University College, Oxford

Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA is a British theoretical physicist and cosmologist, whose scientific books and public appearances have... made him an academic celebrity. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for 30 years, taking up the post in 1979 and retiring on 1 October 2009. He is now Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and a Distinguished Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. He is known for his contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity, especially in the context of black holes.
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William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Before that, he... was Governor of the state of Arkansas. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation. His wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has served as the United States Secretary of State since January 21, 2009, and was Senator from New York from 2001 to 2009. Both Clintons received Juris Doctor degrees from Yale Law School. Clinton has been described as a New Democrat. Some of his policies, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and welfare reform, have been attributed to a centrist Third Way philosophy of governance, while on other issues his stance was left-of-center. Clinton presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history. The Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus between the years 1998 and 2000, during the last three years of Clinton's presidency.
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Paul Mackintosh Foot was a British investigative journalist, political campaigner, author, and long-time member of the Socialist Workers Party . He... was the grandson of Isaac Foot, who had been a Liberal MP, and the son of Hugh Foot . He was the nephew of Michael Foot, former leader of the Labour Party. Foot was born in Haifa, then part of the British Mandate for Palestine, and spent his youth at his uncle's house in Devon, in Italy with his grandmother and with his parents in Cyprus and Jamaica. He was sent to what he described as "a ludicrously snobbish prep school, Ludgrove [near Wokingham in Berkshire], and then to an only slightly less absurd public school, Shrewsbury, in Shropshire." Contemporaries at Shrewsbury included Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton, Christopher Booker and several other friends who would later become involved in Private Eye. Anthony Chenevix-Trench was his Housemaster at Shrewsbury between 1950 and 1955, a time when corporal punishment in all schools was commonplace.
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Armando Giovanni Iannucci is a Scottish comedian, satirist, writer, director, performer and radio producer. Born in Glasgow, he studied at Oxford... University and left graduate work on a PhD about John Milton to pursue a career in comedy. Rising quickly through BBC Scotland and BBC Radio 4, his early work with Chris Morris on the radio series On the Hour was transferred to television as The Day Today. A character from this series, Alan Partridge, went on to feature in a number of Iannucci's television and radio programmes including Knowing Me, Knowing You and I'm Alan Partridge. In the meantime, Iannucci also fronted the satirical Armistice review shows and in 2001 created his most personal work, The Armando Iannucci Shows for Channel 4. Moving back to the BBC in 2005, Iannucci created the political sitcom The Thick of It as well as the spoof documentary Time Trumpet in 2006. Winning funding from the UK Film Council, he directed a critically acclaimed feature film In the Loop featuring characters from The Thick of It in 2009.
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