Elie Nadelman: , Man in the Open Air (c. 1915)—which may have been influenced by the doll collection he had once studied in Munich’s Bavarian National Museum.

Julian Barnes: …explore Belle Époque Paris in The Man in the Red Coat (2019).

Jack Arnold: …to the Old West for Man in the Shadow (1957), starring Orson Welles (in his only western) and Jeff Chandler. The Lady Takes a Flyer (1958), a mainstream romance, featured Chandler alongside Lana Turner, who played a pilot who dislikes the prospect of being domesticated. High School Confidential! (1958), a…

Corrado Alvaro: …1934, L’uomo è forte (1938; Man Is Strong) is a defense of the individual against the oppression of totalitarianism. Alvaro’s other novels include Vent’anni (1930; “Twenty Years”), Itinerario italiano (1933; “Italian Route”), L’età breve (1946; “The Brief Era”), and Tutto è accaduto (1961; “All Has Happened”).

Ngaio Marsh: …she wrote her first novel, A Man Lay Dead (1934), which introduced the detective Roderick Alleyn. In 1933 she returned to New Zealand, where she wrote many more novels and also produced and directed Shakespearean repertory theatre. The theatre guild she helped found in 1944 became an important mainstay of…

South Asian arts: Islāmic architecture in India: period of the Delhi and provincial sultanates: …at Chitor, and the superb Mān Mandir palace at Gwalior (1486–1516), a rich and magnificent work that exerted considerable influence on the development of Mughal architecture at Fatehpur Sīkrī.

Man o’ War, (foaled 1917), American racehorse (Thoroughbred) often considered the greatest of the 20th century. In a brief career of only two seasons (1919–20), he won 20 of 21 races, established seven track records for speed over various distances, and raced at odds as short as 1–100. In 1920 he

Jack Albertson: His other movies included Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), How to Murder Your Wife (1965), and The Flim-Flam Man (1967). Albertson played Grandpa Joe in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) and Manny Rosen in the popular disaster movie The

Frank Sargeson: …comic epistolary novella; the collection Man of England Now (1972), which contained previously published work as well as the novella A Game of Hide and Seek; and Sunset Village (1976), a novella that details the nefarious goings-on at a retirement community. His short fiction was compiled in Collected Stories, 1935–63…

Tenzing Norgay: …Everest (1955; also published as Tiger of the Snows), written in collaboration with James Ramsey Ullman, is an autobiography. After Everest (1978), as told to Malcolm Barnes, tells of his travels after the Everest ascent and his directorship of the Field Training Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling, which the Indian…

English literature: Other novelists: emphatic contrast, Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) offers an extremist and rarefied version of the sentimental hero, while Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765) playfully initiated the vogue for Gothic fiction. William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and

José Clemente Orozco: Mature work and later years: …man who Orozco depicted in Man of Fire, the circular painting in the hospice dome.

Andrzej Wajda: …and Człowiek z żelaza (1981; Man of Iron). The latter, which was regarded as a manifesto against the ruling communist party in Poland and in support of the Solidarity opposition movement, won the Cannes film festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or.

Don Quixote: Legacy and adaptations: …in 1968; and a 1972 film version directed by Arthur Hiller and starring Peter O’Toole, Sophia Loren, and James Coco. Another notable film adaptation was The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018), a loose retelling of Cervantes’s novel by the director Terry Gilliam, whose attempts to make the film over…

The Man of Law’s Tale, one of the 24 stories in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. It is an adaptation of a popular medieval story. The story describes the sufferings of Constance, daughter of a Christian emperor. When she marries a Syrian sultan who has converted to Christianity, his evil

Stephen Dobyns: …year he published the novel A Man of Little Evils, and from that point on he alternated between poetry and fiction, publishing roughly a book a year. His subsequent poetry volumes include Griffon (1976), Heat Death (1980), Black Dog, Red Dog (1984), Cemetery Nights (1987), Velocities: New and Selected Poems,

comedy: Rise of realistic comedy in 17th-century England: these comedies—Sir George Etherege’s Man of Mode (1676), for example, or William Wycherley’s Country-Wife (1675) or William Congreve’s Way of the World (1700)—the premium is on the energy and the grace with which the game is played, and the highest dramatic approval is reserved for those who take the…

David Lodge: Author, Author (2004) and A Man of Parts (2011) are based on the lives of writers Henry James and H.G. Wells, respectively.

John Galsworthy: In The Man of Property, Galsworthy attacks the Forsytes through the character of Soames Forsyte, a solicitor who considers his wife Irene as a mere form of property. Irene finds her husband physically unattractive and falls in love with a young architect who dies. The other…

Tony Zale was an American professional boxer, world middleweight (160 pounds) champion during the 1940s. (Read Gene Tunney’s 1929 Britannica essay on boxing.) Zale began his professional boxing career in 1934, but to make a living he spent much of 1935 and 1936 working in the steel mills of Gary.

Amy Adams: …Henry Cavill as Superman in Man of Steel (2013). She reprised the character in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and Justice League (2017); a different cut of the latter was released in 2021 as Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Her other roles from 2013 included a con artist in…

Edgar Allan Poe: Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe: …of fatality (“The Assignation,” “The Man of the Crowd”). Even when he does not hurl his characters into the clutch of mysterious forces or onto the untrodden paths of the beyond, he uses the anguish of imminent death as the means of causing the nerves to quiver (“The Pit…

Chinua Achebe: A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987) deal with corruption and other aspects of postcolonial African life.

Anthony Mann: The 1950s: westerns of Anthony Mann: …were no such compromises in Man of the West (1958), a brutal but superbly staged drama starring Gary Cooper as a former bank robber who is held hostage by his old gang. The film was not a box-office success but came to be recognized as Mann’s last great western.

Barry Levinson: …Heights (1999), the political thriller Man of the Year (2006), and the comedy Rock the Kasbah (2015).

Thomas Kinsella: …Peppercanister included Marginal Economy (2006), Man of War (2007), and Belief and Unbelief (2007). Numerous collections of Kinsella’s poems were released, including Collected Poems, 1956–2001 (2001), Selected Poems (2007), Fat Master (2011), and Late Poems (2013); the latter was published by Carcanet Press, which released several of his works in…

Ed Harris: …Virginia (2010), in the thriller Man on a Ledge (2012), and as Sen. John McCain in the HBO movie Game Change (2012), which dramatized the final months of the 2008 U.S. presidential race from the McCain campaign’s perspective. In the Cold War thriller Phantom (2013) Harris starred as a Soviet…

Frank Perry: After the muddled thriller Man on a Swing (1974), Perry directed Rancho Deluxe (1975), which was scripted by Thomas McGuane. The offbeat contemporary western centres on two cattle rustlers (Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston) who set their sights on a wealthy rancher (Clifton James). Perry, who occasionally worked in…

Elia Kazan: Films and stage work of the 1950s of Elia Kazan: …was the movie that followed, Man on a Tightrope (1953), an account of a circus troupe’s escape from communist-ruled Czechoslovakia.

Burgess Meredith: Meredith also directed the films The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1950) and The Yin and Yang of Mr. Go (1978), the latter of which he wrote.

Jim Carrey: …a popular television show, and Man on the Moon (1999), in which he portrayed the comedian Andy Kaufman. In 2000 he appeared in the film adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas. After receiving mixed reviews for The Majestic (2001) and Bruce Almighty (2003), Carrey earned critical acclaim…

man orchid, either of two related species of orchids (family Orchidaceae), named for the humanlike shape of their flowers. The common man orchid (Orchis anthropophora, formerly Aceras anthropophorum) is native to grasslands of Great Britain, Eurasia, and northern Africa. The flower spike, about 10

Man Ray was a photographer, painter, and filmmaker who was the only American to play a major role in both the Dada and Surrealist movements. The son of Jewish immigrants—his father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress—Radnitzky grew up in New York City, where he studied architecture,

Jimmy Kimmel: Win Ben Stein’s Money and The Man Show: …Kimmel and Adam Carolla cohosted The Man Show, a talk show aimed at young male audiences with a mix of scantily clad women and irreverent humour. It developed a dedicated following over the following four years, becoming one of the most successful shows on the Comedy Central network. During that…

Rajmahal: Man Singh, a Rajput governor of Bengal under the Mughals, chose the site for his capital in 1595–96 because of its strategic command of the Teliagarh Pass and the Ganges River. The capital of Bengal was transferred to Dacca (now Dhaka, Bangladesh) in 1608, but…

Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), which tracked the mismatched protagonists’ investigation into a decades-old disappearance, was swiftly met with praise in Sweden—in particular for Larsson’s indelible characterization of Salander as a surly pixie with a troubled past. Its two sequels—Flickan som lekte med elden…

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg , short story by Mark Twain satirizing the vanity of the virtuous. It was first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1899 and collected in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Sketches in 1900. The story reflects Twain’s disillusionment and

Garson Kanin: Film directing: …later that year he helmed A Man to Remember, a B-film written by Dalton Trumbo, and Next Time I Marry, a screwball comedy starring Lucille Ball. The Great Man Votes (1939) was Kanin’s first critical success, thanks largely to a moving performance by John Barrymore. An acerbic satire on politicians…

Bob Rafelson: Films of the late 1980s and beyond: …artistically was the screwball comedy Man Trouble (1992), written by Five East Pieces screenwriter Eastman and featuring Nicholson and Ellen Barkin. The complex, tightly woven Blood and Wine (1996), the noirish story of a jewel robbery, which starred Nicholson, Michael Caine, Judy Davis, and Jennifer Lopez, was much better received.…

Manchester United, English professional football (soccer) team based in Manchester, England. Nicknamed “the Red Devils” for its distinctive red jerseys, it is one of the richest and best-supported football clubs not only in England but in the entire world. The club has won the English top-division

Herbert Spencer: Sociology and social philosophy: In The Man Versus the State (1884), he wrote that England’s Tories generally favour a military and Liberals an industrial social order but that the Liberals of the latter half of the 19th century, with their legislation on hours of work, liquor licensing, sanitation (see public…

William Keighley: …expensive acquisitions, the Broadway hit The Man Who Came to Dinner, which was written by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. The 1942 adaptation was a success, with fine performances by Davis and Monty Woolley, who re-created his stage role with verve. Nearly as funny was George Washington Slept Here…

William Keighley: …their most expensive acquisitions, the Broadway hit The Man Who Came to Dinner, which was written by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. The 1942 adaptation was a success, with fine performances by Davis and Monty Woolley, who re-created his stage role with verve. Nearly as funny was George Washington…

Rudolfo Anaya: …in Serafina’s Stories (2004) and The Man Who Could Fly and Other Stories (2006); and a number of children’s books, as well as plays and poems. An advocate of multiculturalism and bilingualism, he translated, edited, and contributed to numerous anthologies of Hispanic writing. In 2002 he was awarded a National…

African American literature: The Black Arts movement: Williams, particularly The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), a roman à clef about a dying Black novelist intent on maintaining his political integrity in the face of government persecution, communicate the spirit of the new Black ideals. The “tell it like it is” temper of the…

Nicolas Roeg: …du Maurier; the science-fiction film The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), featuring an otherworldly David Bowie; Bad Timing (1980), starring Art Garfunkel; and The Witches (1990), based on Roald Dahl’s popular children’s book of the same name. Bad Timing also starred Theresa Russell, whom Roeg married in 1982 (they…

Dai Vernon was a Canadian magician and sleight-of-hand artist who was one of the 20th century’s most renowned practitioners of “up-close” magic and card tricks. (Read Harry Houdini’s 1926 Britannica essay on magic.) Fascinated with magic from age six, he decided to become a professional conjurer

Don Quixote: Legacy and adaptations: Another notable film adaptation was The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018), a loose retelling of Cervantes’s novel by the director Terry Gilliam, whose attempts to make the film over the course of nearly three decades were beset by various complications, delays, and cancellations, turning Gilliam into a quixotic figure…

Jeremy Irons: … in the Srinivasa Ramanujan biopic The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015); as the architect of a tower that becomes the site of a class war in High-Rise (2015), an adaptation of a J.G. Ballard novel; and as a villain in the fantasy adventure Assassin’s Creed (2016), based on a video…

The Man Who Knew Too Much, American thriller film, released in 1956, that was Alfred Hitchcock’s remake of his 1934 classic and is widely considered equal, if not superior, to the original. (Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.) Dr. Ben McKenna (played by James Stewart) and

Alfred Hitchcock: First international releases: The Man Who Knew Too Much to Jamaica Inn: Hitchcock signed with Gaumont-British in 1934, and his first film for that company, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), was also his first international success. Leslie Banks and Edna Best star as the Lawrences, a…

Richard Wright: In addition, The Man Who Lived Underground, a rejected manuscript (1941) that was later condensed into a short story, was released in its entirety in 2021. The novel centres on an African American man who is coerced into confessing to two murders he did not commit..

Rafael Arévalo Martínez: …title story of his collection El hombre que parecía un caballo (1920; “The Man Who Resembled a Horse”), which was once considered the most famous Latin American short story of the 20th century. First published in 1915, the story was so successful that Arévalo made other experiments in the same…

The Man Who Loved Children, novel by Australian writer Christina Stead, published in 1940 and revised in 1965. Although it went unrecognized for 25 years, The Man Who Loved Children is considered Stead’s finest novel. Unfolding a harrowing portrait of a disintegrating family, Stead examines the

Robert Edmond Jones: His settings for The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife (1915), a version by the French satirist Anatole France of an old French folk drama, employed an austere, gray-and-black, poster-like street facade and brilliant costumes. Jones achieved unencumbered, fluid stage arrangements in which it was possible (as it…

Oliver Sacks: …patients in works such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (1985). While most critics found his descriptions of the often strange afflictions to be humane and sympathetic, some accused Sacks of merely attempting to excite and amuse his audience.

Bette Davis: …the ingenue in Warner Brothers’ The Man Who Played God (1932). The positive critical response to her work in this film prompted Warner Brothers to sign Davis to a contract.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: The top-selling theme song by Gene Pitney does not appear in the film.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, American western film, released in 1962, that was John Ford’s poetic and sombre look at the end of the Wild West era. Although atypical of his usual works, it is widely considered Ford’s last great movie and among his best westerns. The story opens with the return

David Bowie: His first album of note, The Man Who Sold the World (1970), a prescient hybrid of folk, art rock, and heavy metal, did not turn him into a household name either. Not until Hunky Dory (1971) did he hit on the attractively postmodern notion of presenting his chameleonism as an…

The Man Who Was Thursday, allegorical novel by G.K. Chesterton, published in 1908. It relates the experiences of Gabriel Syme, a poet turned detective, who is hired by a shrouded, nameless person to infiltrate a group of anarchists, each named for a day of the week and all determined to destroy the

The Man Who Was Thursday, allegorical novel by G.K. Chesterton, published in 1908. It relates the experiences of Gabriel Syme, a poet turned detective, who is hired by a shrouded, nameless person to infiltrate a group of anarchists, each named for a day of the week and all determined to destroy the

Coen brothers: The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) won rave reviews for its pitch-perfect film noir style.

Michael Caine: …popular films as John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and John Sturges’s The Eagle Has Landed (1976). He continued his prodigious output during the 1980s, appearing in some two dozen films during the decade. Though many of these films were dismal failures, Caine’s reputation did not suffer,…

The Man Who Would Be King, short story by Rudyard Kipling, first published in The Phantom Rickshaw, and Other Tales in 1888. The piece, which is narrated by a British journalist in India, is about a pair of comic adventurers who briefly establish themselves as godlike leaders of a native tribe in

Western sculpture: Avant-garde sculpture (1909–20): …in this fashion, he produced Man with a Guitar, and “Standing Figure” (1915), in which voids are introduced, while in the early 1920s he developed freer forms more consistently based on curves.

Georges Braque: Cubism: Braque’s Man with a Guitar is an example: the colours are brown, gray, and green, the pictorial space is almost flat, viewpoints and light sources are multiplied, contours are broken, volumes are often transparent, and facets are turned into apparently illogical simultaneous views. While many of…

history of film: The Soviet Union: …is Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929), a feature-length portrait of Moscow from dawn to dusk. The film plays upon the “city symphony” genre inaugurated by Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, the Symphony of a Great City (1927), but Vertov repeatedly draws attention to the filmmaking process to…

Andrea Solari: …in a fine portrait, “Man with a Pink [Carnation]” (c. 1492; National Gallery, London), which displays Antonello’s sculptural conception of form. Solari’s earliest dated work is a “Madonna and Child with SS. Joseph and Jerome” (Brera, Milan), with a fine landscape background, executed for the Church of San Pietro…

Carrie Fisher: …included The Blues Brothers (1980), The Man with One Red Shoe (1985), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and When Harry Met Sally… (1989).

The Man with the Golden Arm, American film drama, released in 1955, that broke new ground with its realistic look at the life of a heroin addict. The film was based on the novel of the same name by Nelson Algren and starred Frank Sinatra as Frankie Machine, a struggling addict who gets clean while

The Man with the Golden Arm, novel by Nelson Algren, published in 1949. It won a National Book Award in 1950. Set on Chicago’s West Side, the novel evokes the gritty street life of petty criminals and hustlers. Hero Frankie Machine is a shrewd poker dealer whose “golden arm” shakes as he relies on

Christopher Lee: …and the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), in which he starred as Bond’s nemesis Scaramanga. Appearances in a steady series of unremarkable films were punctuated by a well-received turn as Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, in Jinnah (1998).

Edwin Markham: …San Francisco Examiner of “The Man with the Hoe.” Inspired by Jean-François Millet’s painting, Markham made the French peasant the symbol of the exploited classes throughout the world. Its success enabled Markham to devote himself to writing and lecturing—in which he concerned himself with social and industrial, as well as…

Miles Davis: Legacy: …returned to public notice with The Man with the Horn (1981), critics felt that Davis’s erratic playing showed the effects of his five-year layoff, but he steadily regained his powers during the next few years. He dabbled in a variety of musical styles throughout the 1980s, concentrating mostly on jazz-rock…

Russell Crowe: In The Man with the Iron Fists (2012), an homage to kung fu movies, he played a roguish English soldier in feudal China, and in the musical Les Misérables (2012) he performed the role of the determined police inspector Javert. Crowe subsequently appeared as a corrupt…

Carl Reiner: Film directing: Reiner then made The Man with Two Brains (1983), a sci-fi comedy that he also wrote with Martin and Gipe. Martin played a neurosurgeon attending a convention in Vienna. His faithless wife (Kathleen Turner in arguably her best comic performance) becomes insanely jealous when he falls in love…

Archie Mayo: Films of the 1930s: The Man with Two Faces (1934) was a melodrama adapted from a play by George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woollcott, with Edward G. Robinson as a famous actor who is suspected of murdering the overbearing husband (Louis Calhern) of his sister (Mary Astor). After Desirable…

Graham Greene: …success of his first novel, The Man Within (1929; adapted as the film The Smugglers, 1947), he quit The Times and worked as a film critic and literary editor for The Spectator until 1940. He then traveled widely for much of the next three decades as a freelance journalist, searching…

Edward Everett Hale: …for his short story “The Man Without a Country.”

Kurt Vonnegut: In 2005 he published A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush’s America, a collection of essays and speeches inspired in part by contemporary politics. Vonnegut’s posthumously published works include Armageddon in Retrospect (2008), a collection of fiction and nonfiction that focuses on war…

Mel Gibson: …made his directorial debut with The Man Without a Face, in which he also starred. Gibson next directed the epic Braveheart (1995), in which he portrayed the Scottish national hero Sir William Wallace. The film won five Academy Awards, including best picture and best director.

King Vidor: Later films: …(although enjoyable) Kirk Douglas western Man Without a Star (1955).

Erik Lindegren: …poetry, Mannen utan väg (1942; The Man Without a Way), marked the beginning of the poetry of the ’40s. Using unconventional imagery and syntax, the poetry in this volume can best be understood in terms of its visions of the stupidities and horrors of the contemporary human scene. Lindegren’s two…

The Man Without Qualities, unfinished novel by Austrian writer Robert Musil, published as Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften in three installments in 1930, 1933, and 1943. Musil’s sprawling masterpiece was his life’s work. On the surface a witty, urbane portrait of life in the last days of the

The Silent Cry, novel by Ōe Kenzaburō, published in Japanese in 1967 as Man’en gannen no futtōbōru (literally, “Football in the First Year of Man’en”) and awarded the Tanizaki Prize. The Silent Cry is a nonlinear and difficult work whose subject matter bears little relationship to the events

Italian literature: Other writings: A Man’s Blessing]). After a Neorealistic phase, Giuseppe Berto plunged into the world of psychological introspection (Il male oscuro [1964; “The Dark Sickness”] and La cosa buffa [1966; “The Funny Thing”; Eng. trans. Antonio in Love]). Natalia Ginzburg’s territory is the family, whether she reminisces…

Frank Borzage: Freelancing after Fox: Man’s Castle (1933) is a colorful romance, starring Tracy as a hard-boiled resident of New York’s “Hoover Flats” shantytown who takes in a homeless woman (Loretta Young); when she becomes pregnant, he decides to rob for her and their unborn child.

André Malraux: Life: …in 1930, and the masterpiece La Condition humaine in 1933 (awarded the Prix Goncourt) established his reputation as a leading French novelist and a charismatic, politically committed intellectual. Though he captivated Paris with his exceptional intelligence, lyrical prose, astonishing memory, and breadth of knowledge, it was not generally appreciated that…

Howard Hawks: Final films: In the comedy Man’s Favorite Sport? (1964), Rock Hudson played a role in the Grant vein of an expert department-store fly caster who is sent by his boss to enter a fishing competition—a sport he knows nothing about. Red Line 7000 (1965) was Hawks’s disappointing return to the…

André Malraux: Life: His novel L’Espoir (Man’s Hope), based on his experiences in Spain, was published in 1937. A motion-picture version of L’Espoir that Malraux produced and directed in Barcelona in 1938 was not shown in France until after the country’s liberation at the end of World War II.

Richard Overton: In Man’s Mortality (1643), he argued that the soul as well as the body dies and must be resurrected. His tracts of 1645–46, published under the pseudonym Martin Marpriest, castigated the Presbyterians and the Westminster Assembly of Divines for their intolerance. In a series of 40…

Xunzi: …to the often-quoted essay “Man’s Nature Is Evil.” Because Mencius believed that human beings were innately disposed toward moral behaviour, Xunzi was perceived, as the author of this essay, to be attacking his illustrious predecessor. The truth is that Xunzi remained Confucian in his firm rejection of the amoral…

Max Scheler: …des Menschen im Kosmos (1928; Man’s Place in Nature) is a sketch for these projected major works. It offers a grandiose vision of a gradual, self-becoming unification of man, Deity, and world. This converging process has two polarities: mind or spirit on the one hand, and impulsion on the other.…

Annie Ernaux: …separate volumes, La Place (1983; A Man’s Place) and Une Femme (1987; A Woman’s Story). The former delves into the life of an early 20th-century working-class man with minimal education. It received great acclaim, earning her the Prix Renaudot, the French literary prize for an outstanding original novel, as well…

Japanese art: Calligraphy and painting: …of Chinese characters, known as man’yōgana, were employed to represent Japanese phonetic sounds, and two even more abbreviated phonetic writing systems, hiragana and katakana, were known in nascent form. The former was highly stylized and cursive, while the latter was somewhat more severe and rectilinear in form. Use of hiragana…

Man’yō-shū, (Japanese: “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves”), oldest (c. 759) and greatest of the imperial anthologies of Japanese poetry. Among the 4,500 poems are some from the 7th century and perhaps earlier. It was celebrated through the centuries for its “man’yō” spirit, a simple freshness and

hiragana: One such adaptation was man’yōgana, a phonetic syllabary that came into use in the 8th century. This system used Chinese characters whose Chinese pronunciation sounded similar to Japanese syllables, rather than using the ideas that the characters represented. In the 9th century man’yōgana was simplified, giving rise to the…

Man’yō-shū, (Japanese: “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves”), oldest (c. 759) and greatest of the imperial anthologies of Japanese poetry. Among the 4,500 poems are some from the 7th century and perhaps earlier. It was celebrated through the centuries for its “man’yō” spirit, a simple freshness and

Isle of Man: …southwest lies an islet, the Calf of Man, with precipitous cliffs, which is administered by the Manx National Heritage as a bird sanctuary.