Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
George Melly
Summary
Alan George Heywood Melly (17 August 1926 – 5 July 2007) was an English jazz and blues singer, critic, writer, and lecturer. From 1965 to 1973 he was a film and television critic for The Observer; he also lectured on art history, with an emphasis on surrealism.
Melly was born at The Grange, St Michael's Hamlet, Toxteth, Liverpool, Lancashire, the elder son and eldest of three children of wool broker Francis Heywood Melly and (Edith) Maud, née Isaac. His mother was Jewish. Melly was a descendant of the shipowner and Liberal MP George Melly. He was also a relative of the philanthropist Emma Holt, of Sudley House Liverpool; her sister had married Melly's great-grandfather.
Melly was educated at Stowe School, Buckinghamshire where he discovered his interest in modern art, jazz and blues and started coming to terms with his sexuality.
Melly was an atheist. Interviewed by Nigel Farndale in 2005, Melly said "I don't understand people panicking about death. It's inevitable. I'm an atheist; you'd think it would make it worse, but it doesn't. I've done quite a lot in the world, not necessarily of great significance, but I have done it."
Melly once said that he may have been drawn to surrealism by a particular experience he had during his teenage years. A frequent visitor to Liverpool's Sefton Park near his home, he often entered its tropical Palm House and there chatted to wounded soldiers from a nearby military hospital. It was the incongruity of this sight, men smoking among the exotic plants, dressed in their hospital uniforms and usually missing a limb, that he felt he later recognised in the work of the Surrealists.
He joined the Royal Navy at the end of the Second World War because, as he quipped to the recruiting officer, the uniforms were "so much nicer". As he related in his autobiography Rum, Bum and Concertina, he was crestfallen to discover that he would not be sent to a ship and was thus denied the "bell-bottom" uniform he desired. Instead he received desk duty and wore the other Navy uniform, described as "the dreaded fore-and-aft".
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.