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.
SHASWATI MAZUMDAR teaches German at the Department of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Delhi. Her research has included a focus on the German writer Bertolt Brecht. She has edited a coll
A mathematician by training, Kandala Balagopal (1952–2009) was associated with the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee for two decades. In 1998, he became one of the founder-members of H
Sanjib Baruah is professor of political studies at Bard College, New York and honorary research professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. He has been a global fellow at the Peace Researc
