Life
Schapiro was born in Riga, Latvia (part of Imperial Russia at that time) into a prosperous family of Jewish traders which left at the time of the Russian Revolution when he was eight years old, and soon settled in England. He was educated at Clifton College in England and at various universities, including the Sorbonne in Paris.
After graduating, Boris joined the family horse trading and meat business. He worked there until, in his forties, he decided to retire and capitalise on his love of gambling by becoming the banker of a baccarat syndicate at Crockford's, the gaming club in London. During World War II Schapiro, who was fluent in Russian, German and French, put these linguistic skills to use in the Army Intelligence Corps.
Schapiro had an early marriage to a Russian woman. He later married a second time, to Helen, in 1970.
Read more about this topic: Boris Schapiro
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“O, reason not the need! our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“... there is no point in being realistic about here and now, no use at all not any, and so it is not the nineteenth but the twentieth century, there is no realism now, life is not real it is not earnest, it is strange which is an entirely different matter.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)