White Rose of York White Rose of York The White Rose of York (also called the "Rose alba" or rose argent), a white heraldic rose, is the symbol of the House of York and has since been adopted as a symbol of Yorkshire as a whole. The origins of the emblem are said to go back to the fourteenth century, to Edmund of Langley, the first Duke of York and the founder of the House of York as a cadet branch of the then ruling House of Plantagenet (although other reports suggest the rose and Yorkshire have links going back further than that.) The
The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul is a biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French. It was published in 2008 (by Picador in the UK and Knopf in the USA). The title is a quotation from Naipaul's book "A Bend in the River". "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." French deals with Naipaul's family background and his life from his birth in 1932 until his second marriage