English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of four children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper, died when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. After his mother’s death, Keats’s maternal grandmother appointed two London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, as guardians. Abbey, a prosperous tea broker, assumed the bulk of this responsibility, while Sandell played only a minor role. When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School, Enfield, to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and study medicine in a London hospital. In 1816 Keats became a licensed apothecary, but he never practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry.
Joesph A. Schumpeter served as Austria's first finance minister, made and lost a fortune as an investment banker, and taught economics for many years at Harvard.
The late Vivekanand Jha was Director, Indian Council of Historical Research, and editor of the Indian Historical Review (20 vols, 1974-94), making it India's most substantive historical journal. He
Ernest Mandel (1923-1995) was Professor at the Free University of Brussels. He has been the foremost Marxist Economist of our time. An activist in the revolutionary movement, he was a leader of the
