don't stand so close to me - the police





                  


                                           Nov  3  : )

It's the birthday of André Malraux, born in Paris (1901), who dropped out of school when he was 16, taught himself about art by spending all his time in museums, and began writing art criticism for avant-garde magazines. He then went off to Southeast Asia to make a living smuggling stolen art works back to Europe and almost wound up in prison. But it was in Asia that he witnessed a series of communist uprisings that inspired his first few novels, including Man's Fate (1933). He went on to fight against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, organizing a squadron of planes to help bomb Franco's fascist army, which he wrote about in his book Man's Hope (1937), and while he was living in besieged Catalonia, he made a feature film about the war, with bombs falling as his camera rolled. André Malraux, who said, "Youth is a religion from which one　 always ends up being converted."