Compare Constellations

University of Exeter Library has been collecting in this area since c.2000.

Neil Ripley Ker (1908-1982), palaeographer, was born in Brompton, London, son of Robert Macneil Ker and his wife Lucy. He was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he switched from philosophy, politics and economics to English language and literature on the advice of C.S. Lewis. He was appointed lecturer of palaeography in 1941, was elected as a Fellow at Magdalen in 1945, and subsequently to Reader in Palaeography in 1946. He was also librarian for Magdalen between 1955-1968. He is probably best known for his work on Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and his compilation of manuscript catalogues and handlists, including Medieval Libraries of Great Britain (1941), Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon (1957, amended reprint 1990), Medieval Manuscripts of Great Britain (1969 onwards), and English Manuscripts in the Century after the Norman Conquest (1960). He died in Foss near Pitlochry, Scotland, in 1982.

Sergei Mikhaylovich Eisenstein (1898-1948), Soviet film director and theorist, was born in Latvia and studied engineering and architecture at the Petrograd Institute He served with the Red Army during the civil war, and then became scene designer at the Proletkult Theatre. Although he only completed six films, he became most famous for The Battleship Potemkin (1926) and October; or ten days that shook the world (1928), which pioneered the use of montage. He developed a strong political and aesthetic style, which did not fit well into the new aesthetic of socialist realism when he returned to the USSR from a period in France in 1932. He was commissioned to make a three-part epic Ivan the Terrible, for which he received the Stalin Prize (first class) for Part I. Part II was not released until after the death of both Stalin and Eisenstein, and part III was never completed. He is the author of The Film Sense (1942), Film Form (1949), Notes of a Film Director (1959) and Film Essays (1968).