“A prolific composer of symphonic, chamber and vocal music, Mr. Laderman won public notice thanks to his work about Marilyn Monroe for the New York City Opera.”

“Born in Brooklyn and educated in New York, Ms. Croyden contributed regularly to The New York Times during the 1970s and 80s, The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, American Theatre, The Nation and Theater Week” and wrote books about stage directors Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook.

“For years, Canadians have been wielding pens to draw Spock’s pointy Vulcan ears, sharp eyebrows and signature bowl haircut on the fiver’s image of Laurier. Contrary to what many believe, the Bank of Canada said Monday it’s not illegal to deface or even mutilate banknotes, although there are laws that prohibit reproducing both sides of a current bill electronically.”

“[His] most revolutionary production, and the one which brought him international renown, was in 1969, a stage adaptation of Ariosto’s mammoth epic poem Orlando Furioso.”

“As she prepares to play poet Stevie Smith, Zoë Wanamaker talks to Lyn Gardner about acting through grief, finding her voice – and why she has never performed in the theatre that bears her father’s name.”

“I just don’t think I could cope with it. Almost every Wednesday and Saturday I wake up relieved it’s not a matinee.. … It’s hard enough doing film and television, but at least you know it’s not day, after day, after day. I just found it so exhausting.” (By the way, what she actually said about Downton Abbey is less definitive than you think.)

Johns Hopkins classicist Christopher Celenza looks at a letter Machiavelli wrote to a close friend describing his daily life in the country, not long after he was banned from Florence, during the period in which he wrote the first part of The Prince.

“Mr. Kemal’s home region — Cukurova in southern Anatolia, known in antiquity as Cilicia — is the backdrop for his sweeping tales of rapacious landlords, callous bureaucrats and peasant heroes who fight injustice. He wrote more than two dozen books, using a colorful narrative style that appealed to a broad audience, fiercely criticizing injustice and creating noble outlaws who became permanent parts of Turkey’s cultural landscape.”

“These days few readers may know or remember just how big a deal Hope was in his prime. … Hope was both ‘the most popular’ and ‘the most important’ entertainer of the twentieth century, ‘the only one who achieved success—often No. 1-rated success—in every major genre of mass entertainment in the modern era: vaudeville, Broadway, movies, radio, television, popular song, and live concerts.'”

After his win streak, Arthur Chu called publicists and PR firms “and said straight up, ‘Hey, do you work with viral celebrities?’ Then I’d ask, ‘If you were me, how would you hang on to the fame, how would you monetize it?'”

“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.”