The Marietta Museum of History exhibits the history of the city and county. The museum is home to thousands of artifacts including items from Marietta residents and businesses. The Marietta Gone with the Wind Museum, also called "Scarlett on the Square", houses a collection of memorabilia related to "Gone with the Wind", both the book and the film. The William Root House Museum and Garden is the oldest wood-frame house still standing in Marietta, built circa 1845. Once owned by William Root, one of Marietta's founding citizens and merchants whose drugstore was located in the Square.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: Miramax Films and Disney filmed scenes of the 1995 movie "Gordy" here. The 2014 film "Dumb and Dumber To" filmed a scene in the Marietta Square.


title: Marietta, Georgia

text: The city includes the Kennesaw House, one of only four buildings in Marietta not burned to the ground in Sherman's March to the Sea. The Kennesaw House is home to the Marietta Museum of History which tells the history of Marietta and Cobb County.


title: Martin Amis

text: Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is a British novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels "Money" (1984) and "London Fields" (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir "Experience" and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice (shortlisted in 1991 for "Time's Arrow" and longlisted in 2003 for "Yellow Dog"). Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. In 2008, "The Times" named him one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.


title: Martin Amis

text: Amis's work centres on the excesses of "late-capitalist" Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirises through grotesque caricature; he has been portrayed as a master of what "The New York Times" called "the new unpleasantness". Inspired by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, Amis himself has influenced many British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith.


title: Martin Amis

text: Amis was born in 25 August 1949 at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England. His father, noted English novelist Sir Kingsley Amis, was the son of a mustard manufacturer's clerk from Clapham, London; his mother, Kingston upon Thames-born Hilary ("Hilly") Ann Bardwell, was the daughter of a Ministry of Agriculture civil servant. He has an older brother, Philip; his younger sister, Sally, died in 2000. His parents married in 1948 in Oxford and divorced when Amis was 12.


title: Martin Amis

text: Amis attended a number of schools in the 1950s and 1960s including Bishop Gore School, and Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, where he was described by one headmaster as "unusually unpromising". The acclaim that followed his father's first novel "Lucky Jim" (1954) sent the family to Princeton, New Jersey, where his father lectured.


title: Martin Amis

text: In 1965, at the age of 15, Amis played John Thornton in the film version of Richard Hughes' "A High Wind in Jamaica".


title: Martin Amis

text: He read nothing but comic books until his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to Jane Austen, whom he often names as his earliest influence. He graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, with a congratulatory first in English, "the sort where you are called in for a viva and the examiners tell you how much they enjoyed reading your papers".


title: Martin Amis

text: After Oxford, he found an entry-level job at "The Times Literary Supplement", and at the age of 27 became literary editor of the "New Statesman", where he met Christopher Hitchens, then a feature writer for "The Observer", who became his best friend until Hitchens died, in 2011.


title: Martin Amis

text: According to Amis, his father showed no interest in his work. "I can point out the exact place where he stopped and sent "Money" twirling through the air; that's where the character named Martin Amis comes in." "Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself," Kingsley complained.


title: Martin Amis

text: His first novel "The Rachel Papers" (1973) – written at Lemmons, the family home in north London – won the Somerset Maugham Award. The most traditional of his novels, made into an unsuccessful cult film, it tells the story of a bright, egotistical teenager (which Amis acknowledges as autobiographical) and his relationship with the eponymous girlfriend in the year before going to university.


title: Martin Amis

text: "Dead Babies" (1975), more flippant in tone, chronicles a few days in the lives of some friends who convene in a country house to take drugs. A number of Amis's characteristics show up here for the first time: mordant black humour, obsession with the zeitgeist, authorial intervention, a character subjected to sadistically humorous misfortunes and humiliations, and a defiant casualness ("my attitude has been, I don't know much about science, but I know what I like"). A film adaptation was made in 2000.


title: Martin Amis

text: "Success" (1977) told the story of two foster-brothers, Gregory Riding and Terry Service, and their rising and falling fortunes. This was the first example of Amis's fondness for symbolically "pairing" characters in his novels, which has been a recurrent feature in his fiction since (Martin Amis and Martina Twain in "Money", Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry in "The Information", and Jennifer Rockwell and Mike Hoolihan in "Night Train").


title: Martin Amis

text: Amis wrote the screenplay for the film "Saturn 3" (1980), an experience that he was to draw on for his fifth novel, "Money", published in 1984.


title: Martin Amis

text: "Other People: A Mystery Story" (1981), about a young woman coming out of a coma, was a transitional novel in that it was the first of Amis's to show authorial intervention in the narrative voice, and highly artificed language in the heroine's descriptions of everyday objects, which was said to be influenced by his contemporary Craig Raine's "Martian" school of poetry. It was also the first novel Amis wrote after committing to being a full-time writer.


title: Martin Amis

text: Amis's best-known novels are "Money", "London Fields", and "The Information", commonly referred to as his "London Trilogy". Although the books share little in terms of plot and narrative, they all examine the lives of middle-aged men, exploring the sordid, debauched, and post-apocalyptic undercurrents of life in late 20th-century Britain. Amis's London protagonists are anti-heroes: they engage in questionable behaviour, are passionate iconoclasts, and strive to escape the apparent banality and futility of their lives. He writes, "The world is like a human being. And there’s a scientific name for it, which is entropy—everything tends towards disorder. From an ordered state to a disordered state."


title: Martin Amis

text: "Money" (1984, subtitled "A Suicide Note") is a first-person narrative by John Self, advertising man and would-be film director, who is "addicted to the twentieth century". "[A] satire of Thatcherite amorality and greed," the novel relates a series of black comedic episodes as Self flies back and forth across the Atlantic, in crass and seemingly chaotic pursuit of personal and professional success. "Time" included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels of 1923 to 2005. On 11 November 2009, "The Guardian" reported that the BBC had adapted "Money" for television as part of their early 2010 schedule for BBC 2. Nick Frost played John Self. The television adaptation also featured Vincent Kartheiser, Emma Pierson and Jerry Hall. The adaptation was a "two-part drama" and was written by Tom Butterworth and Chris Hurford. After the transmission of the first of the two parts, Amis was quick to praise the adaptation, stating that "All the performances (were) without weak spots. I thought Nick Frost was absolutely extraordinary as John Self. He fills the character. It's a very unusual performance in that he's very funny, he's physically comic, but he's also strangely graceful, a pleasure to watch...It looked very expensive even though it wasn't and that's a feat...The earlier script I saw was disappointing (but) they took it back and worked on it and it's hugely improved. My advice was to use more of the language of the novel, the dialogue, rather than making it up."


title: Martin Amis

text: "London Fields" (1989), Amis's longest work, describes the encounters between three main characters in London in 1999, as a climate disaster approaches. The characters have typically Amisian names and broad caricatured qualities: Keith Talent, the lower-class crook with a passion for darts; Nicola Six, a femme fatale who is determined to be murdered; and upper-middle-class Guy Clinch, "the fool, the foil, the poor foal" who is destined to come between the other two. The book was controversially omitted from the Booker Prize shortlist in 1989, because two panel members, Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, disliked Amis's treatment of his female characters. "It was an incredible row", Martyn Goff, the Booker's director, told "The Independent". "Maggie and Helen felt that Amis treated women appallingly in the book. That is not to say they thought books which treated women badly couldn't be good, they simply felt that the author should make it clear he didn't favour or bless that sort of treatment. Really, there were only two of them and they should have been outnumbered as the other three were in agreement, but such was the sheer force of their argument and passion that they won. David [Lodge] has told me he regrets it to this day, he feels he failed somehow by not saying, 'It's two against three, Martin's on the list'."


title: Martin Amis

text: Amis's 1991 novel, the short "Time's Arrow", was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Notable for its backwards narrative—including dialogue in reverse—the novel is the autobiography of a Nazi concentration camp doctor. The reversal of time in the novel, a technique borrowed from Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse 5" (1969) and Philip K. Dick's "Counter-Clock World" (1967), seemingly transforms Auschwitz—and the entire theatre of war—into a place of joy, healing, and resurrection.


title: Martin Amis

text: "The Information" (1995) was notable not so much for its critical success, but for the scandals surrounding its publication. The enormous advance (an alleged £500,000) demanded and subsequently obtained by Amis for the novel attracted what the author described as "an Eisteddfod of hostility" from writers and critics after he abandoned his long-serving agent, the late Pat Kavanagh, in order to be represented by the Harvard-educated Andrew Wylie. The split was by no means amicable; it created a rift between Amis and his long-time friend, Julian Barnes, who was married to Kavanagh. According to Amis's autobiography "Experience" (2000), he and Barnes had not resolved their differences. "The Information" itself deals with the relationship between a pair of British writers of fiction. One, a spectacularly successful purveyor of "airport novels", is envied by his friend, an equally unsuccessful writer of philosophical and generally abstruse prose. The novel is written in the author's classic style: characters appearing as stereotyped caricatures, grotesque elaborations on the wickedness of middle age, and a general air of post-apocalyptic malaise.


title: Martin Amis

text: Amis's 1997 offering, the short novel "Night Train", is narrated by Mike Hoolihan, a tough woman detective with a man's name. The story revolves around the suicide of her boss's young, beautiful, and seemingly happy daughter. "Night Train" is written in the language of American 'noir' crime fiction, but subverts expectations of an exciting investigation and neat, satisfying ending. Reviewers tended to miss the book's real story, and it was subjected to harshly negative criticism. John Updike 'hated' it and others disapproved of a British author writing in an American idiom. But the novel found defenders elsewhere, notably in Janis Bellow, wife of Amis's mentor and friend Saul Bellow.


title: Martin Amis

text: The 2000s were Amis's least productive decade in terms of full-length fiction since starting in the 1970s (two novels in ten years), while his non-fiction work saw a dramatic uptick in volume (three published works including a memoir, a hybrid of semi-memoir and amateur political history, and another journalism collection).


title: Martin Amis

text: In 2000 Amis published a memoir called "Experience". Largely concerned with the strange relationship between the author and his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, the autobiography nevertheless deals with many facets of Amis's life. Of particular note is Amis's reunion with his daughter, Delilah Seale, resulting from an affair in the 1970s, whom he did not see until she was 19. Amis also discusses, at some length, the murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by Fred West when she was 21. The book was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography.


title: Martin Amis

text: In 2002 Amis published "", a devastating history of the crimes of Lenin and Stalin, and their denial by many writers and academics in the West. The book precipitated a literary controversy for its approach to the material and for its attack on Amis's long-time friend Christopher Hitchens. Amis accuses Hitchens – who was once a committed leftist – of sympathy for Stalin and communism. Although Hitchens wrote a vituperative response to the book in "The Atlantic", his friendship with Amis emerged unchanged: in response to a reporter's question, Amis responded, "We never needed to make up. We had an adult exchange of views, mostly in print, and that was that (or, more exactly, that goes on being that). My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May."


title: Martin Amis

text: In 2003 "Yellow Dog", Amis's first novel in six years, was published. The novel drew mixed reviews and was most notably denounced by the novelist Tibor Fischer: ""Yellow Dog" isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder… It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating." Elsewhere, the book received mixed reviews, with some critics proclaiming the novel a return to form, but most considered the book to be a great disappointment. Amis was unrepentant about the novel and its reaction, calling "Yellow Dog" "among my best three". He gave his own explanation


title: Martin Amis

text: for the novel's critical failure, "No one wants to read a difficult literary novel or deal with a prose style which reminds them how thick they are. There's a push towards egalitarianism, making writing more chummy and interactive, instead of a higher voice, and that's what I go to literature for." "Yellow Dog" "controversially made the 13-book longlist for the 2003 Booker Prize, despite some scathing reviews", but failed to win the award.


title: Martin Amis

text: Following the harsh reviews afforded to "Yellow Dog", Amis relocated from London to Uruguay with his family for two years, during which time he worked on his next novel away from the glare and pressures of the London literary scene.


title: Martin Amis

text: In September 2006, upon his return from Uruguay, Amis published his eleventh novel. "House of Meetings", a short work, continued the author's crusade against the crimes of Stalinism and also saw some consideration of the state of contemporary post-Soviet Russia. The novel centres on the relationship between two brothers incarcerated in a prototypical Siberian gulag who, prior to their deportation, had loved the same woman. "House of Meetings" saw some better critical notices than "Yellow Dog" had received three years before, but there were still some reviewers who felt that Amis's fiction work had considerably declined in quality while others felt that he was not suited to write an ostensibly serious historical novel. Despite the praise for "House of Meetings", once again Amis was overlooked for the Booker Prize longlist. According to a piece in "The Independent", the novel "was originally to have been collected alongside two short stories – one, a disturbing account of the life of a body-double in the court of Saddam Hussein; the other, the imagined final moments of Muhammad Atta, the leader of 11 September attacks – but late in the process, Amis decided to jettison both from the book." The same article asserts that Amis had "recently abandoned a novella, "The Unknown Known" (the title was based on one of Donald Rumsfeld's characteristically strangulated linguistic formulations), in which Muslim terrorists unleash a horde of compulsive rapists on Greeley, Colorado, and instead continued to work on a follow-up full novel that he had started working on in 2003:


title: Martin Amis

text: "The novel I'm working on is blindingly autobiographical, but with an Islamic theme. It's called "A Pregnant Widow", because at the end of a revolution you don't have a newborn child, you have a pregnant widow. And the pregnant widow in this novel is feminism. Which is still in its second trimester. The child is nowhere in sight yet. And I think it has several more convulsions to undergo before we'll see the child."


title: Martin Amis

text: The new novel took some considerable time to write and was not published before the end of the decade. Instead, Amis's last published work of the 2000s was the 2008 journalism collection "The Second Plane", a collection which compiled Amis's many writings on the events of 9/11 and the subsequent major events and cultural issues resulting from the War on Terror. The reception to "The Second Plane" was decidedly mixed, with some reviewers finding its tone intelligent and well reasoned, while others believed it to be overly stylised and lacking in authoritative knowledge of key areas under consideration. The most common consensus was that the two short stories included were the weakest point of the collection. The collection sold relatively well and was widely discussed and debated.


title: Martin Amis

text: In 2010, after a long period of writing, rewriting, editing and revision, Amis published his long-awaited new long novel, "The Pregnant Widow", which is concerned with the sexual revolution. Originally set for release in 2008, the novel's publication was pushed back as further editing and alterations were being made, expanding it to some 480 pages. The title of the novel is based on a quote by Alexander Herzen:


title: Martin Amis

text: The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that what the departing world leaves behind it is not an heir but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.


title: Martin Amis

text: The first public reading of the then just completed version of "The Pregnant Widow" occurred on 11 May 2009 as part of the Norwich and Norfolk festival. At this reading, according to the coverage of the event for the Norwich Writers' Centre by Katy Carr, "the writing shows a return to comic form, as the narrator muses on the indignities of facing the mirror as an ageing man, in a prelude to a story set in Italy in 1970, looking at the effect of the sexual revolution on personal relationships. The sexual revolution was the moment, as Amis sees it, that love became divorced from sex. He said he started to write the novel autobiographically, but then concluded that real life was too different from fiction and difficult to drum into novel shape, so he had to rethink the form."


title: Martin Amis

text: The story is set in a castle owned by a cheese tycoon in Campania, Italy, where Keith Nearing, a 20-year-old English literature student; his girlfriend, Lily; and her friend, Scheherazade, are on holiday during the hot summer of 1970, the year that Amis says "something was changing in the world of men and women". The narrator is Keith's superego, or conscience, in 2009. Keith's sister, Violet, is based on Amis's own sister, Sally, described by Amis as one of the revolution's most spectacular victims.


title: Martin Amis

text: Published in a whirl of publicity the likes of which Amis had not received for a novel since the publication of "The Information" in 1995, "The Pregnant Widow" once again saw Amis receiving mixed reviews from the press and sales being average at best. Despite a vast amount of coverage, some positive reviews, and a general expectation that Amis's time for recognition had come, the novel was overlooked for the 2010 Man Booker Prize long list.


title: Martin Amis

text: In 2012 Amis published "". The novel is centred on the lives of Desmond Pepperdine and his uncle Lionel Asbo, a voracious yob and persistent convict. It is set against the fictional borough of Diston Town, a grotesque version of modern-day Britain under the reign of celebrity culture, and follows the dramatic events in the lives of both characters: Desmond's gradual erudition and maturing; and Lionel's fantastic lottery win of approximately 140 million pounds. Much to the interest of the press, Amis based the character of Lionel Asbo's eventual girlfriend, the ambitious glamour model and poet "Threnody" (quotation marks included), on the British celebrity Jordan. In an interview with "Newsnight"s Jeremy Paxman, Amis said the novel was "not a frowning examination of England" but a comedy based on a "fairytale world", adding that "" was not an attack on the country, insisting he was "proud of being English" and viewed the nation with affection. Reviews, once again, were largely mixed.


title: Martin Amis

text: Amis's 2014 novel, "The Zone of Interest", concerns the Holocaust, his second work of fiction to tackle the subject after "Time's Arrow". In it, Amis tries to imagine the social and domestic lives of the Nazi officers who ran the death camps, and the effect their indifference to human suffering had on their general psychology.


title: Martin Amis

text: In December 2016, Amis announced two new projects. The first, a collection of journalism, titled "The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1986–2016", was published in October 2017. The second project, a new untitled novel which Amis is currently working on, is an autobiographical novel about three key literary figures in his life: the poet Philip Larkin, American novelist Saul Bellow, and noted public intellectual Christopher Hitchens. In an interview with livemint.com, Amis said of the novel-in-progress, "I’m writing an autobiographical novel that I’ve been trying to write for 15 years. It’s not so much about me, it’s about three other writers—a poet, a novelist and an essayist—Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens, and since I started trying to write it, Larkin died in 1985, Bellow died in 2005, and Hitch died in 2011, and that gives me a theme, death, and it gives me a bit more freedom, and fiction is freedom. It’s hard going but the one benefit is that I have the freedom to invent things. I don’t have them looking over my shoulder anymore."


title: Martin Amis

text: On writing, Amis said in 2014: "I think of writing as more mysterious as I get older, not less mysterious. The whole process is very weird … It is very spooky."


title: Martin Amis

text: Amis has also released two collections of short stories ("Einstein's Monsters" and "Heavy Water"), five volumes of collected journalism and criticism ("", "", "The War Against Cliché" , "The Second Plane" and "The Rub of Time"), and a guide to 1980s space-themed arcade video-game machines which he has since disavowed ("Invasion of the Space Invaders"). He has also regularly appeared on television and radio discussion and debate programmes and contributes book reviews and articles to newspapers. His wife Isabel Fonseca released her debut novel "Attachment" in 2009 and two of Amis's children, his son Louis and his daughter Fernanda, have also been published in their own right in "Standpoint" magazine and "The Guardian", respectively.


title: Martin Amis

text: Amis returned to Britain in September 2006 after living in Uruguay for two and a half years with his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, and their two young daughters. Amis became a grandfather in 2008, when his daughter (by Lamorna Seale) Delilah gave birth to a son.


title: Martin Amis

text: He said, "Some strange things have happened, it seems to me, in my absence. I didn't feel like I was getting more rightwing when I was in Uruguay, but when I got back I felt that I had moved quite a distance to the right while staying in the same place." He reports that he is disquieted by what he sees as increasingly undisguised hostility towards Israel and the United States.


title: Martin Amis

text: In late 2010 Amis bought a property in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, although it was unclear whether he would be permanently moving to New York or just maintaining another "sock" there. In 2012, Amis wrote in "The New Republic" that he was "moving house" from Camden Town in London to Cobble Hill.


title: Martin Amis

text: Through the 1980s and 1990s, Amis was a strong critic of nuclear proliferation. His collection of five stories on this theme, "Einstein's Monsters", began with a long essay entitled "Thinkability" in which he set out his views on the issue, writing: "Nuclear weapons repel all thought, perhaps because they can end all thought."


title: Martin Amis

text: He wrote in "Nuclear City" in "Esquire" of 1987 (re-published in "Visiting Mrs Nabokov") that: "when nuclear weapons become real to you, when they stop buzzing around your ears and actually move into your head, hardly an hour passes without some throb or flash, some heavy pulse of imagined supercatastrophe".


title: Martin Amis

text: In comments on the BBC in October 2006, Amis expressed his view that North Korea was the most dangerous of the two remaining members of the Axis of Evil, but that Iran was our "natural enemy", suggesting that Britain should not feel bad about having "helped Iraq scrape a draw with Iran" in the Iran–Iraq War, because a "revolutionary and rampant Iran would have been a much more destabilising presence."


title: Martin Amis

text: In June 2008, Amis endorsed the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, stating that "The reason I hope for Obama is that he alone has the chance to reposition America's image in the world". When briefly interviewed by the BBC during its coverage of the 2012 United States presidential election, Amis displayed a change in tone, stating that he was "depressed and frightened" by the US election, rather than excited. Blaming a "deep irrationality of the American people" for the apparent narrow gap between the candidates, Amis claimed that the Republicans had swung so far to the right that former President Reagan would be considered a "pariah" by the present party – and invited viewers to imagine a Conservative party in the UK which had moved to the right so much that it disowned Margaret Thatcher: "Tax cuts for the rich", he said, "there's not a democracy on earth where that would be mentioned!"


title: Martin Amis

text: In October 2015, he criticised Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in an article for the "Sunday Times", describing him as "humourless" and "under-educated". Owen Jones, a columnist in "The Guardian", was critical of "academic snobbery", and wrote that Amis was born into significant privilege, being the son of Sir Kingsley Amis.


title: Martin Amis

text: In "The Independent", Terence Blacker (son of General Sir Cecil Hugh Blacker) criticised Amis's article as "snobbery" and "patronising" noting that Amis was born into social and cultural privilege. Blacker wrote that Amis's article was an "unintentionally hilarious piece" and a "diatribe", whilst also suggesting Amis would inadvertently convert many to supporting Corbyn instead.


title: Martin Amis

text: Amis was interviewed by "The Times Magazine" in 2006, the day after the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot came to light, about community relations in Britain and the "threat" from Muslims, where he was quoted as saying: "What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There's a definite urge – don't you have it? – to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children...It's a huge dereliction on their part".


title: Martin Amis

text: The interview provoked immediate controversy, much of it played out in the pages of "The Guardian" newspaper. The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, in the 2007 introduction to his work "Ideology", singled out and attacked Amis for this particular quote, saying that this view is "[n]ot the ramblings of a British National Party thug, [...] but the reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world". In a later piece, Eagleton added: "But there is something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment."


title: Martin Amis

text: In a highly critical "Guardian" article, entitled "The absurd world of Martin Amis", satirist Chris Morris likened Amis to the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza (who was jailed for inciting racial hatred in 2006), suggesting that both men employ "mock erudition, vitriol and decontextualised quotes from the Qu'ran" to incite hatred.


title: Martin Amis

text: Elsewhere, Amis was especially careful to distinguish between Islam and radical Islamism, stating that:


title: Martin Amis

text: British Muslim journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote an op-ed piece on the subject condemning Amis, and he responded with an open letter to "The Independent", which the newspaper printed in full. In it, he stated his views had been misrepresented by both Alibhai-Brown and Eagleton.


title: Martin Amis

text: On terrorism, Amis wrote that he suspected "there exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder", and added: "I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper's face, at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant."


title: Martin Amis

text: His views on radical Islamism earned him the contentious sobriquet Blitcon from the "New Statesman" (his former employer). This term, it has since been argued, was wrongly applied.


title: Martin Amis

text: His political opinions have been attacked in some quarters, particularly in "The Guardian". He has received support from other writers, however. In "The Spectator", Philip Hensher noted:


title: Martin Amis

text: In 2006, Amis said that "agnostic is the only respectable position, simply because our ignorance of the universe is so vast" that atheism is "premature". Clearly, "there's not going to be any kind of anthropomorphic entity at all", but the universe is "so incredibly complicated", "so over our heads", that we cannot exclude the existence of "an intelligence" behind it.


title: Martin Amis

text: In 2010, he said: "I'm an agnostic, which is the only rational position. It's not because I feel a God or think that anything resembling the banal God of religion will turn up. But I think that atheism sounds like a proof of something, and it's incredibly evident that we are nowhere near intelligent enough to understand the universe...Writers are above all individualists, and above all writing is freedom, so they will go off in all sorts of directions. I think it does apply to the debate about religion, in that it's a crabbed novelist who pulls the shutters down and says, there's no other thing. Don't use the word God: but something more intelligent than us... If we can't understand it, then it's formidable. And we understand very little."


title: Martin Amis

text: In February 2007, Amis was appointed as a professor of creative writing at "The Manchester Centre for New Writing" in the University of Manchester, and started in September 2007. He ran postgraduate seminars, and participated in four public events each year, including a two-week summer school.


title: Martin Amis

text: Of his position, Amis said: "I may be acerbic in how I write but...I would find it very difficult to say cruel things to [students] in such a vulnerable position. I imagine I'll be surprisingly sweet and gentle with them." He predicted that the experience might inspire him to write a new book, while adding sardonically: "A campus novel written by an elderly novelist, that's what the world wants." It was revealed that the salary paid to Amis by the university was £80,000 a year in return for 28 contracted hours. The "Manchester Evening News" broke the story saying that according to his contract amis was paid £3,000 an hour for 28 contracted hours hours a year teaching. The claim was echoed in headlines in several national papers.


title: Martin Amis

text: In January 2011, it was announced that Amis would be stepping down from his university position at the end of the current academic year. Of his time teaching creative writing at Manchester University, Amis was quoted as saying, "teaching creative writing at Manchester has been a joy" and that he had "become very fond of my colleagues, especially John McAuliffe and Ian McGuire". He added that he "loved doing all the reading and the talking; and I very much took to the Mancunians. They are a witty and tolerant contingent". Amis was succeeded in this position by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín in September 2011.


title: Martin Amis

text: From October 2007 to July 2011, at Manchester University's Whitworth Hall and Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall, Amis regularly engaged in public discussions with other experts on literature and various topics (21st-century literature, terrorism, religion, Philip Larkin, science, Britishness, suicide, sex, ageing, his 2010 novel "The Pregnant Widow", violence, film, the short story, and America).


title: Eighth Doctor

text: The Eighth Doctor is an incarnation of the Doctor, the protagonist of the BBC science fiction television series "Doctor Who". He is portrayed by Paul McGann.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: The character was introduced in the 1996 TV film "Doctor Who", a back-door pilot produced in an unsuccessful attempt to relaunch the series following its 1989 cancellation. While the Eighth Doctor initially had only one on-screen appearance, his adventures were portrayed extensively in subsequent spin-off media, including more than 70 audio dramas starring McGann. In 2013, the actor reprised the role in the mini-episode "The Night of the Doctor", which depicts the Eighth Doctor's final adventure and his regeneration into the War Doctor (played by John Hurt). In 2022, he appeared alongside other past incarnations in "The Power of the Doctor", the final adventure of the Thirteenth Doctor (Jodie Whittaker), marking the Eighth Doctor's first-ever appearance in a regular episode of "Doctor Who" 26 years after McGann first played the role.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: Within the series' narrative, the Doctor is a centuries-old alien Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey who travels in time and space in the TARDIS, frequently with companions. At the end of life, the Doctor regenerates; as a result, the physical appearance and personality of the Doctor changes.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: McGann portrays the eighth such incarnation, a passionate, enthusiastic, and eccentric character. His only companion in the television film is Grace Holloway (Daphne Ashbrook), a medical doctor whose surgery is partly responsible for triggering his regeneration. In the continued adventures of the character depicted in audio dramas, novels and comic books he travels alongside numerous other companions, including self-styled "Edwardian Adventuress" Charley, the alien Destrii and present-day humans Lucie and Sam.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: The Eighth Doctor made his first television appearance in the 1996 "Doctor Who" television film, the first time the Doctor had returned to television screens since the end of the original series in 1989. Intended as a backdoor pilot for a new television series on the Fox Network, the film drew 5.5% of the US audience, according to Nielsen Ratings. In the United Kingdom, it was received well, attracting over 9 million viewers and generally positive reviews. It was also generally well received in Australia.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: Although the film failed to spark a new television series, the Eighth Doctor's adventures continued in various licensed spin-off media, notably BBC Books' "Eighth Doctor Adventures" novels, audio plays from Big Finish Productions, and the "Doctor Who Magazine" comic strip. These stories spanned the nine years between 1996 and the debut of the new television series in 2005. He is the longest-serving Doctor in the "Doctor Who Magazine" comic strip. In the wake of the positive reaction to the revived television series in 2005, several of the Eighth Doctor's Big Finish audio dramas were also broadcast on BBC7 radio in an edited form. The trailers for these broadcasts explained that these adventures took place before the destruction of Gallifrey, the Doctor's homeworld, as described in the revived TV series. In 2007, BBC7 aired a new series of Eighth Doctor audio adventures, created specifically for radio broadcast. Paul McGann has continued to portray the Eighth Doctor in the various audio spinoffs.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: The continuity of the spin-off media with respect to the television series and to each other is open to interpretation. (The "Beginner's Guide to Doctor Who" on the BBC's classic "Doctor Who" website suggests this may be due to the Time War.) It has been suggested that the Eighth Doctor's adventures in three different forms (novels, audio, and comics) take place in three separate continuities. The discontinuities were made explicit in the audio drama "Zagreus". In response, it has become increasingly common to consider the three ranges separately. The final "Eighth Doctor Adventures" novel, "The Gallifrey Chronicles", obliquely references this split in timelines, even suggesting that the split results in the three alternative forms of the Ninth Doctor (a reference to the fact three different versions of the incarnation have appeared in various media). "Mary's Story", a 2009 audio story by Big Finish, contradicted these suggestions, as there the Doctor mentions his companions in order, with book companions before audio companions. In "The Night of the Doctor", the Doctor "salutes" five of his companions by name, all from the Big Finish audio productions.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: Despite the fact the Eighth Doctor appeared on television only twice, he is the most prolific of all the Doctors (to date) in terms of number of individual stories published in novel, novella, short story and audio form. In 2007, the Eighth Doctor finally made a second appearance (of sorts) within the television series' continuity. In the episode "Human Nature" he appears on-screen as a sketch (alongside other incarnations) in the book "A Journal of Impossible Things" by John Smith. In 2008 and 2010 he appeared again as a brief image in "The Next Doctor" and "The Eleventh Hour" along with every other incarnation up to that time. In 2010's "The Lodger", he is shown in a flashback with his first, second, third, fourth, ninth and tenth incarnations. In 2013's "Nightmare in Silver", he is shown in a flashback along with the Doctor's other incarnations; he is also fleetingly seen running past companion Clara Oswald in the following episode, "The Name of the Doctor", though his face is not shown. Later that year, McGann reprised the role for the mini-episode "The Night of the Doctor", a prelude to the show's 50th anniversary special. This appearance marked the Eighth Doctor's final adventure and his regeneration. "The Night of the Doctor" proved popular with fans of the series, some of whom petitioned the BBC to make a spin-off series starring the Eighth Doctor.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: The BBC's official website calls the Eighth Doctor an "effortlessly charming, romantic figure". The site states that he is both unguarded about his own background and candid about the future of those he meets, noting the irony in an "open Doctor" remaining such a closed book.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: The Big Finish Productions website describes the Eighth Doctor as "an enthusiastic figure who explores the universe for the sheer love of it", always surviving on the strength of his excellent improvisational skills rather than preparing elaborate plans. The site states that he is "passionate, direct, sympathetic and emotionally accessible", but notes that these traits are "balanced by occasional feelings of self-doubt and weariness of his endless battles against evil."


title: Eighth Doctor

text: Discussing "The Night of the Doctor", McGann said, "[Moffat's] instinctive take on the Eighth Doctor was exactly how I'd imagined this character to be, even way back, back in the 90s. You know, this... like a bruised nobility. I know it sounds wanky now, but... he's decent, but he's compromised. He's not a warrior, really, at all. There's a pacifist side to him, but he's a realist as well."


title: Eighth Doctor

text: The Eighth Doctor debuts in the TV film "Doctor Who". While transporting the remains of his longtime nemesis the Master to Gallifrey, the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) is caught in the crossfire of a gang shoot-out in 1999 San Francisco's Chinatown, USA. He is taken to a hospital where surgeons, confused by his double heartbeat, attempt to correct a non-existent fibrillation. These efforts instead "kill" the Doctor, and he is taken to a morgue where after several hours—due to the effect of anaesthetic on his alien biology—he finally regenerates into his eighth incarnation (McGann). The Master manages to cheat death, and while the Doctor is on Earth his spirit takes over the body of a paramedic named Bruce (Eric Roberts). The Master (Roberts) then attempts to steal the Doctor's remaining lives by opening the Eye of Harmony inside the Doctor's time machine, the TARDIS, nearly destroying the Earth in the process. However, the Doctor and his companion Dr Grace Holloway (Daphne Ashbrook) are able to prevent the Earth's destruction, and the Master is sucked into the Eye.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: The TV film did not lead to the commissioning of a revived television series, and while Eighth Doctor stories continued in other media, "Doctor Who" did not air again on television until 2005. After this, footage and stills from the TV film would be used in later episodes "The Next Doctor" (2008), "The Eleventh Hour", "The Lodger" (both 2010) and "Nightmare in Silver" (2013). Edited archive footage in "The Name of the Doctor" very briefly shows the Eighth Doctor sharing an adventure with the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton).


title: Eighth Doctor

text: McGann reprised the role for a webcast mini-episode, "The Night of the Doctor", in 2013, which precedes the 50th anniversary special, "The Day of the Doctor". The episode begins during the raging Time War between Daleks and Time Lords when he is killed when attempting to save a young woman who rejects salvation at the hands of a Time Lord causing them both to die in a spaceship crash. He awakens in the company of the Sisterhood of Karn, who explain that he has died and been temporarily resurrected. They urge him to bring the war to an end, and give him a choice of elixirs to trigger his regeneration. Saluting his various companions from the Big Finish audio range, he drinks an elixir designed to produce a warrior, regenerating into the War Doctor (John Hurt) who declares himself to be the Doctor "no more." In "The Day of the Doctor," the Eighth Doctor joins all of the other incarnations of the Doctor in saving Gallifrey at the end of the Time War. He can briefly be seen on a screen in the War Room, though like the other past incarnations of the Doctor, this is achieved through archive footage.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: McGann reprised his role as the Eighth Doctor in the final Thirteenth Doctor special "The Power of the Doctor", appearing in a transitional quasi-afterlife. He, along with the First, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors, help the Thirteenth to undo her forced regeneration by the Master.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: The Eighth Doctor initially wore a Wild Bill Hickok costume including a battleship grey cravat tie intended for a New Year's fancy dress party, which he liberated from the lockers at the San Francisco hospital where he regenerated. He completed it with a pair of black leather shoes taken from Grace Holloway's ex-boyfriend Brian to give him the appearance somewhere between a Victorian dandy and wild west gambler.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: By the time of "The Night of the Doctor" he sported a worn and bottle green moleskin overcoat, a ruffled and midnight-blue ascot tie, a bronze grey paisley waistcoat, leather gaiters, and caramel brown US Army Cavalry boots; corresponding with his overall weary appearance, presumably as a result of many experiences during the Time War. This costume has been featured on many Big Finish Productions' audio plays set during the Time War and has also been used as promotional material after the positive reception of "The Night of the Doctor". McGann wears a variation of this costume for his appearance in "The Power of the Doctor”.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: In 2010, Paul McGann revealed a new costume and sonic screwdriver for the Eighth Doctor which he indicated would be the new costume going forward. The cover and promotional photographs for the 2012 Big Finish story, "Dark Eyes" is, however, the first story to officially feature the new costume. The new outfit was originally premiered in 2010 at the Armageddon Pop Culture Expo, along with a redesigned Sonic Screwdriver, courtesy of Weta Workshop. These changes were independently produced and were not affiliated with Big Finish Productions or the BBC, but were accepted as suitable for official use after the fact.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: The costume consists of a royal blue leather pea coat, a white T-shirt, navy blue jeans and brown shoes. In this outfit the Doctor also carries a brown messenger bag.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: Almost as soon as he'd left San Francisco, the Doctor had another brief attack of amnesia, caused by a final trap of the Master's. To regain his memories, the Doctor was forced to visit all seven of his past selves and help them out with some crisis or another, at the same time acknowledging the responsibility his role gave him. Having regained his memories, the Doctor met a late twentieth-century Coal Hill School student named Samantha Jones; shortly after their encounter, the Doctor left her alone at a Greenpeace rally.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: For a time, the Doctor adventured with an Ice Warrior named Ssard and a human woman named Stacy Townsend, who fell in love with each other; some while after they parted ways with the Doctor, the two invited him to serve as best man at their wedding ("Placebo Effect"). He also, at some point, teamed up with his old companion Bernice Summerfield, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT to combat an Ice Warrior occupation of Great Britain.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: Eventually, three years after his departure and one hour after he left, the Doctor returned to the Greenpeace rally. With Sam collected, the pair spent a great period wandering together, facing dozens of adventures. During their travels, Sam and the Doctor became aware of a great war, looming in the future of Gallifrey, between the Time Lords and an as-yet-unidentified Enemy, with dramatic and disturbing consequences. While exploring the issue of the war, the Doctor discovered that his Sam was not the original Samantha Jones; rather, her biodata had been manipulated by an outside agency with the intent to mould her into a prosaic distraction for him ("Alien Bodies"). Ultimately this plan proved a failure, as Sam developed into a much more strongly-willed companion than intended; at one point she spent three years avoiding the Doctor, so as to cope with a crush she had developed on him, but managed to survive and make a good life for herself in the future until she rejoined the Doctor as she could make more of a difference with him.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: The close dynamic between the pair was shifted with the introduction of Fitz Kreiner, a sixties bar singer incorrectly suspected of matricide. Fitz took on the role of a sort of younger brother to the Doctor, placing the Time Lord on as high a pedestal as Fitz had ever known. Eventually Fitz found himself abducted by Faction Paradox, a "time-travelling voodoo cult", and brainwashed into their legions. When the Doctor realised that a Faction member he had encountered was a biomass copy of Fitz- a 'clone' created and shaped based on others' memories and perceptions of Fitz-, he used the TARDIS's telepathic circuits to restore Fitz's memories and identity to the clone, believing that the original Fitz was dead and reasoning that the clone would essentially be the real Fitz in every way that mattered.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: With both Sam and Fitz gone – Sam's origins established as a temporal paradox caused by exposure to a scar in reality created when the Doctor regenerated, which the 'original' Sam was only exposed to because the Doctor met blonde Sam – the Doctor continued his travels with the clone Fitz (although he was treated as the real one and generally thought of himself as such) and Compassion, an ex-Faction agent implanted with an interface that the Doctor found compatible with his TARDIS. Unbeknownst to the Doctor, the Faction – with the aid of the original Fitz – had changed his history, drawing the Third Doctor to a planet he should never have visited and causing a chain of events that culminated in the Third Doctor regenerating ahead of schedule, allowing them to infect him with the Faction Paradox biodata virus. While his immune system would allow him to resist the virus for a time, it would gain a greater hold on him with each subsequent regeneration, until it would finally transform him into a faction member in his eighth incarnation (" and ").


title: Eighth Doctor

text: Eventually, Compassion's implant, linked to the Doctor's TARDIS to prevent her being influenced by random local signals, triggered her unexpected mutation into a sentient Type 102 TARDIS, specifically the "mother" of the TARDISes that would be used in the pending War. With this knowledge, the Time Lords – led by Romana, now in her third incarnation – attempted to capture Compassion, intending to use her as breeding stock in preparation for the war. In response, and in light of the apparent destruction of his old TARDIS in a dimensional rift, the Doctor and Fitz retreated into Compassion and fled, the Doctor refusing to let his people enslave his friend in such a manner and resolving to keep on the run until he could find another way to deal with the issue of the War ("The Shadows of Avalon").


title: Eighth Doctor

text: The Doctor and Fitz travelled in Compassion for some time, until the machinations of Faction Paradox came to a head back on Gallifrey. As it turned out, in the new timeline triggered by the Doctor's infection, the Doctor was destined to become "Grandfather Paradox", the mythical founder of Faction Paradox. The only factor keeping the original sequence of events in play was the Doctor's TARDIS, which had rebuilt itself after its apparent destruction on Avalon, and had now materialised in a twisted form above Gallifrey, holding within itself the Doctor's original reality where he had regenerated on Metebelis III and never been infected ever since it sensed that something was wrong when the Third Doctor regenerated ahead of schedule.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: In a final confrontation with his future self, the Doctor resolved the timeline conflict by channelling the TARDIS's built-up energies through its weapon systems, thereby destroying both the Faction Paradox fleet and Gallifrey itself. In so doing, the TARDIS was able to rewrite the altered timeline with the original one that it "remembered"; no longer able to contain both timelines as a result of its energy drain, one reality had to become 'real'. As a side effect, however, the Doctor's entire memory was erased, apparently from the trauma of the event ("The Ancestor Cell").


title: Eighth Doctor

text: To give the Doctor time to recover and the TARDIS time to regenerate from the extensive damage it had suffered, Compassion dropped the Doctor off on Earth in the year 1889; she then delivered Fitz to 2001, with the intent that he wait for the Doctor to catch up to him. With that, Compassion departed for parts unknown. Back in 1889, meanwhile, the Doctor awoke in a railway carriage to discover no memory as to his real identity, and no possessions save a small, shapeless box– what was left of the TARDIS after its power loss— and a note, simply stating "Meet me in St. Louis', 8 February 2001. Fitz".


title: Eighth Doctor

text: Despite his amnesia, the Doctor retained a wide general knowledge. However, he also showed an uncharacteristic callous streak, easily allowing others to die if he felt that they 'deserved' to perish ("The Burning"). To contrast, he was capable of feeling unusually poignant warmth, even dating a woman in the 1980s, and adopting a young girl named Miranda, a Time Lady from the future ("Father Time"). During this time, he often became involved in strange problems outside the norm, such as confronting an entity that was essentially sentient fire ("The Burning"). He experienced a particular funk in the 1950s, feeling that his efforts to learn about his past were pointless, but his interest in life was re-inspired when he was recruited to defeat his old enemies the Players as they sought to escalate the Cold War ("Endgame").


title: Eighth Doctor

text: Unsure what "St Louis" was intended by the note, the Doctor created his own in London: the St Louis Bar and Restaurant. As 2001 rolled around, Fitz indeed turned up there to meet him. With the aid of new companion Anji Kapoor, the Doctor and Fitz completed the TARDIS's regeneration, dealt with a race of invading aliens, then set back again to exploring time and space ("Escape Velocity").


title: Eighth Doctor

text: With his freedom restored, the Doctor chose to counteract his extended exile by seeking as much non-human company as possible. During this period, the Doctor encountered all manner of unusual beings – from a species that at cursory glance resembled the Earth tiger ("The Year of Intelligent Tigers"), to water spirits, to talking apes from another dimension. Though at times the Doctor seemed somewhat cold – as when he seemed more concerned about damaged plums than a dead man ("Eater of Wasps") – he retained his passion for life in all forms. Although his amnesia remained a bother, the Doctor acknowledged that whatever had happened to him had happened for a reason, and he might as well make use of the advantages it offered.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: Only a few months after resuming his old lifestyle, the Doctor faced another radical change: the loss of his second heart. As it happened, the heart served as a bond with Gallifrey; with the planet gone, the heart had begun to fester within the Doctor's body, pumping it with poison.


title: Eighth Doctor

text: A man named Sabbath, an eighteenth-century secret agent gifted with time travel abilities, excised the blackened organ, both saving the Doctor's life and robbing the Doctor of some of his higher Time Lord abilities, including his respiratory bypass system and his ability to metabolise toxins. It transpired that Sabbath was actually after the heart for his own purposes: when implanted into Sabbath's own chest, it imparted upon him those same Time Lord powers, including allowing Sabbath to travel further from Earth in his own time machine than he had previously been capable of. An unexpected side effect of this experiment was that so long as the Doctor's heart remained within Sabbath's chest, the Doctor himself remained practically invulnerable to harm, returning to life after up to a day in a death-like state even after sustaining normally regeneration-inducing injuries such as getting his chest crushed by sandbags (though any injury sustained by the Doctor would weaken Sabbath).