Philip Pullman

Lyra Belacqua , also known as Lyra Silvertongue, is the heroine of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Lyra is a young girl who inhabits a universe parallel to our own. Brought up in the cloistered world of Jordan College, Oxford, she finds herself embroiled in a cosmic war between Lord... Asriel on the one side, and the first angel to come into being, called The Authority, and his Regent, called Metatron, on the other. Lyra Belacqua, age twelve at the beginning of the trilogy, is the daughter of Lord Asriel and Marisa Coulter in an Oxford similar to our own. She was brought up at Jordan College, where the scholars, professors and servants largely treated her as an adopted daughter. She was raised believing that her parents had died in an airship crash, and that Lord Asriel was her uncle, and later learned the truth from John Faa, leader of the Gyptians. Lyra spends most of her time socializing with other children of the city, sometimes harmoniously, frequently mock-violently, and often by way of avoiding school-work.
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Lord Asriel is a major character in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series and one of the main protagonists of Northern Lights. Asriel is a member of the English aristocracy in a parallel universe dominated by the Church. He is described as being "a tall man with powerful shoulders, a fierce... dark face, and eyes that seem to flash and glitter with savage laughter." Possessed of enormous determination and willpower, he is fierce in nature and commands great respect in both the political and academic spheres, being a military leader and a fellow of Jordan College in his world's version of the University of Oxford. The name Asriel could be derived from the Hebraic name Asriel, who, in the Jewish and Muslim tradition is the family of Asriel and is mentioned in the counting of the tribes. If one looks in the Bible in the Book of Numbers chapter 26 verse 31, you will see the source of the name. "Azrael" is the name of the Angel of Death. Alternatively Asriel, being an anagram for Israel, could refer to the English translation of the name Israel, given to Jacob in the Hebrew Bible - namely; "He who has struggled with God". His dæmon is Stelmaria, a Snow Leopard.
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Will Parry is one of the protagonists in Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials, along with Lyra Belacqua. He is first introduced into the series in the second novel, The Subtle Knife, and also appears in the final part of the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. He does not appear in the first novel... Northern Lights . Will has been described as having straight black eyebrows, dark hair, a strong, jutting jaw, a muscular build and often a passionate ferocity in his eyes into which most characters in the trilogy avoid looking directly. Although he is supposed to have dark hair, he can be seen on the cover of the US edition with fair, brown hair, and in the Spanish edition with reddish hair. Often during the course of the books Will is compared to Lord Asriel in looks and personality. Will Parry is only son of John Parry, an explorer, and of Elaine Parry, a woman who suffers from apparent mental problems including obsessive-compulsive disorder and paranoia, and whom he has taken care of since early age due to her ailment.
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Veronica Beatrice "Sally" Lockhart is a fictional character in a series of books by Philip Pullman. The character of Sally Lockhart first appears in The Ruby in the Smoke, a play Pullman wrote for performance by a secondary school. In the play, sixteen-year-old Sally Lockhart attempts to... investigate her father's apparently accidental death. In the course of her investigation she uncovers her father's connections to the opium trade, the Indian Mutiny, and a cursed ruby. Philip Pullman was attracted to the story and characters so much that he rewrote the play as a children's book; he later extended the story into a series of four books. Sally Lockhart is first introduced in The Ruby in the Smoke, the first of the four novels in the Sally Lockhart Quartet. The book begins in London in 1872, where Pullman states Lockhart is "sixteen or so". Physically, Lockhart is described as being "uncommonly pretty"; she has blonde hair, dark brown eyes and is "slender and pale". She works as a financial consultant - an unusual job for a woman in the Victorian era.
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Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist was a poet, dramatist, novelist and short story writer. The Kleist Prize, a prestigious prize for German literature, is named after him. Kleist was born into the von Kleist family in Frankfurt an der Oder in the Margraviate of Brandenburg. After a scanty... education, he entered the Prussian Army in 1792, served in the Rhine campaign of 1796, and retired from the service in 1799 with the rank of lieutenant. He studied law and philosophy at the Viadrina University and in 1800 received a subordinate post in the Ministry of Finance at Berlin. In the following year, Kleist's roving, restless spirit got the better of him, and procuring a lengthened leave of absence he visited Paris and then settled in Switzerland. Here he found congenial friends in Heinrich Zschokke and Ludwig Friedrich August Wieland , son of the poet Christoph Martin Wieland; and to them he read his first drama, a gloomy tragedy, The Schroffenstein Family .
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William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the... least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry has led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself". Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of both the Romantic movement and "Pre-Romantic", for its large appearance in the 18th century.
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