Family and Early Life
Hislop was born on 13 July 1960 in Mumbles, Swansea, to a Scottish father, David Hislop, and a Channel Islander mother of English descent, Helen Rosemarie née Beddows.
Hislop did not know his grandparents. His paternal grandfather, David Murdoch Hislop, died just before he was born. His maternal grandfather, William Beddows, was originally from Lancashire.
When he was five months old, Hislop's family began to travel around the world because of his father's job as a civil engineer. During his infant years, Hislop lived in Nigeria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong. When Hislop was 12 years old his father, David Hislop, died; his mother, who was born in Jersey and had left for Wales in her late teens, died when he was 32 years old. On his return to Britain he was educated at Ardingly College, an independent boarding school, where he became Head Boy, and began his satirical career directing and appearing in revues alongside Nick Newman.
Hislop and Newman's association continued when they attended Oxford University together, later working together at Private Eye and on a number of comedy scriptwriting jobs. Hislop applied to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, but changed to English Literature before arriving at Magdalen College. His Oxford tutors included Bernard O'Donoghue, John Fuller and David Norbrook. While at university, Hislop was actively involved in student journalism, and relaunched and edited the satirical magazine Passing Wind. He graduated with a BA in 1981.
Read more about this topic: Ian Hislop
Famous quotes containing the words family and, family, early and/or life:
“Productive collaborations between family and school, therefore, will demand that parents and teachers recognize the critical importance of each other’s participation in the life of the child. This mutuality of knowledge, understanding, and empathy comes not only with a recognition of the child as the central purpose for the collaboration but also with a recognition of the need to maintain roles and relationships with children that are comprehensive, dynamic, and differentiated.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)
“Female Virtues are of a Domestick turn. The Family is the proper Province for Private Women to Shine in. If they must be showing their Zeal for the Publick, let it not be against those who are perhaps of the same Family, or at least of the same Religion or Nation, but against those who are the open, professed, undoubted Enemies of their Faith, Liberty, and Country.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
“I could be, I discovered, by turns stern, loving, wise, silly, youthful, aged, racial, universal, indulgent, strict, with a remarkably easy and often cunning detachment ... various ways that an adult, spurred by guilt, by annoyance, by condescension, by loneliness, deals with the prerogatives of power and love.”
—Gerald Early (20th century)
“To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)