“His artistic pursuits — poetry, photography and music in addition to acting — ranged far beyond the United Federation of Planets, but it was as Mr. Spock that Mr. Nimoy became a folk hero, bringing to life one of the most indelible characters of the last half century: a cerebral, unflappable, pointy-eared Vulcan with a signature salute and blessing: ‘Live long and prosper’ (from the Vulcan ‘Dif-tor heh smusma’).”

Jonathan Ive “establish[ed] the build and the finish of the iMac, the MacBook, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. He is now one of the two most powerful people in the world’s most valuable company” – on whom 100,000 employees and a not-insignificant chunk of the stock market depend. Says Steve jobs’s widow, “Jony’s an artist with an artist’s temperament, and he’d be the first to tell you artists aren’t supposed to be responsible for this kind of thing.”

“Lithe, debonair and exceedingly handsome, with a tide of dark, wavy hair, Louis Jourdan became Hollywood’s ideal of Gallic charm and seduction in the late 1940s and 1950s. His peak came in the Oscar-winning musical Gigi (1958), which cemented him in the popular imagination as a debonair playboy.”

“A book which helped changed the course of English history, part of the evidence Henry VIII and his lawyers gathered in the 1530s to help win an annulment from Catherine of Aragon and ultimately to break with Rome, has turned up on the shelves of the magnificent library at Lanhydrock, a National Trust mansion in Cornwall.”

The story of Paul Durand-Ruel, who repeatedly risked bankruptcy to support Monet, Degas, Manet, Pissarro, and their fellows – and created a market for their work, especially in the United States.

“It’s hard to keep up with that; it takes a lot of energy and recently [there was] some study that overusing social media can make you depressed and jealous, so I actually chose not to go there. … User comments-culture is not useful for creating original work, I think. I’m all for information diets, which are helpful for the mood and for the art.”

He is best known for the series of three Paradise Lost films he made with co-director Joe Berlinger about the West Memphis Three, defendants in a controversial Arkansas murder case.

The scion of a lima-bean-farming family, Segerstrom turned some empty fields into South Coast Plaza, one of America’s high-end shopping meccas. He went on to donate the land and much of the money to build the venues at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, renamed after him in 2011.

“For nearly two years, Neruda’s remains have been lying in forensic laboratories in three countries – and from early this year in a fourth – in an attempt to determine whether his death may have been accelerated by poisoning.”

Sheila Girling, who has died at 90, met Caro at art school. “Girling’s pictures often dazzle with their intense hues, and it was she who on occasion chose the colours in Caro’s sculptures, from his steel and aluminium compositions of the 1960s to more recent pieces in Perspex.”

Harris Wittels was found by his assistant. “On ‘Parks and Rec,’ whose seventh and final season concludes Feb. 24, Wittels also served as a writer and occasionally appeared as an animal control staffer.”

“From the nineteen-sixties on, Rivers had been the purveyor of a harsh Realpolitik, one based on her experience: looks mattered. If you got cut off from access to men and money — and from men as the route to money — you were dead in the water. Women were one another’s competition, always. For half a century, this dark comedy of scarce resources had been her forte: many hands grasping, but only one golden ring. Rivers herself had fought hard for the token slot allotted to a female comic, yet she seemed thrown by a world in which that might no longer be necessary.”

“Alongside Ian McKellen, Howard was the leading heroic actor of his generation, someone whose voice … thrillingly encompassed, said the critic Irving Wardle, a sardonic croak, a lyrical caress, a one-man brass section and a whinnying cry of horror.”

“People come to hear music, not to hear shouting. And to go on stage and scare Netrebko, how can the Met let this happen? If someone were to shout an anti-American slogan on the stage of the Mariinsky, it would be my fault.” The conductor then goes on to talk about Ukraine and Crimea.

“I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at NewsHour every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming. … I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future.”

“It’s one of the reasons I didn’t like acting. I don’t like not being able to interject. I don’t like waiting to talk. You have to wait for the other person to finish with his lines.”

“In 2006, the Iranian artist Mana Neyestani sat down to draw a children’s cartoon for a weekly magazine called Iran Jome. The image showed a 10-year-old boy named Soheil trying to have a conversation with a cockroach in a nonsensical cockroach language. The insect didn’t understand the boy and responded, ‘Namana?’ – which means, ‘What?'”

“It’s called ‘I Can’t Breathe,’ and as the title indicates, the song is something of a tribute to Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who died last summer after New York Police Department officer placed him in an apparent chokehold. ‘I can’t breathe’ were Garner’s last words, repeated and captured on video.”

“The world they live in is so beyond our understanding. You’ve never queued for anything. Ever, for anything. Every time you go in the street, the traffic is stopped for you. It’s a world you can’t imagine. They are, in a way, aliens. But inside that, they are the same flawed, insecure, vulnerable, complicated human beings we are. It’s my job to get into the person who’s inside that world.”

Hilton Als: “One of the architects of black political correctness, he saw as threatening any attempt to expose black difference or weakness in front of a white audience. … Hughes’s reluctance to reveal the cracks in the black world – which is to say, his own world – curtailed not only what he was able to achieve as an artist but what he was able to express as a man.”

“Kenneth G. Pigott was that rarity among leaders of cultural institutions: a visionary board president who could speak knowledgeably about the art form he served and who took an active, influential role in moving the institution forward.”

“Right now Brian Williams is receiving the scorn and contempt of the world at large, which, I can tell you, feels like thousands of bloodthirsty strangers cutting you with tiny invisible knives. I know it has to hurt. I remember clearly how tempting it was to hide. I didn’t, and from the other side of it, all I can say is that it is one of the first good decisions I made.”

“In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro in 2005, [Assia] Djebar reflected on her status as a female author in the Arab world. ‘I am not a symbol,’ she said. ‘My only activity consists of writing.'”

“A gifted artist, he had composed 13 symphonies by the age of 11, and his recordings of Joseph Haydn’s piano sonatas are considered definitive. His own compositions included orchestral and chamber music, and he was director of the London College of Music between 1983 and 1990.”

“In spare, realistic free verse, Mr. Levine explored the subjects that had animated his work for decades: his gritty Detroit childhood; the soul-numbing factory jobs he held as a youth; Spain, where he lived for some time as an adult; and the Spanish anarchists of the 1930s, a personal passion since he was a boy.”

“Magie filed a legal claim for her Landlord’s Game in 1903, more than three decades before Parker Brothers began manufacturing Monopoly. She actually designed the game as a protest against the big monopolists of her time — people like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.”

Marvin David Levy “was at midcentury an American composer of seemingly limitless promise, compared by Leonard Bernstein to Benjamin Britten.”

French media have called this the “€60 million trial”, an allusion to the estimated value of the hoard of art they (the electrician and his wife) kept in their garage for almost 40 years: 271 unsigned Picasso collages, drawings, sketches or lithographs, dating from the first third of the 20th century.

The arts communities in Regina and Calgary are in shock with the news that four of their own have been killed in a devastating highway crash in Saskatchewan. Emotional tributes about the four artists poured out on social media Wednesday.