William Barnes was an English polymath, writer, poet, philologist, priest, mathematician, engraving artist and inventor. He wrote over 800 poems, some in Dorset dialect, and much other work, including a comprehensive English grammar quoting from more than 70 different languages. A linguistic purist, Barnes strongly advocated against borrowing foreign words into English, and instead supported the use and proliferation of "strong old Anglo-Saxon speech".
William Jack Baumol was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at New York University, Academic Director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He was a prolific author of more than eighty books and several hundred journal articles. He is the namesake of the Baumol effect.
William Bayle Bernard, often referred to as "Bayle Bernard", was a well-known American-born London playwright and drama critic. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of English comic actor John Bernard, he came to Britain with his family in 1820, where he first worked as a clerk in an army accounts office. His plays include The Four Sisters and Casco Bay (1832), The Kentuckian (1833), The Nervous Man (1833), The Mummy (1833), Marie Ducange (1837), The Round of Wrong (1846), The Doge of Venice (1867), The Passing Cloud (1850) and A Storm in a Teacup (1854), as well as adaptations of Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle (1834) and Wilkie Collins's No Name (1863). He also wrote the five-volume historical romance The Freebooter's Bride (1829).
William Thomas Beckford was an English novelist, art critic, planter and politician. He was reputed at one stage to be England's richest commoner. The son of William Beckford and Maria Hamilton, daughter of the Hon. George Hamilton, he served as a Member of Parliament for Wells in 1784–1790 and Hindon in 1790–1795 and 1806–1820. Beckford is best known for writing the 1786 Gothic novel Vathek, for building the Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire and Beckford's Tower in Bath, and for his extensive art collection.
William Beinart is a South African historian and Africanist. He was educated at the University of Cape Town and School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He taught at the University of Bristol from 1983 to 1997, and is now a professor of race relations and director of graduate studies at the African Studies Centre, St Antony's College, University of Oxford. His focuses are South Africa and the developments of racism.
William Bell Scott (1811–1890) was a Scottish artist in oils and watercolour and occasionally printmaking. He was also a poet and art teacher, and his posthumously published reminiscences give a chatty and often vivid picture of life in the circle of the Pre-Raphaelites; he was especially close to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. After growing up in Edinburgh, he moved to London, and from 1843 to 1864 was principal of the government School of Art in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he added industrial subjects to his repertoire of landscapes and history painting. He was one of the first British artists to extensively depict the processes of the Industrial Revolution. He returned to London, working for the Science and Art Department until 1885.
William Belsham (1752–1827) was an English political writer and historian, noted as a supporter of the Whig Party and its principles. He justified the American Revolution in excusing Americans in their resistance to the demands of England, and he was an advocate of progressive political liberty.
