Early Life and Family
Cockburn was born in Ireland and grew up in County Cork, Ireland. His parents were the well-known socialist author and journalist Claud Cockburn and his third wife Patricia Byron, née Arbuthnot (who also wrote an autobiography, Figure of Eight). He was educated at Glenalmond College, Perthshire, and Trinity College, Oxford.
Cockburn married in 1981 Janet Elisabeth ("Jan") Montefiore (14 November 1948), an English Lecturer at the University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, daughter of Rt. Rev. Hugh Montefiore, and has two children, Henry Claud Cockburn (4 January 1982) and Alexander Cockburn (1987). He has two brothers, Alexander Cockburn and Andrew Cockburn who are also journalists}, and a half-sister, mystery writer Sarah Caudwell. Journalists Laura Flanders and Stephanie Flanders are his half-nieces, daughters of his half-brother in law Michael Flanders, and actress Olivia Wilde, is his niece, daughter of his sister in law Leslie Cockburn.
Read more about this topic: Patrick Cockburn
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or family:
“... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Life! Life! Don’t let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“It is as when a migrating army of mice girdles a forest of pines. The chopper fells trees from the same motive that the mouse gnaws them,—to get his living. You tell me that he has a more interesting family than the mouse. That is as it happens.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)