Tim stockdale autobiography of a flea market
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Khaled Hosseini, M.D.
Your English is virtually unaccented and perfectly fluent, and you write in English. Where did that fluency come from?
Khaled Hosseini: I think part of it is youth. Farsi was my first language. I learned French when I was eleven, and we lived in France for about four years, so that became my second language. And then we moved to the States, and I was 15 at that time, so I began to pick up English. Actually, I picked up English pretty quickly, probably within a year I was pretty fluent. And part of it is that you’re still very pliable mentally at 14, 15 years old. You still are not fully rooted in that, so you still have that ability to absorb things in a kind of a childlike way. And so I picked up the language pretty quickly. And I think part of it also is that I always had kind of an ease with foreign languages. I always had an ear for it and seemed to pick it up more quickly than some of my friends and fellow students. So I think it was a combination of both things.
As a teenager in America, you really have to learn the idiom, you have to learn the slang fast so you can fit in, right?
Khaled Hosseini: Fitting in in the U.S. when we first moved here — boy, that was quite a difficulty, because I moved to the States when I was 15, and 15 is
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South Tyneside Council's Post
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William Blake
English poet and artist (1757–1827)
For other people named William Blake, see William Blake (disambiguation).
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake has become a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his "prophetic works" were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language".[2] While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham,[3] he produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God",[4] or "human existence itself".[5]
Although Blake was considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, he came to be highly regarded by later critics and readers 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 the Romantic movement and as "Pre-Romantic".[6] A theist who preferred his own Marcionite style of theology,[7][8] he was host