The Romanian prosaist and poet Mircea Cărtărescu was born and raised in Bucharest together with his sister. Both his mother, Maria (née Badislav) and his father, the economist and journalist Konstantin Cărtărescu, were committed communists.
Cărtărescu graduated from college in 1975 and went on to study literature and languages at university, graduating in 1980. His PhD thesis in literature was on...

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Freeman Wills Crofts was born in Dublin, Ireland, as the son of a British army surgeon who died when Croft was still young. Because his mother then married an archdeacon, Croft was brought up in a deeply religious home. He studied engineering, and at the age of seventeen he became an apprentice at the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway where he stayed until 1929 when he left for health...

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