Historical Trivia

Oliver  Goldsmith : (1728-1774) Anglo-Irish poet, novelist and dramatist Oliver Goldsmith was born in Ireland in 1728. He was the son of a Protestant Clergyman. After his education at various schools and Trinity College, Dublin, he failed to settle down to any regular professional career. He studied medicine at Edinburgh and Leyden, but never took a medical degree from either university. Indeed, he appears to have been too irresponsible to fit himself for any regular profession. The combination of his literary work and his dissolute lifestyle led Horace Walpole to give him the name of  " Inspired Idiot ". For sometime during his twenties he rambled the continent leading hand to mouth existence and often, according to the stories he told later , lived on the the alms he was given for playing the flute. At the age of thirty he settled penniless. In London, he tried to earn a living by writing. He did an immense amount of sheer hack-work. As a writer, he had an easy and graceful

Thomas Campion: (15657-1620) English poet, composer and musician Thomas Campion was born in 1567 in London. He was amazingly versatile English even by poet Elizabethan and musician standards. He was the second child of john and Lucy Campion. His father died when he was 10 years old, though his mother married again but she too passed away soon and left him under the guardianship of his stepfather Augustine Steward. When he was 14, his stepfather sent him and his sister to Cambridge. In1584, he left Cambridge and studied law but was later qualified and practiced as a doctor in London. However, he achieved fame not as a scholar, lawyer or a doctor but as a poet and musician. This was an age when English poetry and music reached their supreme heights. His poems  started gaining publicity around 1591 with five un-ascribed poems which contained ' Astrophel and Stella ' by Sir Philip Sydney. His Second work was published  was in Latin and called ' Thomae Campini Poemata ' whic

Omar Al-Mukhtar: (1858-1931) " The sentence on you Omar Mukhtar is Death by hanging in Public ."   " From God we come, and unto God, we shall return ". The National hero of Libya, revolutionist and member of the Senusy Omar AL-Mukhtar led a religious organization with administrative and military functions and led the anti-colonial resistance in Cyrenaica from 1923 to 1931 when he was captured by the Italians and condemned to death. He was  called  The Lion of the Desert , known among the Colonial Italians as  Matari of the Monifa. Though his date of birth is uncertain, he was born between 1856 and 1862. He learned Islam at an early age and became Hafiz after which he started to teach the Quran as a scholar till he came to the age of 53, it was the time when his life was about to take a new phase. During the Italian-Turk war in October, an Italian naval regiment arrived at the coast of Libya, then a territory subject which was under the control of Ottoman. Italian th

Abdul Ghani Khan Baba: (1914-1996) Ghani baba was born in Hashtnagar in Frontier tribal areas of British India (probably now the Charsadda district of  KPK) in 1914. He was the son of Indian independence activist the time of British era, The leader of Awami National Party Abdul Ghaffar khan aka Bacha Khan . His wife Roshan belonged from a Parsi family, daughter of Nawab Rustam Jang. This couple had three children Shanadana and Zareen daughters and son, Faridun. He is widely considered to be the best Pashto poet of the 20th century and stands on a par with Kaushal khan Khattak and Rehman Baba. Apart from that he was politician, philosopher, writer, and artist. He was often praised by the titles of   Lewanay Palaspay  (i.e.: Mad Philosopher) and  Da Ilm Samandar  (i.e. Ocean of Knowledge). In his early age, he went to study art at Rabindranath Tagore's University in Shanti Niketan, where he build interest in painting and sculptures. In 1933 after he came back from England where he s