Herbert Kretzmer's protest anthem Do You Hear The People Sing? is one of the most recognisable songs from the musical Les Miserables , and now it has become the soundtrack to Hong Kong's discontent - protesters sung it at this year's July 1 march and the HKTV protests last year. The South African-born lyricist was also a television and drama critic. As a reporter, he interviewed many prominent personalities, including boxer Sugar Ray Robinson and writer Truman Capote … The American author apparently found his calling at the age of 12, and would write after school for three hours every day, "like other kids go home and practise the violin or the piano, or whatever", he recalled. He is perhaps best known for his spellbinding non-fiction novel In Cold Blood , about the murder of a family in Kansas. Capote's hopes were said to have been dashed when the book failed to win him an enormously prestigious prize, named after Joseph Pulitzer … As publisher of now-defunct newspaper New York World between 1883 and 1911, Pulitzer became a founding father of "yellow" journalism - the practice of sensationalising stories to sell papers. Such journalism, unsurprisingly, tends not to win Pulitzer prizes, a fact to which the august New York Times can attest. The Grey Lady, as the Times is also known, has won more Pulitzers (112) than any other paper, although it didn't scoop one for its breaking of the WikiLeaks revelations, leaked by another publisher of sorts Julian Assange … The Australian whistleblower, wanted by authorities in the United States and Sweden, has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for more than two years. In an interview with the Democracy Now website last week, Assange gave a little insight into how his WikiLeaks organisation had helped facilitate Edward Snowden's flight from Hong Kong to Russia, assessing the legal and political situation for the American fugitive. "It's not like it was guaranteed to work," said Assange. "But the risks of inaction were even greater." While opinion about Assange is divided, he has some famous supporters, including Michael Moore, Lady Gaga and Oliver Stone … Enlisted for combat duty in the army during the Vietnam war, Stone won two awards for heroism. He subsequently made four films about the war: Platoon , Born on the Fourth of July , Heaven and Earth and the short film Last Year in Vietnam . Another recurring theme for the director is American presidents - his White House films include Nixon (about Richard Nixon), W. (George W. Bush) and JFK , about the assassination of John F. Kennedy … The youngest man to have been elected American president, Kennedy is also the only Pulitzer Prize winner to have held office. After his assassination, in November 1963, tributes poured into the White House from around the world, in many forms. The song In The Summer of His Years was written straight after JFK's death. For a hastily arranged television programme, the BBC enlisted English actress Millicent Martin to sing the song, the lyrics of which were written by David Lee and Herbert Kretzmer.
