A con man is a person who intentionally misleads another person, usually for personal financial gain. In recent history there have been a number of con men who have really stood out for either the wealth they amassed, or the ease with which they tricked people. This is a list of 10 of the most famous con men in recent history.

1. Frank Abagnale [Born: 1948]

Frank Abagnale is a former cheque con artist, forger and imposter who, for five years in the 1960s, passed bad cheques worth more than $2.5 million in 26 countries. The recent blockbuster film Catch Me If You Can is based on his life. His first experience of fraud was as a youth when he used his father’s Mobil card to buy car parts that he would then sell back to the gas station for a lower price. He did not realise that his father was the one who had to foot the bill and when he was eventually confronted with the fraud, his mother sent him for four months to a juvenile correction facility.

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I think it is fair to say that American poets have really dominated the poetry scene in the 20th century. Some of the most remarkable and groundbreaking poetry has come from US poets living in or away from home. Below is a sampling of the work of 10 of the greatest American poems from the 20th century.

1. the Wasteland - T S Eliot

Eliot was born an American, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at the age of 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39.

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

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This is a list of the origins of 10 slang words or phrases that we all use regularly. From insults to idiomatic expressions, these are common in virtually all English speaking nations.

1. Idiot

Idiot originally comes from the Greek word Idiotes which was used to refer to a person who was a private individual - or more specifically, one who was so preoccupied with their own personal life that they would not take part in the democratic process. In the biblical sense, the word referred to an uneducated person. By the fourteenth century, it could also refer to a clown, a layman (non-religious), or an individual. Later, however, the Oxford English Dictionary gave it the following definition which has stuck: “A person so deficient in mental or intellectual faculty as to be incapable of ordinary acts of reasoning or rational conduct”. When IQ tests arrived, a person scoring less than 20 was regarded to have earned the “idiot’s score”.

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When you love Science Fiction movies, making a list like this is very difficult because you want to include every film you have loved. But I can’t. So, after a lot of culling, from best to good, here is my top 15. NOTE: In the case of sequels I have only included one of the set.

1. Blade Runner [1982]

In a cyberpunk vision of the future, man has developed the technology to create replicants, human clones used to serve in the colonies outside Earth but with fixed lifespans. In Los Angeles, 2019, Deckard is a Blade Runner, a cop who specialises in terminating replicants. Originally in retirement, he is forced to re-enter the force when five replicants escape from an offworld colony to Earth.

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