Neo received the Best Director Award at the Silver Screen Awards in 1998. He was also awarded with the Lifetime Achievement Award in the following year for his contributions to Singapore's media industry. In 2004, Neo became the first moviemaker in Singapore to be honoured with the Public Service Award. He also received the Cultural Medallion on 21 October 2005 together with musician Dick Lee.
In 2008, Neo and Mark Lee bought the Singapore master franchise rights for Old Town White Coffee. It is a coffee retail store from Ipoh, Malaysia. Their first store at Big Splash opened on 30 March in 2008.
Neo married Irene Kng in 1988 and they have four children. It is his second marriage. He is a Christian and worships at City Harvest Church.
In March 2010, it was revealed Neo had an affair with model Wendy Chong. Later it was reported that Neo tried to have relations with up to 11 women.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881) was a Russian novelist.
In his 20s he joined a group of radicals in St Petersburg They were into French socialist ideas. A police agent reported the group to the authorities. On 22 April 1849, Dostoyevsky was arrested and imprisoned with the other members. After months of questioning and investigation they were tried. They were found guilty of planning to distribute subversive propaganda and condemned to death by firing squad.
The punishment was changed to a sentence of exile and hard labour, but not before they were forced to go through a mock execution. In 1859 a new tsar allowed Dostoyevsky to end his Siberian exile. A year later he was back in St Petersburg. The experience had cost him ten years of his life. It is the root of all his writing.
Raised in an educated and religious family, Dostoyevsky's beliefs changed through his life. In prison, he focused intensely on the figure of Christ and on the "New Testament", the only book allowed in prison. In a letter to the woman who had sent him the "New Testament", Dostoyevsky wrote that he was a "child of unbelief and doubt up to this moment, and I am certain that I shall remain so to the grave". He also wrote that "even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth".
From an analysis of religious ideas in "Crime and Punishment", "The Idiot", "The Demons" ("The Possessed"), and "The Brothers Karamazov", James Townsend thinks Dostoyevsky held orthodox Christian beliefs except for his view of salvation from sin. According to Townsend, "Dostoevsky almost seemed to embrace an in-this-life purgatory", in which people suffer to pay for their sins, rather than the Christian doctrine of salvation through Christ. Malcolm Jones sees elements of Islam and Buddhism in Dostoyevsky's religious convictions. Colin Wilson in "The Outsider" describes him as a "tormented half-atheist-half-Christian".
Many scholars see Dostoyevsky as one of the greatest psychologists in literature. His works have had a big effect on twentieth-century fiction. Very often, he wrote about characters who live in poor conditions. Those characters are sometimes in extreme states of mind. They might show both a strange grasp of human psychology as well as good analyses of the political, social and spiritual states of Russia of Dostoevsky's time. Many of his best-known works are prophetic. He is sometimes considered to be a founder of existentialism, most frequently for "Notes from Underground", which has been described as "the best overture for existentialism ever written". He is also famous for writing "The Brothers Karamazov", which many critics, such as Sigmund Freud, have said was one of the best novels ever written.
His attack on nihilism is in his great novel "Demons", or "The Possessed". Published in 1872, it is a "dark comedy, cruelly funny in its depiction of high-minded intellectuals toying with revolutionary notions without understanding anything of what revolution means in practice".
The plot is a version of actual events at the time. A former teacher of divinity turned terrorist, Sergei Nechaev, had written a pamphlet, "The Catechism of a Revolutionary", which argued that any means (including blackmail and murder) could be used to advance the cause of revolution. Nechaev planned to kill a student who questioned his ideas.
One of the characters in "Demons" confesses: "I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion contradicts the original idea from which I start. From unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism". This suggests that the result of abandoning morality for the sake of an idea will be tyranny more extreme than any in the past.
English versions of titles come after the Russian title.
The last five stories (1873-1877) are included in "A Writer's Diary".
Julia Grant
Julia Boggs Dent Grant (January 26, 1826 – December 14, 1902), was the wife of the 18th President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, and was First Lady of the United States from 1869 to 1877.
She was born at White Haven plantation west of St. Louis, Missouri. She was the daughter of Colonel Frederick Dent, a slaveholding planter and merchant, and Ellen Wrenshall-Dent.
After her schooling, she and Ulysses S. Grant got engaged in 1844. At that time, Ulysses S. Grant was a Lieutenant in the US Army. In the meanwhile, Mexican War began. Ulysses went to war. He returned from the war after many years. They married in 1848.
The Grants had three sons and a daughter:
She entered the White House in 1869 to begin, in her words, "the happiest period" of her life. With Cabinet wives as her allies, she entertained extensively and lavishly. The social highlight of the Grant years was the White House wedding of their daughter in 1874. Contemporaries noted her finery, jewels, and silks and laces. After four years of war, an assassination, and an impeachment trial, Washington was ready for a little levity, and Julia obliged. She offered a full array of events and became a popular hostess. She planned lavish state dinners, where guests enjoyed expensive wines and liquors.
As First Lady it was suggested to her that she have an operation to correct her crossed eyes, but President Grant said that he liked her that way.
Upon leaving the White House in 1877, the Grants made a trip around the world. Julia proudly recalled details of hospitality and magnificent gifts they received. A highlight of the trip was an overnight stay and dinner hosted for them by Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle in England. They also enjoyed a swing through the Far East, being cordially received at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo by the Emperor and Empress of Japan.
In 1884 Grant suffered yet another business failure and they lost all they had.
She became the first First Lady to write a memoir, though she was unable to find a publisher, and had been dead almost 75 years before "The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant (Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant)" was finally published in 1975.
She had attended in 1897 the dedication of Grant's monumental tomb overlooking the Hudson River in New York City. She was laid to rest in a sarcophagus beside her husband. She had ended her own chronicle of their years together with a firm declaration: "the light of his glorious fame still reaches out to me, falls upon me, and warms me."
Jane Pierce
Jane Means Appleton Pierce (March 12, 1806 – December 2, 1863), wife of U.S. President Franklin Pierce, was First Lady of the United States from 1853 to 1857.
Her father’s name was Jesse Appleton. When her father died, her mother moved with her to Amherst, New Hampshire.