Boyzone

Boyzone are an Irish boy band. Their most famous line-up was composed of Keith Duffy, Stephen Gately, Mikey Graham, Ronan Keating, and Shane Lynch. Boyzone have had 21 singles in the top 40 UK charts and 22 singles in the Irish charts. The group have had 6 UK number one singles and 9 number one singles in Ireland with 12 of their 24 singles in the UK being in the UK Top 2. Boyzone are one of the most successful bands in Ireland and the United Kingdom. In total, Boyzone had 19 top 5 singles on the Irish Singles Chart, 18 top 10 hits on the UK Singles Chart, nine No. 1 Irish hit singles and six No. 1 UK hit singles and five No. 1 albums, with 25 million records sold by 2013 worldwide.

They were put together in 1993 by Louis Walsh, who is also known for managing Johnny Logan and Westlife. Before even recording any material, Boyzone made an appearance on RTÉ's The Late Late Show. The group split in 1999. Boyzone made a comeback in 2007, originally with the intention of just touring. Gately died on 10 October 2009 of natural causes while on his holiday in the Spanish island of Majorca with his civil partner, Andrew Cowles.

Paradise

Paradise (Persian: پردیس, Paradise garden) is the term for a place of timeless harmony. The Abrahamic faiths associate paradise with the Garden of Eden, that is, the perfect state of the world prior to the fall from grace, and the perfect state that will be restored in the World to Come.

Paradisaical notions are cross-cultural, often laden with pastoral imagery, and may be cosmogonical or eschatological or both, often compared to the miseries of human civilization: in paradise there is only peace, prosperity, and happiness. Paradise is a place of contentment, a land of luxury and idleness. Paradise is often described as a "higher place", the holiest place, in contrast to this world, or underworlds such as Hell. In eschatological contexts, paradise is imagined as an abode of the virtuous dead. In Christian and Islamic understanding, Heaven is a paradisaical relief. In old Egyptian beliefs, the otherworld is Aaru, the reed-fields of ideal hunting and fishing grounds where the dead lived after judgment. For the Celts, it was the Fortunate Isle of Mag Mell. For the classical Greeks, the Elysian fields was a paradisaical land of plenty where the heroic and righteous dead hoped to spend eternity. The Vedic Indians held that the physical body was destroyed by fire but recreated and reunited in the Third Heaven in a state of bliss. In the Zoroastrian Avesta, the "Best Existence" and the "House of Song" are places of the righteous dead. On the other hand, in cosmological contexts 'paradise' describes the world before it was tainted by evil.

Paradise (Cody Simpson album)

Paradise is the debut studio album by Australian recording artist Cody Simpson, released on 28 September 2012 by Atlantic Records.

Background

On 12 June 2012, Simpson released Preview to Paradise, a four song teaser EP. The EP featured the songs "Got Me Good", "So Listen", "Wish U Were Here", and "Gentleman". All of the songs, besides "So Listen" were released as a part of Paradise. Simpson stated the reason behind only having a few collaborations on the album is because "I wanted my debut full length album to be a representation of me." It is rumored that Simpson could perform a one off song with JLS star Aston Merrygold once Surfers Paradise has been released.

Singles

On 25 May 2012, the lead single, "Got Me Good" was released as a teaser on Simpson's official website and radio. The accompanying music video was released on 5 June.

"Wish U Were Here", which features American YouTube singer Becky G, was the second official single off the album, released on 12 June 2012. The music video debuted on 7 August 2012. Four days later, three remixes of the song were released.

Paradise (Abdulrazak Gurnah)

Paradise is a historical novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah. The novel was nominated for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Fiction.

Plot

The novel follows the story of Yusuf, a boy born in the fictional town of Kawa in Tanzania at the turn of the Twentieth century. Yusuf's father is a hotelier and is in debt to a rich and powerful Arab merchant named Aziz. Early in the story Yusuf is pawned in exchange for his father's owed debt to Aziz and must work as an unpaid servant for the merchant. Yusuf joins Aziz's caravan as they travel into parts of Central Africa and the Congo Basin that have hitherto not been traded with for many generations. Here, Aziz's caravan of traders meets hostility from local tribes, wild animals and difficult terrain. As the caravan returns to East Africa, World War I begins and Aziz encounters the German Army as they sweep Tanzania, forcibly conscripting African men as soldiers.

Major themes

African literary scholar J U Jacobs writes that Gurnah is writing back to Joseph Conrad's famous 1902 novel Heart Of Darkness. In Aziz's easterly journey to the Congo, Jacobs says that Gurnah is challenging the dominant Western images of the Congo at the turn of the twentieth century that continue to pervade the popular imagination.