title: Wrocław

text: The early 13th-century Main Market Square (Rynek) is the oldest medieval public square in Poland, and also one of the largest. It features the ornate Gothic Old Town Hall, the oldest of its kind in the country. In the north-west corner of the square is St. Elisabeth's Church (Bazylika Św. Elżbiety) with its 91.5-metre-high tower and an observation deck at an altitude of 75 metres. Beneath the basilica are two small medieval houses connected by an arched gate that once led into a churchyard; these were reshaped into their current form in the 1700s. Today, the two connected buildings are known to the city's residents as "Jaś i Małgosia", named after the children's fairy tale characters from Hansel and Gretel. North of the church are so-called "shambles" (Polish: "jatki"), a former meat market with a . The Salt Square (now a flower market) opened in 1242 is located at the south-western corner of the Market Square – close to the square, between Szewska and Łaciarska streets, is the domeless 13th-century St. Mary Magdalene Church, which during the Reformation (1523) was converted into Wrocław's first Protestant temple.


title: Wrocław

text: The Cathedral of St. Vincent and St. James and the Holy Cross and St. Bartholomew's Collegiate Church are burial sites of Polish monarchs, Henry II the Pious and Henry IV Probus, respectively.


title: Wrocław

text: The "Pan Tadeusz Museum", open since May 2016, is located in the "House under the Golden Sun" at 6 Market Square. The manuscript of the national epos, "Pan Tadeusz", is housed there as part of the Ossolineum National Institute, with multimedia and interactive educational opportunities.


title: Wrocław

text: The Tourist Information Centre () is situated on the Main Market Square (Rynek) in building no 14. In 2011, Wrocław was visited by about 3 million tourists, and in 2016 about 5 million. Free wireless Internet (Wi-Fi) is available at a number of places around town.


title: Wrocław

text: Wrocław is a major attraction for both domestic and international tourists. Noteworthy landmarks include the Multimedia Fountain, Szczytnicki Park with its Japanese Garden, miniature park and dinosaur park, the Botanical Garden founded in 1811, Poland's largest railway model "Kolejkowo", Hydropolis Centre for Ecological Education, University of Wrocław with Mathematical Tower, , Wrocław water tower, the Royal Palace, ropes course on the Opatowicka Island, White Stork Synagogue, the Old Jewish Cemetery and the . An interesting way to explore the city is seeking out "Wrocław's dwarfs" – over 600 small bronze figurines can be found across the city, on pavements, walls and lampposts. They first appeared in 2005.


title: Wrocław

text: Wrocław Zoo is home to the "Africarium" – the only space devoted solely to exhibiting the fauna of Africa with an oceanarium. It is the oldest zoological garden in Poland established in 1865. It is also the third-largest zoo in the world in terms of the number of animal species on display.


title: Wrocław

text: Small passenger vessels on the Oder offer river tours, as do historic trams or the converted open-topped historic buses Jelcz 043.


title: Wrocław

text: The Centennial Hall (Hala Stulecia, ), designed by Max Berg in 1911–1913, is a World Heritage Site listed by UNESCO in 2006.


title: Wrocław

text: The city is well known for its large number of nightclubs and pubs. Many are in or near the Market Square, and in the Niepolda passage, the on the Bogusławskiego street. The basement of the old City Hall houses one of the oldest restaurants in Europe—Piwnica Świdnicka (operating since around 1273), while the basement of the new City Hall contains the brewpub "Spiż". There are many other craft breweries in Wrocław: three brewpubs – Browar Stu Mostów, Browar Staromiejski Złoty Pies, Browar Rodzinny Prost; two microbrewery – Profesja and Warsztat Piwowarski; and seven contract breweries – Doctor Brew, Genius Loci, Solipiwko, Pol A Czech, Baba Jaga, wBrew and Wielka Wyspa. Every year on the second weekend of June the Festival of Good Beer takes place. It is the biggest beer festival in Poland.


title: Wrocław

text: The National Museum at Powstańców Warszawy Square, one of Poland's main branches of the National Museum system, holds one of the largest collections of contemporary art in the country.


title: Wrocław

text: Ossolineum is a National Institute and Library incorporating the , partially salvaged from the formerly Polish city of Lwów (now Lviv in Ukraine), containing items of international and national significance. It has a history of major World War II theft of collections after the invasion and takeover of Lwów by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.


title: Wrocław

text: Major museums also include the , Museum of Bourgeois Art in the Old Town Hall, Museum of Architecture, , Museum of Natural History at University of Wrocław, Museum of Contemporary Art in Wrocław, , Galeria Awangarda, the , , , , the , .


title: Wrocław

text: The history of Wrocław is described in minute detail in the monograph by Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse. A number of books have been written about Wrocław following World War II.


title: Wrocław

text: Wrocław philologist and writer Marek Krajewski wrote a series of crime novels about detective Eberhard Mock, a fictional character from the city of Breslau. Accordingly, Michał Kaczmarek published "Wrocław according to Eberhard Mock – Guide based on the books by Marek Krajewski". In 2011 appeared the 1104-page Lexicon of the architecture of Wrocław and in 2013 a 960-page Lexicon about the greenery of Wrocław. In March 2015 Wrocław filed an application to become a UNESCO City of Literature and received it in 2019. Wrocław was designated as the World Book Capital for 2016 by UNESCO.


title: Wrocław

text: Wrocław is home to the Audiovisual Technology centre (formerly Wytwórnia Filmów Fabularnych), the Film Stuntman School, ATM Grupa, Grupa 13, and Tako Media.


title: Wrocław

text: Film directors Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Sylwester Chęciński, among others, made their film debuts in Wrocław. Numerous movies shot around the city include "Ashes and Diamonds, The Saragossa Manuscript, Sami swoi, Lalka, A Lonely Woman, Character, Aimée & Jaguar, Avalon, A Woman in Berlin, Suicide Room, The Winner, 80 Million, Run Boy Run, Bridge of Spies and Breaking the Limits".


title: Wrocław

text: Numerous Polish TV-series were also shot in Wrocław, notably "Świat według Kiepskich", "Pierwsza miłość", "Belfer", and "Four Tank-Men and a Dog".


title: Wrocław

text: There are several theatres and theatre groups, including Polish Theatre (Teatr Polski) with three stages, and Contemporary Theatre (Wrocławski Teatr Współczesny). The International Theatre Festival Dialog-Wrocław is held every two years.


title: Wrocław

text: Wrocław's opera traditions are dating back to the first half of the seventeenth century and sustained by the Wrocław Opera, built between 1839 and 1841. Wrocław Philharmonic, established in 1954 by Wojciech Dzieduszycki is also important for music lovers. The National Forum of Music was opened in 2015 and is a famous landmark, designed by the Polish architectural firm, Kurylowicz & Associates.


title: Wrocław

text: The area of Wrocław is home to many popular professional sports teams; the most popular sport is football (Śląsk Wrocław club – Polish Champion in 1977 and 2012), followed by basketball (Śląsk Wrocław Basketball Club – award-winning men's basketball team and 17-time Polish Champion).


title: Wrocław

text: Matches of Group A UEFA Euro 2012's were held at Wrocław at the Municipal Stadium. Matches of EuroBasket 1963 and EuroBasket 2009, as well as 2009 Women's European Volleyball Championship, 2014 FIVB Volleyball Men's World Championship and 2016 European Men's Handball Championship were also held in Wrocław. Wrocław was the host of the 2013 World Weightlifting Championships and will the host World Championship 2016 of Duplicate bridge and World Games 2017, a competition in 37 non-Olympic sport disciplines.


title: Wrocław

text: The Olympic Stadium in Wrocław hosts the Speedway Grand Prix of Poland. It is also the home arena of the popular motorcycle speedway club WTS Sparta Wrocław, four-time Polish Champion.


title: Wrocław

text: A marathon takes place in Wrocław every year in September. Wrocław also hosts the Wrocław Open, a professional tennis tournament that is part of the ATP Challenger Tour.


title: Wrocław

text: There are 3 general consulates in Wrocław – Germany, Hungary and Ukraine, and 23 honorary consulates – Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Chile, Denmark, Georgia, Estonia, France, Finland, Spain, India, Kazakhstan, Korea, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Mexico, Norway, Slovakia, Sweden, Turkey, Italy.


title: Ray Winstone

text: Raymond Andrew Winstone (; born 19 February 1957) is an English actor with a career spanning five decades. Having worked with many prominent directors, including Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, Winstone is perhaps best known for his "hard man" roles (usually delivered in his distinctive London accent). The first of these was the character Carlin in "Scum", the 1979 film remake of a BBC television play in which Winstone had originated the role, and which was not broadcast due to its violent nature. The same year he played ex-army soldier Kevin in the cult classic "Quadrophenia". In the 1980s he rose to prominence starring as Will Scarlet in the successful television series "Robin of Sherwood".


title: Ray Winstone

text: Winstone has been described as one of the UK's "seminal screen hard nuts", while "The Guardian" has said that he "plays troubled hard men with such conviction, it's easy to believe he's not acting", adding that he is "the East End's answer to George Clooney". He has appeared in a wide variety of feature films, including "Nil by Mouth" (1997), "Sexy Beast" (2000), "Ripley's Game" (2002), "The Magic Roundabout" (2005), "The Proposition" (2005), "The Departed" (2006), "Beowulf" (2007), "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" (2008), "44 Inch Chest" (2009), "London Boulevard" (2010), "Hugo" (2011), "Snow White and the Huntsman" (2012), "Point Break" (2015), "Cats" (2019) and "Black Widow" (2021).


title: Ray Winstone

text: Winstone was born on 19 February 1957 in Hackney Hospital, London. He first lived in Caister Park Road, Plaistow E13, and attended Portway infants and junior school. He moved to Enfield when he was seven and grew up on a council estate just off the A10 road. His father, Raymond J. Winstone (1933–2015), ran a fruit and vegetable business while his mother, Margaret (née Richardson; 1932–1985) had a job emptying fruit machines. Winstone has recounted how, as a child, he used to play with his friends on bomb sites (vacant lots with rubble from World War II bombs). He joined Brimsdown Primary School and later he was educated at Edmonton County School which had changed from a grammar school to a comprehensive upon his arrival. He also attended Corona Theatre School. He did not take to school, eventually leaving with a single CSE (Grade 2) in Drama. He recounted an early encounter with a notorious gangster:


title: Ray Winstone

text: Winstone had an early affinity for acting; his father would take him to the cinema every Wednesday afternoon. Later, he viewed Albert Finney in "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning", and said: "I thought, 'I could be that geezer'." Other major influences included John Wayne, James Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson. After borrowing extra tuition money from a friend's mother, a drama teacher, Winstone took to the stage, appearing as a Cockney newspaper seller in a production of "Emil and the Detectives".


title: Ray Winstone

text: Winstone was also a fan of boxing. Known to his friends as Winnie, he was called Little Sugs at home (his father already being known as Sugar, after Sugar Ray Robinson). At the age of 12, Winstone joined the Repton Amateur Boxing Club. Over the next 10 years, he won 80 out of 88 bouts. At welterweight, he was London schoolboy champion on three occasions, fighting twice for England. The experience gave him a perspective on his later career: "If you can get in a ring with 2,000 people watching and be smacked around by another guy, then walking onstage isn't hard."


title: Ray Winstone

text: Deciding to pursue drama, Winstone enrolled at the Corona Stage Academy in Hammersmith, when he was aged "about seventeen". At £900 a term, it was expensive considering the average wage was then about £36 a week. He landed his first major role in "What a Crazy World" at the Theatre Royal, Stratford in London, but he danced and sang badly, leading his usually supportive father to say "Give it up, while you're ahead." One of his first TV appearances came in the 1976 "Loving Arms" episode of the popular police series "The Sweeney" where he was credited as "Raymond Winstone" (as he was in "What a Crazy World") and played a minor part as an unnamed young thug.


title: Ray Winstone

text: Winstone was not popular with the establishment at his secondary school, who considered him a bad influence. When he discovered that he was the only pupil not invited to the Christmas party he decided to take revenge for this slight. Hammering some pins through a piece of wood, he placed it under the wheel of his headmistress's car and blew out the tyre, for which he was expelled. As a joke, he went up to the BBC, where his schoolmates were involved in an audition and got one of his own by flirting with the secretary. The audition was for one of the most notorious plays in history – Alan Clarke's "Scum" – and, because Clarke liked Winstone's cocky, aggressive boxer's walk, he got the part, even though it had been written for a Glaswegian.


title: Ray Winstone

text: The play, written by Roy Minton and directed by Clarke, was a brutal depiction of a young offender's institution. Winstone was cast in the leading role of Carlin, a young offender who struggles against both his captors and his fellow cons to become the "Daddy" of the institution. Hard hitting and often violent (particularly during the infamous "billiards" scene in which Carlin uses two billiard balls stuffed in a sock to beat one of his fellow inmates over the head) the play was judged unsuitable for broadcast by the BBC, and was not shown until 1991. The banned television play was entirely re-filmed in 1979 for cinematic release with many of the original actors playing the same roles, including Winstone. In a commentary for the "Scum" DVD, Winstone cites Clarke as a major influence on his career and laments the director's death in 1990 from cancer.


title: Ray Winstone

text: While Winstone has portrayed many characters who share the "hard man" nature of his performance in "Scum", he has also explored a variety of other roles, including comedy ("Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence") and as the romantic lead ("Fanny and Elvis"). His favourite role was Henry VIII in the 2003 TV serial of the same name, remarking at the time: "It's really flattering for me to be asked to play a king. I mean, I'm a kid out of Plaistow, and I'm playing one of the most famous kings of England. It's fantastic!"


title: Ray Winstone

text: After a short run in the TV series "Fox" (1980), and a role in "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains" (1982), alongside Diane Lane, Laura Dern, and a host of real life punks like Fee Waybill, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Paul Simonon, Winstone starred in the opening episode of the third season of "Bergerac" (1983), quickly followed by another big break, when he was cast as Will Scarlet in "Robin of Sherwood" (which began in 1984). He proved immensely popular and enjoyed the role, considering Scarlet to be "the first football hooligan" – although he was reportedly not fond of the dubbed German version. When the series ended, he again teamed up with Jason Connery when they co-starred in "Tank Malling", which also featured Amanda Donohoe and Maria Whittaker. Over the years, he has appeared in TV shows including "The Sweeney", "The Bill", "Boon", "Fairly Secret Army" (as Stubby Collins), "Ever Decreasing Circles", "One Foot in the Grave", ‘’Home To Roost, (Se4, Ep6)’’, "Murder Most Horrid", "Birds of a Feather", "Minder", "Kavanagh QC", "Auf Wiedersehen, Pet", and "Get Back" (with the fledgling Kate Winslet). During this period, he was increasingly drawn to the theatre, playing in "Hinkemann" in 1988, "Some Voices" in 1994 and "Dealer's Choice" and "Pale Horse" the following year. Ray also added his London accent to a dance track in 1982 by "Marsha Raven" called "I Like Plastic".


title: Ray Winstone

text: Winstone was asked to appear in "Mr Thomas", a play written by his friend and fellow Londoner Kathy Burke. The reviews were good, and led to Winstone being cast, alongside Burke in Gary Oldman's drama "Nil By Mouth". He was widely lauded for his performance as an alcoholic wife-batterer, receiving a BAFTA nomination (17 years after his Best Newcomer award for "That Summer"). He continued to play "tough guy" roles in "Face" and "The War Zone" – the latter especially controversial, as he played a man who rapes his own daughter – but that obvious toughness would also allow him to play loved-up nice-guys in romantic comedies "Fanny and Elvis" and "There's Only One Jimmy Grimble". In "Last Christmas", he played a dead man, now a trainee angel, who returns from heaven to help his young son cope with his bereavement, written by Tony Grounds, with whom Winstone worked again on "Births, Marriages & Deaths" and "Our Boy", the latter winning him the Royal Television Society Best Actor Award. They worked together again in 2006 on "All in the Game" where Winstone portrayed a football manager. He did a series of Holsten Pils advertisements where he played upon the phrase "Who's the Daddy", coined in the film "Scum".


title: Ray Winstone

text: In 2000, Winstone starred alongside Jude Law in "Love, Honour and Obey". He then won the lead role in "Sexy Beast", which earned him great acclaim from UK and international audiences and brought him to the attention of the American film industry. Winstone plays "Gal" Dove, a retired and happily married former thief dragged back into London's underworld by a psychopathic former associate (Ben Kingsley, who received an Oscar nomination for his performance). In 2000, he starred in "To the Green Fields Beyond" at the Donmar Warehouse and directed by Sam Mendes. In 2002, he performed at the Royal Court as Griffin in "The Night Heron". Two years later, he joined Kevin Spacey for "24 Hour Plays" at the Old Vic, a series of productions that were written, rehearsed and performed in a single day.


title: Ray Winstone

text: After a brief role alongside Burke again in the tragi-comic "The Martins", he appeared in "Last Orders" where he starred alongside Michael Caine, Helen Mirren, David Hemmings, and Tom Courtenay. Next Winstone would get a prime part in "Ripley's Game", the semi-sequel to "The Talented Mr. Ripley", in which he once again played a gangster. He followed up with "Lenny Blue", the sequel to "Tough Love", and the short "The Bouncer". Now internationally known, Winstone was next chosen by Anthony Minghella to play Teague, a sinister Home Guard boss in the American Civil War drama "Cold Mountain".


title: Ray Winstone

text: At this time, Winstone set up "Size 9" and "Flicks" production companies with his longtime agent Michael Wiggs. The first effort was "She's Gone" in which he plays a businessman whose young daughter disappears in Istanbul (filming was held up by unrest in the Middle East). He followed it up with "Jerusalem" in which he played poet and visionary William Blake.


title: Ray Winstone

text: Winstone made his action film debut in "King Arthur", starring Clive Owen, directed by Antoine Fuqua, and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Fuqua lauded his performance proclaiming he was "the British De Niro". Winstone provided the voice of Soldier Sam in the screen version of "The Magic Roundabout".


title: Ray Winstone

text: In 2005, he appeared opposite Suranne Jones in ITV drama "Vincent" about a team of private detectives. He returned to the role in 2006 and was awarded an International Emmy. He also portrayed a 19th-century English policeman trying to tame the Australian outback in "The Proposition". In 2006, American critic Roger Ebert described Winstone as "one of the best actors now at work in movies".


title: Ray Winstone

text: A complete change of pace for Winstone was when he provided the voice for the cheeky-chappy Mr. Beaver in "", also in 2005. Winstone appeared in Martin Scorsese's 2006 film "The Departed" as Mr. French, an enforcer to Jack Nicholson's Irish mob boss. Critic Roger Ebert singled out Winstone for praise among the ensemble cast of "The Departed", writing that the actor "invests every line with the authority of God dictating to Moses".


title: Ray Winstone

text: He provided motion capture movements and voice-over work for the title character in the Robert Zemeckis' film "Beowulf". He then co-starred in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", which was released on 22 May 2008. He returned to television drama in "The Changeling"-inspired "Compulsion", originally shown in May 2009.


title: Ray Winstone

text: Winstone has mixed work in Hollywood productions with work in lower budget, independent films. In 2010, Winstone starred as Arjan van Diemen in the film "Tracker" with Temuera Morrison He had a role as CIA agent Darius Jedburgh in the "Edge of Darkness" remake, replacing Robert De Niro. In 2011, Winston starred British independent film "The Hot Potato". In 2012, Winstone starred in big screen remake of popular 70s show The Sweeney (having had a minor role in the original series). In 2015, Winstone starred in The Gunman with Sean Penn, the film was a box office failure. In 2015 Winstone also featured in remake Point Break, a relative box office success, though critically panned.


title: Ray Winstone

text: 2017 saw the actor star in critically acclaimed British independent film Jawbone (film) | Jawbone]], before 2018's critical and box office failure King of Thieves. 2019 would see Winstone star in critical disaster The Queen's Corgi, and critical and box office bomb Cats. After a 2020 in which no productions featuring Winstone were released, in 2021 Winstone starred in Marvel's Black Widow.


title: Ray Winstone

text: In April 2013, while a guest host of the comedy quiz show "Have I Got News for You", he provoked controversy by stating that Scotland's chief exports were "oil, whisky, tartan and tramps", leading to a headline in "The Scotsman" claiming "Ray Winstone calls Scots 'tramps' on TV quiz show". Viewers complained to Ofcom and the BBC. In 2015, he played the role of ex-criminal Jimmy Rose in "The Trials of Jimmy Rose", a three-part drama for ITV.


title: Ray Winstone

text: Winstone met his wife, Elaine McCausland, while filming "That Summer" in 1979. They have three daughters; the eldest two, Lois and Jaime, are both actresses. Winstone lives with his wife in Roydon, Essex.


title: Ray Winstone

text: In March 2019, Winstone expressed a preference for leaving the European Union without a deal in the context of Brexit and argued against holding a second referendum, stating that it would lead to "rebellion" and that "The country voted to leave. Then that's democracy, you leave."


title: Handkerchief code

text: The handkerchief code (also known as the hanky code, the bandana code, and flagging) is a system of color-coded cloth handkerchief or bandanas for non-verbally communicating one's interests in sexual activities and fetishes. The color of the handkerchief identifies a particular activity, and the pocket it is worn in (left or right) identifies the wearer's preferred role in that activity. Wearing a handkerchief on the left side of the body typically indicates one is a "top" (considered "active" in the act/fetish indicated by the color of the handkerchief), while wearing it on the right side of the body would indicate one is a "bottom" (considered "passive" in it). For example, a dark blue handkerchief indicates an interest in anal sex, and wearing it in the left pocket indicates a preference for being the insertive partner. The code was most widely used in the 1970s in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe, by gay and bisexual men seeking casual sex, or BDSM practitioners.


title: Handkerchief code

text: The wearing of colored bandanas around the neck as a practical accessory was common in the mid- and late-nineteenth century among cowboys, steam railroad engineers, and miners in the Western United States. It is thought that the wearing of bandanas by gay men originated in San Francisco after the Gold Rush, when, because of a shortage of women, men dancing with each other in square dances developed a code wherein the man wearing the blue bandana took the male part in the square dance, and the man wearing the red bandana took the female part (these bandanas were usually worn around the arm or hanging from the belt or in the back pocket of one's jeans).


title: Handkerchief code

text: The modern hanky code is often reported to have started in New York City around 1970, when a journalist for the "Village Voice" joked that instead of simply wearing a set of keys on one side or the other (then a common code to indicate whether someone was a "top" or a "bottom"), it would be more efficient to subtly announce their particular sexual focus by wearing different colored handkerchiefs. Other sources attribute the expansion of the original red–blue system into today's code to marketing efforts around 1971 by The Trading Post, a San Francisco department store for erotic merchandise, promoting handkerchiefs by printing cards listing the meanings of various colors.


title: Handkerchief code

text: Alan Selby, founder of Mr. S Leather in San Francisco, claimed that he created the first hanky code with his business partners at Leather 'n' Things in 1972, when their bandana supplier inadvertently doubled their order and the expanded code would help them sell the extra colors they had received.


title: Handkerchief code

text: Around 1980, "Bob Damron's Address Book" published a yearly chart for the meaning of each colored handkerchief.


title: Handkerchief code

text: There was no single authoritative standard for the code. This table is drawn from Larry Townsend's "The Leatherman's Handbook II" (the 1983 second edition; the 1972 first edition did not include this list) and is generally considered authoritative. Implicit in this list is the concept of left/right polarity, left as usual indicating the top, dominant, or active partner; right the bottom, submissive, or passive partner. Townsend noted that discussion with a prospective partner was still important because, people may wear a given color "only because the idea of the hankie turns them on" or "may not even know what it means".


title: Handkerchief code

text: The longer lists found on the web are more elaborate and the many color codes in them are less often used in practice, although some of these colors are offered for sale at LGBT stores along with free cards listing their meanings.


title: Handkerchief code

text: The hanky code has recently undergone a revival and while the use of handkerchiefs may not be as prevalent, the hanky colours are a common consideration in the choice of leather and fetish gear colour. It should not, however, always be assumed this is the case and is best used as a conversation starter rather than a certain indication of sexual preferences.


title: Handkerchief code

text: The hanky code was a semiotic system of sexual advertising popular among the gay leather community of the United States and cruising scene more broadly. Social networking services may have replaced the use of hankies in cruising areas by digitizing the process. By using online platforms, men who have sex with men (MSM) can eliminate harassment and violence that they may face in public. Social networking services for MSM also allow for sub-groups, and for people to list fetishes, and what they are looking for, which is where the replacement of the need for hankies may have come from.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English writer, novelist, poet and essayist. His works reflect on modernity, industrialization, sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity and instinct. His best-known novels—"Sons and Lovers", "The Rainbow", "Women in Love", and "Lady Chatterley's Lover"— were the subject of censorship trials.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Lawrence's opinions and artistic preferences earned him many enemies, and he endured persecution and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile, four years of which he described as a "savage enough pilgrimage". At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. However, English novelist and critic E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, English literary critic F. R. Leavis also championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: The fourth child of Arthur John Lawrence, a barely literate miner at Brinsley Colliery, and Lydia Beardsall, a former pupil-teacher who had been forced to perform manual work in a lace factory due to her family's financial difficulties, Lawrence spent his formative years in the coal mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. The house in which he was born, 8a Victoria Street, is now the D. H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum. His working-class background and the tensions between his parents provided the raw material for a number of his early works. Lawrence roamed out from an early age in the patches of open, hilly country and remaining fragments of Sherwood Forest in Felley woods to the north of Eastwood, beginning a lifelong appreciation of the natural world, and he often wrote about "the country of my heart" as a setting for much of his fiction.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: The young Lawrence attended Beauvale Board School (now renamed Greasley Beauvale D. H. Lawrence Primary School in his honour) from 1891 until 1898, becoming the first local pupil to win a county council scholarship to Nottingham High School in nearby Nottingham. He left in 1901, working for three months as a junior clerk at Haywood's surgical appliances factory, but a severe bout of pneumonia ended this career. During his convalescence he often visited Hagg's Farm, the home of the Chambers family, and began a friendship with Jessie Chambers. An important aspect of this relationship with Chambers and other adolescent acquaintances was a shared love of books, an interest that lasted throughout Lawrence's life.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: In the years 1902 to 1906 Lawrence served as a pupil-teacher at the British School, Eastwood. He went on to become a full-time student and received a teaching certificate from University College, Nottingham (then an external college of University of London), in 1908. During these early years he was working on his first poems, some short stories, and a draft of a novel, "Laetitia", which was eventually to become "The White Peacock." At the end of 1907 he won a short story competition in the "Nottinghamshire Guardian", the first time that he had gained any wider recognition for his literary talents.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: In the autumn of 1908, the newly qualified Lawrence left his childhood home for London. While teaching in Davidson Road School, Croydon, he continued writing. Jessie Chambers submitted some of Lawrence's early poetry to Ford Madox Ford (then known as Ford Hermann Hueffer), editor of the influential "The English Review". Hueffer then commissioned the story "Odour of Chrysanthemums" which, when published in that magazine, encouraged Heinemann, a London publisher, to ask Lawrence for more work. His career as a professional author now began in earnest, although he taught for another year.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Shortly after the final proofs of his first published novel, "The White Peacock", appeared in 1910, Lawrence's mother died of cancer. The young man was devastated, and he was to describe the next few months as his "sick year". Due to Lawrence's close relationship with his mother, his grief became a major turning point in his life, just as the death of his character, Mrs. Morel, is a major turning point in his autobiographical novel "Sons and Lovers", a work that draws upon much of the writer's provincial upbringing. Essentially concerned with the emotional battle for Lawrence's love between his mother and "Miriam" (in reality Jessie Chambers), the novel also documents Lawrence's (through his protagonist, Paul) brief intimate relationship with Chambers that Lawrence had finally initiated in the Christmas of 1909, ending it in August 1910. The hurt this caused Chambers and, finally, her portrayal in the novel, ended their friendship; after it was published, they never spoke again.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: In 1911, Lawrence was introduced to Edward Garnett, a publisher's reader, who acted as a mentor and became a valued friend, as did his son David. Throughout these months, the young author revised "Paul Morel", the first draft of what became "Sons and Lovers". In addition, a teaching colleague, Helen Corke, gave him access to her intimate diaries about an unhappy love affair, which formed the basis of "The Trespasser", his second novel. In November 1911, Lawrence came down with a pneumonia again; once recovered, he abandoned teaching in order to become a full-time writer. In February 1912, he broke off an engagement to Louie Burrows, an old friend from his days in Nottingham and Eastwood.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: In March 1912, Lawrence met Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen), with whom he was to share the rest of his life. Six years his senior, she was married to Ernest Weekley, his former modern languages professor at University College, Nottingham, and had three young children. However, she and Lawrence eloped and left England for Frieda's parents' home in Metz, a garrison town (then in Germany) near the disputed border with France. Lawrence experienced his first encounter with tensions between Germany and France when he was arrested and accused of being a British spy, before being released following an intervention from Frieda's father. After this incident, Lawrence left for a small hamlet to the south of Munich where he was joined by Frieda for their "honeymoon", later memorialised in the series of love poems titled "Look! We Have Come Through" (1917). During 1912 Lawrence wrote the first of his so-called "mining plays", "The Daughter-in-Law", written in Nottingham dialect. The play was never to be performed, or even published, in Lawrence's lifetime.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: From Germany, they walked southwards across the Alps to Italy, a journey that was recorded in the first of his travel books, a collection of linked essays titled "Twilight in Italy" and the unfinished novel, "Mr Noon". During his stay in Italy, Lawrence completed the final version of "Sons and Lovers". Having become so tired of the manuscript, he allowed Edward Garnett to cut roughly 100 pages from the text. The novel was published in 1913 and hailed as a vivid portrait of the realities of working class provincial life.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Lawrence and Frieda returned to Britain in 1913 for a short visit, during which they encountered and befriended critic John Middleton Murry and New Zealand-born short story writer Katherine Mansfield.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Also during that year, on 28 July, Lawrence met Welsh tramp poet W. H. Davies, whose nature poetry he greatly admired. Davies collected autographs, and had been particularly keen to obtain Lawrence's signature. Georgian poetry publisher Edward Marsh secured an autograph, probably as part of a signed poem, for Davies, and hosted a meeting in London at which the poet met with Lawrence and his wife. Lawrence was immediately captivated by Davies and later invited him to visit them in Germany. However, despite this early enthusiasm for Davies' work, Lawrence's opinion changed after reading "Foliage"; whilst in Italy, he also disparaged "Nature Poems", calling them "so thin, one can hardly feel them".


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: After the couple returned to Italy, staying in a cottage in Fiascherino on the Gulf of Spezia Lawrence wrote the first draft of what would later be transformed into two of his best-known novels, "The Rainbow" and "Women in Love", in which unconventional female characters take centre stage. Both novels were highly controversial and were banned on publication in the UK for obscenity, although "Women in Love" was banned only temporarily.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: "The Rainbow" follows three generations of a Nottinghamshire farming family from the pre-industrial to the industrial age, focusing particularly on a daughter, Ursula, and her aspiration for a more fulfilling life than that of becoming a housebound wife. "Women in Love" delves into the complex relationships between four major characters, including the sisters Ursula and Gudrun. Both novels explored grand themes and ideas that challenged conventional thought on the arts, politics, economic growth, gender, sexual experience, friendship and marriage. Lawrence's views as expressed in the novels are now thought to be far ahead of his time. The frank and relatively straightforward manner in which he wrote about sexual attraction was ostensibly why the books were initially banned, in particular the mention of same-sex attraction; Ursula has an affair with a woman in "The Rainbow", and there is an undercurrent of attraction between the two principal male characters in "Women in Love".


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: While working on "Women in Love" in Cornwall during 1916–17, Lawrence developed a strong relationship with a Cornish farmer named William Henry Hocking, which some scholars believe was possibly romantic, especially considering Lawrence's fascination with the theme of homosexuality in "Women in Love". Although Lawrence never made it clear their relationship was sexual, Frieda believed it was. In a letter written during 1913, he writes, "I should like to know why nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not..." He is also quoted as saying, "I believe the nearest I've come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about 16." However, given his enduring and robust relationship with Frieda it is likely that he was primarily "bi-curious", and whether he actually ever had homosexual relations remains an open question.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Eventually, Frieda obtained her divorce from Ernest Weekley. Lawrence and Frieda returned to Britain shortly before the outbreak of World War I and were legally married on 13 July 1914. During this time, Lawrence worked with London intellectuals and writers such as Dora Marsden, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and others connected with "The Egoist", an important Modernist literary magazine that published some of his work. Lawrence also worked on adapting Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's "Manifesto of Futurism" into English. He also met the young Jewish artist Mark Gertler, with whom he became good friends for a time; Lawrence would later express his admiration for Gertler's 1916 anti-war painting, "Merry-Go-Round" as "the best "modern" picture I have seen. . . it is great and true." Gertler would inspire the character Loerke (a sculptor) in "Women in Love".


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Frieda's German parentage and Lawrence's open contempt for militarism caused them to be viewed with suspicion and live in near-destitution during wartime Britain; this may have contributed to "The Rainbow" being suppressed and investigated for its alleged obscenity in 1915. Later, the couple were accused of spying and signaling to German submarines off the coast of Cornwall, where they lived at Zennor. During this period, Lawrence finished his final draft of "Women in Love". Not published until 1920, it is now widely recognized as a novel of great dramatic force and intellectual subtlety.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: In late 1917, after constant harassment by the armed forces and other authorities, Lawrence was forced to leave Cornwall at three days’ notice under the terms of the Defence of the Realm Act. This persecution was later described in an autobiographical chapter of his novel "Kangaroo" (1923). Lawrence spent a few months of early 1918 in the small, rural village of Hermitage near Newbury, Berkshire. Subsequently, he lived for just under a year (mid-1918 to early 1919) at Mountain Cottage, Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derbyshire, where he wrote one of his most poetic short stories, “Wintry Peacock”. Until 1919, poverty compelled him to shift from address to address.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: After the wartime years, Lawrence began what he termed his "savage pilgrimage", a time of voluntary exile from his native country. He escaped from Britain at the earliest practical opportunity and returned only twice for brief visits, spending the remainder of his life travelling with Frieda. This wanderlust took him to Australia, Italy, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the United States, Mexico and the South of France. Abandoning Britain in November 1919, they headed south, first to the Abruzzo region in central Italy and then onwards to Capri and the Fontana Vecchia in Taormina, Sicily. From Sicily they made brief excursions to Sardinia, Monte Cassino, Malta, Northern Italy, Austria and Southern Germany.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Many of these places appear in Lawrence's writings, including "The Lost Girl" (for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction), "Aaron's Rod" and the fragment titled "Mr Noon" (the first part of which was published in the Phoenix anthology of his works, and the entirety in 1984). He wrote novellas such as "The Captain's Doll", "The Fox" and "The Ladybird". In addition, some of his short stories were issued in the collection "England, My England and Other Stories". During these years Lawrence also wrote poems about the natural world in "Birds, Beasts and Flowers".


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Lawrence is often considered one of the finest travel writers in English. "Sea and Sardinia" describes a brief journey undertaken in January 1921 and focuses on the life of Sardinia’s people. Less well known is his eighty-four page introduction to Maurice Magnus's 1924 "Memoirs of the Foreign Legion", in which Lawrence recalls his visit to the monastery of Monte Cassino.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: His other nonfiction books include two responses to Freudian psychoanalysis, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious" and "Fantasia of the Unconscious"; "Movements in European History", a school textbook published under a pseudonym, is a reflection of Lawrence's blighted reputation in Britain.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: In late February 1922, the Lawrences left Europe intending to migrate to the United States. They sailed in an easterly direction, however, first to Ceylon and then on to Australia. During a short residence in Darlington, Western Australia, Lawrence met local writer Mollie Skinner, with whom he coauthored the novel "The Boy in the Bush". This stay was followed by a brief stop in the small coastal town of Thirroul, New South Wales, during which Lawrence completed "Kangaroo", a novel about local fringe politics that also explored his wartime experiences in Cornwall.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: The Lawrences finally arrived in the United States in September 1922. Lawrence had several times discussed the idea of setting up a utopian community with several of his friends, having written in 1915 to Willie Hopkin, his old socialist friend from Eastwood: "I want to gather together about twenty souls and sail away from this world of war and squalor and found a little colony where there shall be no money but a sort of communism as far as necessaries of life go, and some real decency … a place where one can live simply, apart from this civilisation … [with] a few other people who are also at peace and happy and live, and understand and be free.…"It was with this in mind that they made for Taos, New Mexico, a Pueblo town where many white "bohemians" had settled, including Mabel Dodge Luhan, a prominent socialite. Here they eventually acquired the 160-acre (0.65 km) Kiowa Ranch, now called the D. H. Lawrence Ranch, in 1924 from Dodge Luhan in exchange for the manuscript of "Sons and Lovers". The couple stayed in New Mexico for two years, with extended visits to Lake Chapala and Oaxaca in Mexico. While Lawrence was in New Mexico, he was visited by Aldous Huxley.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Editor and book designer Merle Armitage wrote a book about D. H. Lawrence in New Mexico. "Taos Quartet in Three Movements" was originally to appear in Flair Magazine, but the magazine folded before its publication. This short work describes the tumultuous relationship of D. H. Lawrence, his wife Frieda, artist Dorothy Brett, and Mabel Dodge Sterne Luhan. Armitage took it upon himself to print 16 hardcover copies of this work for his friends. Richard Pousette-Dart executed the drawings for "Taos Quartet", published in 1950.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: While in the U.S., Lawrence rewrote and published "Studies in Classic American Literature", a set of critical essays begun in 1917 and later described by Edmund Wilson as "one of the few first-rate books that have ever been written on the subject". These interpretations, with their insights into symbolism, New England Transcendentalism and the Puritan sensibility, were a significant factor in the revival of the reputation of Herman Melville during the early 1920s. In addition, Lawrence completed new fictional works, including "The Boy in the Bush", "The Plumed Serpent", "St Mawr", "The Woman who Rode Away", "The Princess" and other short stories. He also produced the collection of linked travel essays that became "Mornings in Mexico".


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: A brief voyage to England at the end of 1923 was a failure and Lawrence soon returned to Taos, convinced his life as an author now lay in the United States. However, in March 1925 he suffered a near fatal attack of malaria and tuberculosis while on a third visit to Mexico. Although he eventually recovered, the diagnosis of his condition obliged him to return once again to Europe. He was dangerously ill and the poor health limited his ability to travel for the remainder of his life. The Lawrences made their home in a villa in Northern Italy, living near Florence while he wrote "The Virgin and the Gipsy" and the various versions of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" (1928). The latter book, his last major novel, was initially published in private editions in Florence and Paris and reinforced his notoriety. A story set once more in Nottinghamshire about a cross-class relationship between a Lady and her gamekeeper, it broke new ground in describing their sexual relationship in explicit yet literary language. Lawrence hoped to challenge the British taboos around sex: to enable men and women "to think sex, fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly." Lawrence responded robustly to those who took offense, even publishing satirical poems ("Pansies" and "Nettles") as well as a tract on "Pornography and Obscenity".


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: The return to Italy allowed him to renew old friendships; during these years he was particularly close to Aldous Huxley, who was to edit the first collection of Lawrence's letters after his death, along with a memoir. After Lawrence visited local archaeological sites (particularly old tombs) with artist Earl Brewster in April 1927, his collected essays inspired by the excursions were published as "Sketches of Etruscan Places", a book that contrasts the lively past with Benito Mussolini's fascism.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Lawrence continued to produce short stories and other works of fiction such as "The Escaped Cock" (also published as "The Man Who Died"), an unorthodox reworking of the story of Jesus Christ's Resurrection.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: During his final years, Lawrence renewed his serious interest in oil painting. Official harassment persisted and an exhibition of his paintings at the Warren Gallery in London was raided by the police in mid 1929 and several works were confiscated.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Lawrence continued to write despite his failing health. In his last months he wrote numerous poems, reviews and essays, as well as a robust defence of his last novel against those who sought to suppress it. His last significant work was a reflection on the Book of Revelation, "Apocalypse". After being discharged from a sanatorium, he died on 2 March 1930 at the Villa Robermond in Vence, France, from complications of tuberculosis. Frieda commissioned an elaborate headstone for his grave bearing a mosaic of his adopted emblem of the phoenix. After Lawrence's death, Frieda lived with the couple's friend Angelo Ravagli on their Taos ranch and eventually married him in 1950. In 1935, Ravagli arranged, on Frieda's behalf, to have Lawrence's body exhumed and cremated. However, upon boarding the ship he learned he would have to pay taxes on the ashes, so he instead spread them in the Mediterranean, a more preferable resting place, in his opinion, than a concrete block in a chapel. The ashes brought back were dust and earth and remain interred on the Taos ranch in a small chapel amid the mountains of New Mexico.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Lawrence is best known for his novels "Sons and Lovers", "The Rainbow", "Women in Love" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover". In these books, Lawrence explores the possibilities for life within an industrial setting. In particular Lawrence is concerned with the nature of relationships that can be had within such a setting. Though often classed as a realist, Lawrence in fact uses his characters to give form to his personal philosophy. His depiction of sexuality, though seen as shocking when his work was first published in the early 20th century, has its roots in this highly personal way of thinking and being.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Lawrence was very interested in the sense of touch, and his focus on physical intimacy has its roots in a desire to restore an emphasis on the body and rebalance it with what he perceived to be Western civilization's overemphasis on the mind; writing in a 1929 essay "Men Must Work and Women As Well," he stated,"Now then we see the trend of our civilization, in terms of human feeling and human relation. It is, and there is no denying it, towards a greater and greater abstraction from the physical, towards a further and further physical separateness between men and women, and between individual and individual... It only remains for some men and women, individuals, to try to get back their bodies and preserve the other flow of warmth, affection and physical unison. There is nothing else to do." "Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works by D.H. Lawrence", ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), pp. 589, 591.In his later years Lawrence developed the potentialities of the short novel form in "St Mawr", "The Virgin and the Gypsy" and "The Escaped Cock".


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Lawrence's best-known short stories include "The Captain's Doll", "The Fox", "The Ladybird", "Odour of Chrysanthemums", "The Princess", "The Rocking-Horse Winner", "St Mawr", "The Virgin and the Gypsy" and "The Woman who Rode Away". ("The Virgin and the Gypsy" was published as a novella after he died.) Among his most praised collections is "The Prussian Officer and Other Stories", published in 1914. His collection "The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories", published in 1928, develops the theme of leadership that Lawrence also explored in novels such as "Kangaroo" and "The Plumed Serpent" and the story "Fanny and Annie".


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Lawrence wrote almost 800 poems, most of them relatively short. His first poems were written in 1904 and two of his poems, "Dreams Old" and "Dreams Nascent", were among his earliest published works in "The English Review". It has been claimed that his early works clearly place him in the school of Georgian poets, and indeed some of his poems appear in the "Georgian Poetry" anthologies. However, James Reeves in his book on Georgian Poetry, notes that Lawrence was never really a Georgian poet. Indeed, later critics contrast Lawrence's energy and dynamism with the complacency of Georgian poetry.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Just as the First World War dramatically changed the work of many of the poets who saw service in the trenches, Lawrence's own work dramatically changed, during his years in Cornwall. During this time, he wrote free verse influenced by Walt Whitman. He set forth his manifesto for much of his later verse in the introduction to "New Poems". "We can get rid of the stereotyped movements and the old hackneyed associations of sound or sense. We can break down those artificial conduits and canals through which we do so love to force our utterance. We can break the stiff neck of habit […] But we cannot positively prescribe any motion, any rhythm."


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Lawrence rewrote some of his early poems when they were collected in 1928. This was in part to fictionalise them, but also to remove some of the artifice of his first works. As he put it himself: "A young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes and speaks for him." His best-known poems are probably those dealing with nature such as those in the collection "Birds, Beasts and Flowers", including the Tortoise poems, and "Snake", one of his most frequently anthologised, displays some of his most frequent concerns: those of man's modern distance from nature and subtle hints at religious themes.<poem>


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: "Look! We have come through!" is his other work from the period of the end of the war and it reveals another important element common to much of his writings; his inclination to lay himself bare in his writings. Ezra Pound in his "Literary Essays" complained of Lawrence's interest in his own "disagreeable sensations" but praised him for his "low-life narrative." This is a reference to Lawrence's dialect poems akin to the Scots poems of Robert Burns, in which he reproduced the language and concerns of the people of Nottinghamshire from his youth.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Although Lawrence's works after his Georgian period are clearly in the modernist tradition, they were often very different from those of many other modernist writers, such as Pound. Pound's poems were often austere, with every word carefully worked on. Lawrence felt all poems had to be personal sentiments, and that a sense of spontaneity was vital. He called one collection of poems "Pansies", partly for the simple ephemeral nature of the verse, but also as a pun on the French word "panser", to dress or bandage a wound. "Pansies", as he made explicit in the introduction to "New Poems", is also a pun on Blaise Pascal's "Pensées". "The Noble Englishman" and "Don't Look at Me" were removed from the official edition of "Pansies" on the grounds of obscenity, which wounded him. Even though he lived most of the last ten years of his life abroad, his thoughts were often still on England. Published in 1930, just eleven days after his death, his last work "Nettles" was a series of bitter, nettling but often wry attacks on the moral climate of England.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Two notebooks of Lawrence's unprinted verse were posthumously published as "Last Poems" and "More Pansies". These contain two of Lawrence's most famous poems about death, "Bavarian Gentians" and "The Ship of Death".


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Lawrence's criticism of other authors often provides insight into his own thinking and writing. Of particular note is his "Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays". In "Studies in Classic American Literature" Lawrence's responses to writers like Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe also shed light on his craft.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Lawrence wrote "A Collier's Friday Night" about 1906–1909, though it was not published until 1939 and not performed until 1965. He wrote "The Daughter-in-Law" in 1913, though it was not staged until 1967, when it was well received. In 1911 he wrote "The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd", which he revised in 1914; it was staged in the US in 1916 and in the UK in 1920, in an amateur production. It was filmed in 1976; an adaptation was shown on television (BBC 2) in 1995. He also wrote "Touch and Go" towards the end of World War I, and his last play, "David", in 1925.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: D. H. Lawrence had a lifelong interest in painting, which became one of his main forms of expression in his last years. His paintings were exhibited at the Warren Gallery in London's Mayfair in 1929. The exhibition was extremely controversial, with many of the 13,000 people visiting mainly to gawk. The "Daily Express" claimed, ""Fight with an Amazon" represents a hideous, bearded man holding a fair-haired woman in his lascivious grip while wolves with dripping jaws look on expectantly, [this] is frankly indecent". However, several artists and art experts praised the paintings. Gwen John, reviewing the exhibition in "Everyman", spoke of Lawrence's "stupendous gift of self-expression" and singled out "The Finding of Moses", "Red Willow Trees" and "Boccaccio Story" as "pictures of real beauty and great vitality". Others singled out "Contadini" for special praise. After a complaint, the police seized thirteen of the twenty-five paintings (including "Boccaccio Story" and "Contadini"). Despite declarations of support from many writers, artists and Members of Parliament, Lawrence was able to recover his paintings only by agreeing never to exhibit them in England again. The largest collection of the paintings is now at La Fonda de Taos hotel in Taos, New Mexico. Several others, including "Boccaccio Story" and "Resurrection", are at the Humanities Research Centre of the University of Texas at Austin.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: A heavily censored abridgement of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf in 1928. This edition was posthumously re-issued in paperback there both by Signet Books and by Penguin Books in 1946. When the full unexpurgated edition of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was published by Penguin Books in Britain in 1960, the trial of Penguin under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 became a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law. The 1959 act (introduced by Roy Jenkins) had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that a work was of literary merit. One of the objections was to the frequent use of the word "fuck" and its derivatives and the word "cunt".


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Various academic critics and experts of diverse kinds, including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Norman St John-Stevas, were called as witnesses, and the verdict, delivered on 2 November 1960, was "not guilty". This resulted in a far greater degree of freedom for publishing explicit material in the UK. The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked if it were the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read".


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: The Penguin second edition, published in 1961, contains a publisher's dedication, which reads: "For having published this book, Penguin Books were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, 1959 at the Old Bailey in London from 20 October to 2 November 1960. This edition is therefore dedicated to the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of 'Not Guilty' and thus made D. H. Lawrence's last novel available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom."


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Despite often writing about political, spiritual and philosophical matters, Lawrence was essentially contrary by nature and hated to be pigeonholed. Critics such as Terry Eagleton have argued that Lawrence was right wing due to his lukewarm attitude to democracy, which he intimated would tend towards the leveling down of society and the subordination of the individual to the sensibilities of the "average" man. In his letters to Bertrand Russell around 1915, Lawrence voiced his opposition to enfranchising the working class and his hostility to the burgeoning labour movements, and disparaged the French Revolution, referring to "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" as the "three-fanged serpent." Rather than a republic, Lawrence called for an absolute dictator and equivalent dictatrix to lord over the lower peoples. In 1953, recalling his relationship with Lawrence in the First World War, Russell characterised Lawrence as a "proto-German Fascist," saying "I was a firm believer in democracy, whereas he had developed the whole philosophy of Fascism before the politicians had thought of it." Russell felt Lawrence to be a "positive force for evil". However, in 1924 Lawrence wrote an epilogue to "Movements in European History" (a textbook he wrote, originally published in 1921) in which he denounced fascism and Soviet-style socialism as bullying and “a mere worship of Force”. Further, he declared “I believe a good form of socialism, if it could be brought about, would be the best form of government.” In the late 1920s, he told his sister he would vote Labour if he was living back in England. In general, though, Lawrence disliked any organized groupings, and in his essay "Democracy", written in the late twenties, he argued for a new kind of democracy in which


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: each man shall be spontaneously himself – each man himself, each woman herself, without any question of equality or inequality entering in at all; and that no man shall try to determine the being of any other man, or of any other woman.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Lawrence held seemingly contradictory views on feminism. The evidence of his written works, particularly his earlier novels, indicates a commitment to representing women as strong, independent, and complex; he produced major works in which young, self-directing female characters were central. In his youth he supported extending the vote to women, and he once wrote, “All women in their natures are like giantesses. They will break through everything and go on with their own lives.” However, some feminist critics, notably Kate Millett, have criticised, indeed ridiculed, Lawrence's sexual politics, Millett claiming that he uses his female characters as mouthpieces to promote his creed of male supremacy and that his story "The Woman Who Rode Away" showed Lawrence as a pornographic sadist with its portrayal of “human sacrifice performed upon the woman to the greater glory and potency of the male.” Brenda Maddox further highlights this story and two others written around the same time, "St. Mawr" and "The Princess", as “masterworks of misogyny.”


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Despite the inconsistency and at times inscrutability of his philosophical writings, Lawrence continues to find an audience, and the publication of a new scholarly edition of his letters and writings has demonstrated the range of his achievement. Philosophers like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari found in Lawrence's critique of Sigmund Freud an important precursor of anti-Oedipal accounts of the unconscious that has been much influential.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: The obituaries shortly after Lawrence's death were, with the exception of the one by E. M. Forster, unsympathetic or hostile. However, there were those who articulated a more favourable recognition of the significance of this author's life and works. For example, his long-time friend Catherine Carswell summed up his life in a letter to the periodical "Time and Tide" published on 16 March 1930. In response to his critics, she wrote:In the face of formidable initial disadvantages and lifelong delicacy, poverty that lasted for three quarters of his life and hostility that survives his death, he did nothing that he did not really want to do, and all that he most wanted to do he did. He went all over the world, he owned a ranch, he lived in the most beautiful corners of Europe, and met whom he wanted to meet and told them that they were wrong and he was right. He painted and made things, and sang, and rode. He wrote something like three dozen books, of which even the worst page dances with life that could be mistaken for no other man's, while the best are admitted, even by those who hate him, to be unsurpassed. Without vices, with most human virtues, the husband of one wife, scrupulously honest, this estimable citizen yet managed to keep free from the shackles of civilisation and the cant of literary cliques. He would have laughed lightly and cursed venomously in passing at the solemn owls—each one secretly chained by the leg—who now conduct his inquest. To do his work and lead his life in spite of them took some doing, but he did it, and long after they are forgotten, sensitive and innocent people—if any are left—will turn Lawrence's pages and will know from them what sort of a rare man Lawrence was.Aldous Huxley also defended Lawrence in his introduction to a collection of letters published in 1932. However, the most influential advocate of Lawrence's literary reputation was Cambridge literary critic F. R. Leavis, who asserted that the author had made an important contribution to the tradition of English fiction. Leavis stressed that "The Rainbow", "Women in Love", and the short stories and tales were major works of art. Later, the obscenity trials over the unexpurgated edition of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" in America in 1959, and in Britain in 1960, and subsequent publication of the full text, ensured Lawrence's popularity (and notoriety) with a wider public.


title: D. H. Lawrence

text: Since 2008, an annual D. H. Lawrence Festival has been organised in Eastwood to celebrate Lawrence's life and works; in September 2016, events were held in Cornwall to celebrate the centenary of Lawrence's connection with Zennor.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Blaxploitation is an ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film that emerged in the United States during the early 1970s. The term, a portmanteau of the words "black" and "exploitation", was coined in August 1972 by Junius Griffin, the president of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood NAACP branch. He claimed the genre was "proliferating offenses" to the black community in its perpetuation of stereotypical characters often involved in crime. The genre does rank among the first after the race films in the 1940s and 1960s in which black characters and communities are the protagonists and subjects of film and television, rather than sidekicks, antagonists or victims of brutality. The genre's inception coincides with the rethinking of race relations in the 1970s.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Blaxploitation films were originally aimed at an urban African-American audience but the genre's audience appeal soon broadened across racial and ethnic lines. Hollywood realized the potential profit of expanding the audiences of blaxploitation films.


title: Blaxploitation

text: "Variety" credited "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" and the less radical, Hollywood-financed film "Shaft" (both released in 1971) with the invention of the blaxploitation genre; "Cotton Comes to Harlem" was released before either of those pictures. Blaxploitation films were also the first to feature soundtracks of funk and soul music.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Blaxploitation films set in the Northeast or West Coast mainly take place in poor urban neighborhoods. Pejorative terms for white characters, such as "cracker" and "honky," are commonly used. Blaxploitation films set in the South often deal with slavery and miscegenation. The genre's films are often bold in their statements and use violence, sex, drug trafficking and other shocking qualities to provoke the audience. The films usually portray black protagonists overcoming "The Man" or emblems of the white majority that oppresses the black community.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Blaxploitation includes several subtypes, including crime ("Foxy Brown"), action/martial arts ("Three the Hard Way"), westerns ("Boss Nigger"), horror ("Abby", "Blacula"), prison ("Penitentiary"), comedy ("Uptown Saturday Night"), nostalgia ("Five on the Black Hand Side"), coming-of-age ("Cooley High/Cornbread, Earl and Me"), and musical ("Sparkle").


title: Blaxploitation

text: Following the example set by "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song", many blaxploitation films feature funk and soul jazz soundtracks with heavy bass, funky beats and wah-wah guitars. These soundtracks are notable for complexity that was not common to the radio-friendly funk tracks of the 1970s. They also often feature a rich orchestration which included flutes and violins.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Following the popularity of these films in the 1970s, movies within other genres began to feature black characters with stereotypical blaxploitation characteristics, such as the Harlem underworld characters in the James Bond film "Live and Let Die" (1973), Jim Kelly's character in "Enter the Dragon" (1973) and Fred Williamson's character in "The Inglorious Bastards" (1978).


title: Blaxploitation

text: Afeni Shakur claimed that every aspect of culture (including cinema) in the 1960s and 1970s was influenced by the Black Power movement. "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" was one of the first films to incorporate black power ideology and permit black actors to be the stars of their own narratives, rather than being relegated to the typical roles available to them (such as the "mammy" figure and other low-status characters). Films such as "Shaft" brought the black experience to film in a new way, allowing black political and social issues that had been ignored in cinema to be explored. "Shaft" and its protagonist, John Shaft, brought African American culture to the mainstream world. "Sweetback" and "Shaft" were both influenced by the black power movement, containing Marxist themes, solidarity and social consciousness alongside the genre-typical images of sex and violence.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Knowing that film could bring about social and cultural change, the Black Power movement seized the genre to highlight black socioeconomic struggles in the 1970s; many such films contained black heroes who were able to overcome the institutional oppression of African American culture and history. Later films such as "Super Fly" softened the rhetoric of black power, encouraging resistance within the capitalist system rather than a radical transformation of society. "Super Fly" still embraced the black nationalist movement in its argument that black and white authority cannot coexist easily.


title: Blaxploitation

text: The genre's role in exploring and shaping race relations in the United States has been controversial. Some held that the blaxploitation trend was a token of black empowerment but others accused the movies of perpetuating common white stereotypes about black people. As a result, many called for the end of the genre. The NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference and National Urban League joined to form the Coalition Against Blaxploitation. Their influence in the late 1970s contributed to the genre's demise. Literary critic Addison Gayle wrote in 1974, "The best example of this kind of nihilism / irresponsibility are the Black films; here is freedom pushed to its most ridiculous limits; here are writers and actors who claim that freedom for the artist entails exploitation of the very people to whom they owe their artistic existence."


title: Blaxploitation

text: Films such as "Super Fly" and "The Mack" received intense criticism not only for the stereotype of the protagonist (generalizing pimps as representative of all African-American men, in this case) but for portraying all black communities as hotbeds for drugs and crime.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Blaxploitation films such as "Mandingo" (1975) provided mainstream Hollywood producers, in this case Dino De Laurentiis, a cinematic way to depict plantation slavery with all of its brutal, historical and racial contradictions and controversies, including sex, miscegenation, rebellion. The story world also depicts the plantation as one of the main origins of boxing as a sport in the U.S.


title: Blaxploitation

text: In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new wave of acclaimed black film makers, particularly Spike Lee ("Do the Right Thing"), John Singleton ("Boyz n the Hood"), and Allen and Albert Hughes ("Menace II Society)" focused on black urban life in their movies. These directors made use of blaxploitation elements while incorporating implicit criticism of the genre's glorification of stereotypical "criminal" behavior.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Alongside accusations of exploiting stereotypes, the NAACP also criticized the blaxploitation genre of exploiting the black community and culture of America, by creating films for a profit that those communities would never see, despite being the vastly misrepresented main focus of many blaxploitation film plots. Many film professionals still believe that there is no truly equal "Black Hollywood" as evidenced by the "Oscars So White" scandal in 2015 that caused uproar when no black actors were nominated for "Best Actor" Oscar Awards.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Slavesploitation, a subgenre of blaxploitation in literature and film, flourished briefly in the late 1960s and 1970s. As its name suggests, the genre is characterized by sensationalistic depictions of slavery.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Abrams, arguing that Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained" (2012) finds its historical roots in the slavesploitation genre, observes that slavesploitation films are characterized by "crassly exploitative representations of oppressed slave protagonists".


title: Blaxploitation

text: One early antecedent of the genre is "Slaves" (1969), which Gaines notes was "not 'slavesploitation' in the vein of later films", but which nonetheless featured graphic depictions of beatings and sexual violence against slaves. Novotny argues that "Blacula" (1972), although it does not depict slavery directly, is historically linked to the slavesploitation subgenre.


title: Blaxploitation

text: By far the best-known and best-studied exemplar of slavesploitation is "Mandingo", a 1957 novel which was adapted into a 1961 play and a 1975 film. Indeed, "Mandingo" was so well known that a contemporary reviewer of "Die the Long Day", a 1972 novel by Orlando Patterson, called it an example of the "Mandingo genre". The film, panned on its release, has been subject to widely divergent critical assessments. Robin Wood, for instance, argued in 1998 that it is the "greatest film about race ever made in Hollywood, certainly prior to Spike Lee and in some respects still".


title: Blaxploitation

text: Blaxploitation films have had an enormous and complicated influence on American cinema. Filmmaker and exploitation film fan Quentin Tarantino, for example, has made numerous references to the blaxploitation genre in his films. An early blaxploitation tribute can be seen in the character of "Lite," played by Sy Richardson, in "Repo Man" (1984). Richardson later wrote "Posse" (1993), which is a kind of blaxploitation Western.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Some of the later, blaxploitation-influenced movies such as "Jackie Brown" (1997), "Undercover Brother" (2002), "Austin Powers in Goldmember" (2002), "Kill Bill Vol. 1" (2003), and "Django Unchained" (2012) feature pop culture nods to the genre. The parody "Undercover Brother", for example, stars Eddie Griffin as an afro-topped agent for a clandestine organization satirically known as the ""B.R.O.T.H.E.R.H.O.O.D."". Likewise, "Austin Powers in Goldmember" co-stars Beyoncé Knowles as the Tamara Dobson/Pam Grier-inspired heroine, Foxxy Cleopatra. In the 1977 parody film "The Kentucky Fried Movie", a mock trailer for "Cleopatra Schwartz" depicts another Grier-like action star married to a rabbi. In a famous scene in "Reservoir Dogs", the protagonists discuss "Get Christie Love!", a mid-1970s blaxploitation television series. In the catalytic scene of "True Romance", the characters watch the movie "The Mack".


title: Blaxploitation

text: John Singleton's "Shaft" (2000), starring Samuel L. Jackson, is a modern-day interpretation of a classic blaxploitation film. The 1997 film "Hoodlum" starring Laurence Fishburne portrays a fictional account of black mobster Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson and recasts gangster blaxploitation with a 1930s twist. In 2004, Mario Van Peebles released "Baadasssss!", about the making of his father Melvin's movie (with Mario playing Melvin). 2007's "American Gangster", based on the true story of heroin dealer Frank Lucas, takes place in the early 1970s in Harlem and has many elements similar in style to blaxploitation films, specifically its prominent featuring of the song "Across 110th Street".


title: Blaxploitation

text: Blaxploitation films have profoundly impacted contemporary hip-hop culture. Several prominent hip hop artists, including Snoop Dogg, Big Daddy Kane, Ice-T, Slick Rick, and Too Short, have adopted the no-nonsense pimp persona popularized first by ex-pimp Iceberg Slim's 1967 book "Pimp" and subsequently by films such as "Super Fly", "The Mack", and "Willie Dynamite". In fact, many hip-hop artists have paid tribute to pimping within their lyrics (most notably 50 Cent's hit single "P.I.M.P.") and have openly embraced the pimp image in their music videos, which include entourages of scantily-clad women, flashy jewelry (known as ""bling""), and luxury Cadillacs (referred to as "pimpmobiles"). The most famous scene of "The Mack", featuring the "Annual Players Ball", has become an often-referenced pop culture icon—most recently by "Chappelle's Show", where it was parodied as the "Playa Hater's Ball". The genre's overseas influence extends to artists such as Norway's hip-hop duo Madcon.


title: Blaxploitation

text: In Michael Chabon's novel "Telegraph Avenue", set in 2004, two characters are former blaxploitation stars.


title: Blaxploitation

text: In 1980, opera director Peter Sellars (not to be confused with actor Peter Sellers) produced and directed a staging of Mozart's opera "Don Giovanni" in the manner of a blaxploitation film, set in contemporary Spanish Harlem, with African-American singers portraying the anti-heroes as street-thugs, killing by gunshot rather than with a sword, using recreational drugs, and partying almost naked. It was later released on commercial video and can be seen on YouTube.


title: Blaxploitation

text: A 2016 video game, "Mafia III", is set in the year 1968 and revolves around Lincoln Clay, a mixed-race African American orphan raised by "black mob". After the murder of his surrogate family at the hands of the Italian mafia, Lincoln Clay seeks vengeance on those who took away the only thing that mattered to him.


title: Blaxploitation

text: The notoriety of the blaxploitation genre has led to many parodies. The earliest attempts to mock the genre, Ralph Bakshi's "Coonskin" and Rudy Ray Moore's "Dolemite", date back to the genre's heyday in 1975.


title: Blaxploitation

text: "Coonskin" was intended to deconstruct racial stereotypes, from early minstrel show stereotypes to more recent stereotypes found in blaxploitation film itself. The work stimulated great controversy even before its release when the Congress of Racial Equality challenged it. Even though distribution was handed to a smaller distributor who advertised it as an exploitation film, it soon developed a cult following with black viewers.


title: Blaxploitation

text: "Dolemite," less serious in tone and produced as a spoof, centers around a sexually active black pimp played by Rudy Ray Moore, who based the film on his stand-up comedy act. A sequel, "The Human Tornado", followed.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Later spoofs parodying the blaxploitation genre include "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka", "Pootie Tang", "Undercover Brother", "Black Dynamite", and "The Hebrew Hammer", which featured a Jewish protagonist and was jokingly referred to by its director as a "Jewsploitation" film.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Robert Townsend's comedy "Hollywood Shuffle" features a young black actor who is tempted to take part in a white-produced blaxploitation film.


title: Blaxploitation

text: The satirical book "Our Dumb Century" features an article from the 1970s entitled "Congress Passes Anti-Blaxploitation Act: Pimps, Players Subject to Heavy Fines".


title: Blaxploitation

text: FOX's network television comedy, "MADtv", has frequently spoofed the Rudy Ray Moore-created franchise "Dolemite", with a series of sketches performed by comic actor Aries Spears, in the role of "The Son of Dolemite". Other sketches include the characters "Funkenstein", "Dr. Funkenstein" and more recently Condoleezza Rice as a blaxploitation superhero. A recurring theme in these sketches is the inexperience of the cast and crew in the blaxploitation era, with emphasis on ridiculous scripting and shoddy acting, sets, costumes, and editing. The sketches are testaments to the poor production quality of the films, with obvious boom mike appearances and intentionally poor cuts and continuity.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Another of FOX's network television comedies, "Martin" starring Martin Lawrence, frequently references the blaxploitation genre. In the Season Three episode "All The Players Came", when Martin organizes a "Player's Ball" charity event to save a local theater, several stars of the blaxploitation era, such as Rudy Ray Moore, Antonio Fargas, Dick Anthony Williams and Pam Grier all make cameo appearances. In one scene, Martin, in character as aging pimp "Jerome", refers to Pam Grier as "Sheba, Baby" in reference to her 1975 blaxploitation feature film of the same name.


title: Blaxploitation

text: In the movie "Leprechaun in the Hood", a character played by Ice-T pulls a baseball bat from his Afro. This scene alludes to a similar scene in "Foxy Brown", in which Pam Grier hides a small semi-automatic pistol in her Afro.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Adult Swim's "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" series has a recurring character called "Boxy Brown" - a play on Foxy Brown. An imaginary friend of Meatwad, Boxy Brown is a cardboard box with a crudely drawn face with a French cut that dons an afro. Whenever Boxy speaks, '70s funk music, typical of blaxploitation films, plays in the background. The cardboard box also has a confrontational attitude and dialect similar to many heroes of this film genre.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Some of the TVs found in the action video game "" feature a Blaxploitation-themed parody of the original "Max Payne" game called "Dick Justice", after its main character. Dick behaves much like the original Max Payne (down to the "constipated" grimace and metaphorical speech) but wears an afro and mustache and speaks in Ebonics.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Duck King, a fictional character created for the video game series "Fatal Fury", is a prime example of foreign black stereotypes.


title: Blaxploitation

text: The sub-cult movie short "Gayniggers from Outer Space" is a blaxploitation-like science fiction oddity directed by Danish filmmaker, DJ, and singer Morten Lindberg.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Jefferson Twilight, a character in "The Venture Bros.", is a parody of the comic-book character Blade (a black, half human, half-vampire vampire hunter), as well as a blaxploitation reference. He has an afro, sideburns, and a mustache. He carries swords, dresses in stylish 1970s clothing, and says that he hunts "Blaculas". He looks and sounds like Samuel L. Jackson.


title: Blaxploitation

text: The intro credits of "Beavis and Butt-Head Do America" feature a blaxploitation-style theme sung by Isaac Hayes.


title: Blaxploitation

text: A scene from the Season 9 episode of "The Simpsons", "Simpson Tide", shows Homer Simpson watching "Exploitation Theatre." A voice-over announces the fake movie titles such as "The Blunch Black of Blotre Blame."


title: Blaxploitation

text: "Family Guy" has parodied blaxploitation numerous times using fake movie titles such as "Black to the Future" "(Back to the Future)" and "Love Blactually" "(Love Actually)". These parodies occasionally feature a stereotyped black version of Peter Griffin.


title: Blaxploitation

text: Martha Southgate's 2005 novel "Third Girl from the Left" is set in Hollywood during the era of blaxploitation films and references many blaxploitation films and stars such as Pam Grier and Coffy.


title: Magic: The Gathering

text: Magic: The Gathering (colloquially known as Magic or MTG) is a tabletop and digital collectable card game created by Richard Garfield. Released in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast (now a subsidiary of Hasbro), "Magic" was the first trading card game and had approximately thirty-five million players , and over twenty billion "Magic" cards were produced in the period from 2008 to 2016, during which time it grew in popularity.


title: Magic: The Gathering

text: A player in "Magic" takes the role of a Planeswalker, a powerful wizard who can travel ("walk") between dimensions ("planes") of the Multiverse, doing battle with other players as Planeswalkers by casting spells, using artifacts, and summoning creatures as depicted on individual cards drawn from their individual decks. A player defeats their opponent typically (but not always) by casting spells and attacking with creatures to deal damage to the opponent's "life total," with the objective being to reduce it from 20 to 0. Although the original concept of the game drew heavily from the motifs of traditional fantasy role-playing games such as "Dungeons & Dragons", the gameplay bears little similarity to paper-and-pencil games, while simultaneously having substantially more cards and more complex rules than many other card games.


title: Magic: The Gathering

text: "Magic" can be played by two or more players, either in person with printed cards or on a computer, smartphone or tablet with virtual cards through the Internet-based software "" or such as "" and "Magic Duels". It can be played in various rule formats, which fall into two categories: "constructed" and "limited". Limited formats involve players building a deck spontaneously out of a pool of random cards with a minimum deck size of 40 cards; in constructed formats, players create decks from cards they own, usually with a minimum of 60 cards per deck.


title: Magic: The Gathering

text: New cards are released on a regular basis through . Further developments include the Wizards Play Network played at the international level and the worldwide community , as well as a substantial resale market for "Magic" cards. Certain cards can be valuable due to their rarity in production and utility in gameplay, with prices ranging from a few cents to tens of thousands of dollars.


title: Magic: The Gathering

text: Cards in "Magic: The Gathering" have a consistent format, with half of the face of the card showing the card's art, and the other half listing the card's mechanics, often relying on commonly-reused to simplify the card's text. Cards fall into generally two classes: lands and spells. Lands produce mana, or magical energy. Players can only play one land card per turn, with most land providing a specific color of mana when they are "tapped" (usually by rotating the card 90 degrees to show it has been used that turn); each land can be tapped for mana only once per turn. Meanwhile, spells consume mana, typically requiring at least one mana of a specific color. More powerful spells cost more, and more specifically colored, mana, so as the game progresses, more land will be in play, more mana will be available, and the quantity and relative power of the spells played tends to increase. Spells come in several varieties: non-permanents like "sorceries" and "instants" have a single, one-time effect before they go to the "graveyard" (discard pile); "enchantments" and "artifacts" that remain in play after being cast to provide a lasting magical effect; and "creature" spells summon creatures that can attack and damage an opponent as well as used to defend from the opponent's creature attacks; "planeswalker" spells that summon powerful allies that act similarly to other players. Land, enchantments, artifacts, and creature cards are considered "permanents" as they remain in play until removed by other spells, ability, or combat effects.


title: Magic: The Gathering

text: Players begin the game by shuffling their decks and then drawing seven cards. On each player's turn, following a set phase order, they draw a card, tap their lands and other permanents as necessary to gain mana as to cast spells, engage their creatures in a single attack round against their opponent who may use their own creatures to block the attack, and then complete other actions with any remaining mana. Most actions that a player can perform enter the "Stack", a concept similar to the stack in computer programming, as either player can react to these actions with other actions, such as counter-spells; the stack provides a method of resolving complex interactions that may result in certain scenarios.


title: Magic: The Gathering

text: Most sanctioned games for "Magic: The Gathering" under the Wizards Play Network (WPN) use the based Constructed format that require players to build their decks from their own library of cards. In general, this requires a minimum of sixty cards in the deck, and, except for basic land cards, no more than four cards of the same named card. The pool of cards is also typically limited to the Standard rotation, which consists of only recently-released cards. The Standard format helps to prevent "power creep" that can be difficult to predict with the size of the "Magic" card library and help give newer players a fair advantage with long-term players. Other Constructed formats exist that allow for use of older expansions to give more variety for decks. A large variety of formats have been defined by the WPN which allows different pools of expansions to be used or alter deck construction rules for special events.


title: Magic: The Gathering

text: In the format, a small number of cards are opened for play from booster packs or tournament packs, and a minimum deck size of forty cards is enforced. One of the most popular limited formats is Booster Draft, in which players open a booster pack, choose a card from it, and pass it to the player seated next to them. This continues until all the cards have been picked, and then a new pack is opened. Three packs are opened in total, and the direction of passing alternates left-right-left. Once the draft is done, players create 40-card decks out of the cards they picked, basic land cards being provided for free, and play games with the players they drafted with.


title: Magic: The Gathering

text: Most cards in "Magic" are based on one of five colors that make up the game's "Color Wheel" or "Color Pie", shown on the back of each card, and each representing a school or realm of magic: white, blue, black, red, and green. The arrangement of these colors on the wheel describes relationships between the schools, which can broadly affect deck construction and game execution. For a given color such as white, the two colors immediately adjacent to it, green and blue, are considered complementary, while the two colors on the opposite side, black and red, are its opposing schools. The Research and Development (R&D) team at Wizards of the Coast aimed to balance power and abilities among the five colors by using the Color Pie to differentiate the strengths and weaknesses of each. This guideline lays out the capabilities, themes, and mechanics of each color and allows for every color to have its own distinct attributes and gameplay. The Color Pie is used to ensure new cards are thematically in the correct color and do not infringe on the territory of other colors.


title: Magic: The Gathering

text: The concepts behind each of the colors on the Color Wheel, based on a series of articles written by Mark Rosewater, are as follows:


title: Magic: The Gathering

text: Most cards in "Magic: The Gathering" are based on a single color, shown along the card's border. The cost to play them requires some mana of that color and potentially any amount of mana from any other color. Multicolored cards were introduced in the "" expansion and typically use a gold border. Their casting cost includes mana from at least two colors plus additional mana from any color. Hybrid cards, included with "", use a two-color gradient border. These cards can be cast using mana from either color shown, in addition to other mana costs. Finally, colorless cards, such as some artifacts, do not have any colored mana requirements but still require a general amount of mana to be spent to play.


title: Magic: The Gathering

text: The color wheel can influence deck construction choices. Cards from colors that are aligned such as red and green often provide synergistic effects, either due to the core nature of the schools or through designs of cards, but may leave the deck vulnerable to the magic of the common color in conflict, blue in the case of red and green. Alternatively, decks constructed with opposing colors like green and blue may not have many favorable combinations but will be capable of dealing with decks based on any other colors. There are no limits to how many colors can be in a deck, but the more colors in a deck, the more difficult it may be to provide mana of the right color.


title: Magic: The Gathering

text: "Magic", like many other games, combines chance and skill. One frequent complaint about the game involves the notion that there is too much luck involved, especially concerning drawing too many or too few lands. Early in the game especially, too many or too few lands could ruin a player's chance at victory without the player having made a mistake. This in-game statistical variance can be minimized by proper deck construction, as an appropriate land count can reduce mana problems. In "Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012", the land count is automatically adjusted to 40% of the total deck size.


title: Magic: The Gathering

text: A "mulligan" rule was introduced into the game, first informally in casual play and then in the official game rules. In multiplayer, a player may take one mulligan without penalty, while subsequent mulligans will cost one card (a rule known as "Partial Paris mulligan"). The original mulligan allowed a player a single redraw of seven new cards if that player's initial hand contained seven or zero lands. A variation of this rule called a "forced mulligan" is still used in some casual play circles and in multiplayer formats on "Magic Online", and allows a single "free" redraw of seven new cards if a player's initial hand contains seven, six, one or zero lands. With the release of the Core Set 2020, a new mulligan system was introduced for competitive play known as the . Under this rule, after taking a mulligan, the player redraws 7 new cards, and then chooses 1 card to place on the bottom of their library for each mulligan they have taken (or chooses to mulligan again, drawing another 7 cards.) This mulligan rule is generally considered less punishing to mulligans than the prior mulligan rule, in which a player would simply draw one less card each time they mulliganed, rather than drawing 7 new cards after each mulligan, and subsequently choosing to “bottom” one card per mulligan taken.


title: Magic: The Gathering

text: Confessing his love for games combining both luck and skill, "Magic" creator Richard Garfield admitted its influence in his design of "Magic". In addressing the complaint about luck influencing a game, Garfield states that new and casual players tend to appreciate luck as a leveling effect, since randomness can increase their chances of winning against a more skilled player. Meanwhile, a player with higher skills appreciates a game with less chance, as the higher degree of control increases their chances of winning. According to Garfield, "Magic" has and would likely continue decreasing its degree of luck as the game matured. The "Mulligan rule", as well as card design, past vs. present, are good examples of this trend. He feels that this is a universal trend for maturing games. Garfield explained using chess as an example, that unlike modern chess, in predecessors, players would use dice to determine which chess piece to move.


title: Magic: The Gathering

text: The original set of rules prescribed that all games were to be played for ante. Garfield was partly inspired by the game of marbles and added this rule because he wanted the players to play with the cards rather than simply collect them. The ante rule stated that each player must remove a card at random from the deck they wished to play with before the game began, and the two cards would be set aside together as the ante. At the end of the match, the winner would take and keep both cards. Early sets included a few cards with rules designed to interact with this gambling aspect, allowing replacements of cards up for ante, adding more cards to the ante, or even permanently trading ownership of cards in play. The ante concept became controversial because many regions had restrictions on games of chance. The ante rule was soon made optional because of these restrictions and because of players' reluctance to possibly lose a card that they owned. The gambling rule was also forbidden at sanctioned events. The last card to mention ante was printed in the 1995 expansion set "".


title: Magic: The Gathering

text: The Wizards Play Network (WPN), formerly the Duelists' Convocation International (DCI), is the organizing body for sanctioned "Magic" events; it is owned and operated by Wizards of the Coast. The WPN establishes the set allowances and card restrictions for the and formats for regulation play for tournaments as well as for other events.