Origins and Early Life
Johnson was born in 1940 in Penzance, Cornwall, the son of Osman Wilfred Johnson and Irene, daughter of Stanley F. Williams of Bromley, Kent, and Marie Louise (née de Pfeffel). His paternal grandfather Ali Kemal Bey, one of the last interior ministers of the Ottoman Empire government, was assassinated during the Turkish War of Independence. Stanley's father was born Osman Wilfred Kemal in England in 1909, his Anglo-Swiss mother Winifred dying shortly after giving birth. After Ali Kemal returned to Turkey in 1912, Stanley's father and aunt were brought up by their English grandmother Margaret Brun (née Johnson) and took her maiden name, Stanley's father becoming simply Wilfred Johnson.
Johnson attended Sherborne School, Dorset, and while still an undergraduate reading Greats at Exeter College, Oxford, he took part in the Marco Polo Expedition with Tim Severin and Michael de Larrabeiti, travelling on a motorcycle from Oxford to Venice and on to India and Afghanistan.
Read more about this topic: Stanley Johnson (writer)
Famous quotes containing the words origins, early and/or life:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“I believe that if we are to survive as a planet, we must teach this next generation to handle their own conflicts assertively and nonviolently. If in their early years our children learn to listen to all sides of the story, use their heads and then their mouths, and come up with a plan and share, then, when they become our leaders, and some of them will, they will have the tools to handle global problems and conflict.”
—Barbara Coloroso (20th century)
“Innocence is lovely in the child, because in harmony with its nature; but our path in life is not backward but onward, and virtue can never be the offspring of mere innocence. If we are to progress in the knowledge of good, we must also progress in the knowledge of evil. Every experience of evil brings its own temptation and according to the degree in which the evil is recognized and the temptations resisted, will be the value of the character into which the individual will develop.”
—Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)