User:Fosse8

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"
 * &mdash; Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto (1855)

Some Information About Me
Er, yes. Hello. I am a lawyer based in Cardiff, Wales; I've probably been here longer than you have, though you wouldn't know it from my edit count. I started adding & editing articles here in 2003, though the list under my contributions is really only a fraction of the number of edits I've made while not logged in (either through being automatically logged out, or through complete laziness). Entertainingly, a lot of these are made under various different proxy edits from NTL IPs in Cardiff, shared by hundreds of other people (mostly vandals or Doctor Who fans by the look of things... does anyone else on a proxy ever look to see what edits their "IP neighbours" have made? Er, anyway, I'm digressing). Basically, if an article connected to one of my AREAS! OF! INTEREST! listed below has been edited by a random Cardiff NTL IP - usually User:62.252.32.12, User:62.252.32.13, User:81.104.160.179 or User:81.110.86.44 - it was quite probably me. (Unless you thought the edit in question was rubbish, in which case it was someone else.) Happily I have no real interest in joining any communities or groups here, or doing anything else on Wikipedia other than adding or tidying up articles (or pointlessly padding out this vanity page), so it doesn't really bother me that lots of my edits aren't credited. In fact, I'm only now looking at this page for the first time in something like three and a half years. That's commitment for you. Yeah it is.

The name
"Fosse 8" has nothing to do with Bob Fosse; it was the name of a coal mine in northern France which was the site of some particularly vicious fighting during the Battle of Loos in 1915. Just so you know.

Some articles what I have done created
Literature
 * Louis Couperus
 * W. N. P. Barbellion
 * Maurice Leblanc
 * Alexander Texeira de Mattos

Émile Zola novels
 * Les Rougon-Macquart
 * Le Ventre de Paris
 * La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret
 * L'Assommoir

Noël Coward plays
 * Private Lives
 * Hay Fever
 * Blithe Spirit (play)
 * Design for Living
 * Bitter Sweet
 * Tonight at 8:30

Robert Browning's poetry
 * Dramatic Lyrics
 * Dramatic Romances and Lyrics
 * Men and Women (poetry collection)
 * Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society
 * Jocoseria
 * Ferishtah's Fancies

Sports
 * Jupp Derwall
 * Otto Nerz
 * Christian Gross
 * Iban Mayo
 * Axel Merckx

Film
 * Claude Berri
 * Mathieu Kassovitz
 * La Haine

Music
 * The Satintones
 * Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard
 * Nothing Can Stop Us

(I've been here a long time, and Wikipedia was a different place back in 2004, so lots of these would look like stubs if they were created like that now - I just happened to get there first. And quite often, I hadn't bothered to log in (which shows how long ago it was!).  There are lots more, those are just the ones I can remember, or see from my contributions...!)

Areas of Interest
Here are some of the things I am interested in, and have created articles about.

Robert Browning
The Victorian poet Robert Browning has always been a favourite of mine; a while back I rewrote his article here and started to create articles based on some of his major works and collections. The mission continues.

Noel Coward
Most of the articles on the plays and revues of Noel Coward have had some input from me, or were created by me in the first place. Yeah, *be* impressed.

Émile Zola
The French novelist Emile Zola is my favourite novelist, and given the general lack of English-language Zola resources on the internet, I want to eventually have an article here for every single Zola novel in existence. I started out with some basic sketches on the first few volumes in the Rougon-Macquart series; hopefully they'll eventually grow into something like a definitive guide.

Basketball
Unusually for a Brit, I am very interested in basketball; I joined WikiProject:National Basketball Association to try and improve the standard of pro basketball coverage on Wikipedia to something like encyclopaedic standards. It was a future project of mine to build a complete guide to the teams and seasons of the shortlived American Basketball Association along the same lines. I didn't do it, obviously. Obviously.

Motown
I am proud to be a great big Motown nerd.

Featured articles
You must be joking.

Links
There are no links.