Life
His father was originally from South Africa, and his mother was English; he has two younger brothers. After a childhood in poverty, he studied languages and taught himself Gregg Shorthand. Having learned Welsh, he was interviewed in Welsh on radio; he has a reasonable knowledge of ten different languages. He was apparently approached by the Home Office to work on speaker identification but turned down the offer as it was still considered unacceptable to be homosexual at the time, and he feared that the security check would make his homosexuality public.
Read more about this topic: John C. Wells
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)
“It is high time we realized that the havoc wrought in human life and ideals by a technological revolution and too long ignored has caught up with us.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“One perceives that again and again she has destroyed her life when it was forming into shapes of happiness because of her loyalty to the early misery, her conviction that that has the sanction of ultimate reality, and that beside it all other things are trivial.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)