“The Thorn Birds, which has never been out of print, has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 20 languages. In hardcover, it spent more than a year on the New York Times best-seller list; the paperback rights were sold at auction for $1.9 million, a record at the time.”
“Sanctioned stalking” … interesting. I could see how someone would see it that way. And I think anyone outside — anyone who is not me or my PI — I could see that perspective. But I do not consider it to be that at all.”
“Even in imperial Rome, matricide was, apparently, bad P.R. … And so Nero turned to the man he had always relied on … The letter ‘explaining’ Agrippina’s murder is just one of the ways Seneca propped up Nero’s regime – a regime that the average Julius, let alone the author of De Ira, surely realized was thoroughly corrupt. How to explain the philosopher-tutor’s sticking by his monstrous pupil?”
“Last week, her duties included the conservation of one of the world’s most important collection of artefacts, including Tutankhamun’s fabled death mask and jewellery, as well as hundreds of ancient mummies, tombs and statues. From now on her role will be limited to overseeing the contents of Egypt’s royal stables.”
“In Chaucer’s case, the division between life and art is especially glaring: 494 different ‘records’ of his life survive, including matters such as courtly and civic posts he held, awards he received, and at least one place he lived … but not one of them mentions that he was a poet. Why, then, bother to look at these records? What had Chaucer’s busy London life and world of work to do with his poems, other than preventing their completion?”
“Archaeologists made the find over the weekend during excavations to solve the centuries-old mystery of where the famed Spanish writer was laid to rest. The initials on a plank of the coffin were formed with metal tacks embedded into the wood.”
Dianne Weist “earned Oscars for best supporting actress for 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters and 1994’s Bullets Over Broadway, both directed by Woody Allen. But after that, she found she was only getting offered roles to play “a nice mom, and that’s it. That’s all that ever came, except in theater.”
“Callas wasn’t perfect, to be sure. (And perfect can be boring, as some of her successors have demonstrated.) But she was something more: even when she falls short of her best, she gives an intimation of what an ideal performance might sound like. Few more perfect singers have managed to do that.”
Philippe Lançon: “I thought about Bernard, Cabu, and the others in my narrow field of view, all dead now, and I wondered, with no idea of how seriously I was hurt, what determined life or death … The only difference between us was a couple of inches’ variation in the paths of the bullets and our respective locations when the black-legged men came in.”
“On August 5th 1946, two years after Paris was liberated from the Germans, a young American soldier named Jerome Seckler visited Henri Matisse. … Until now this interview has never been published.”
“From CDs to DVDs to Live in HD, DiDonato is a diva for the digital age, using new technology and social media to reach broad audiences.”
“The Treasury Department told Anslinger he was wasting his time taking on a community that couldn’t be fractured, so he scaled down his focus until it settled like a laser on a single target—perhaps the greatest female jazz vocalist there ever was.”
“For a half-century, she stayed current by taking topical roles in films dealing with social justice and women’s rights. As an idolized national figure, she not only galvanized support for those causes but also helped redefine the Arab woman.” (She was also, by the way, the frequent co-star and erstwhile wife of Omar Sharif.)
“Tests on Neruda’s exhumed body in 2013 found no trace of poison but more will now be done. His death certificate says he died of prostate cancer. Neruda died 12 days after the military coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power.”
“As a critic and author, Mr. Bayley was acclaimed for his dissections of Goethe and Pushkin as well as of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Henry James.” He drew an international readership, wide praise and some condemnation for Elegy for Iris, his account of his wife’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease.
His a cappella octet “reimagined Bach and Mozart with driving jazz rhythms and playfully scatlike vocals – and put centuries-old classical masterworks on the pop charts.”
“Mr. Verna was directing the Army-Navy football game for CBS Sports in 1963 when he ran the first instant replay on television, changing the way sports were viewed by fans and, over time, refereed by officials. His invention, for which he received no patent or payment, is considered one of the most momentous in sports and entertainment history.”
“While not known most widely for its literary fiction, Playboy was for many years one of the few mainstream monthlies that published ambitious short stories. Ms. Turner became fiction editor in 1980 and guarded that tradition, shepherding works by John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Bob Shacochis and other acclaimed writers into pages better known for Playmates and other pinups.”
A young Japanese harpist who went to Venice to study and met and married a wealthy nobleman, she spent her adult life discreetly but lavishly funding major performers and institutions – and sometimes taking personal care of them.
“In the postwar era, Wilson marshaled the dominant Abstract Expressionist style – loose brushwork and wide swaths of color – to record real places, from the endless skies of her Midwestern childhood and the seascapes of Long Island’s East End to Tompkins Square Park in New York City.”
“Being an actor is a strange thing that came up in my life, and I’ve had great good luck with it … I take myself much more seriously as a writer, but I understand why people might not like my writing. I mean I really understand why it’s not as popular as the writing of some other people. … I actually don’t understand why I haven’t been taken more seriously as an actor, in the sense of being given better parts.”
“Often experimental in structure, mixing diary entries with intensely lyrical passages, [Tadeusz] Konwicki’s work was not always political, though his anti-Soviet novels, published underground, are among his most esteemed works.”
“When I got the diagnosis in January of 2014, it was a catastrophe for me. Everything that was normal to me up to that point was gone all of a sudden. No one had died of cancer in my family. I had always assumed I’d die of something else.”
“Ms. Obraztsova became such an admired favorite of the Soviet cultural establishment that the authorities in Moscow allowed her frequent opportunities to perform abroad as a shining representative of Soviet artistic greatness.”
“Literary biography—an enterprise Updike regarded with some skepticism—is largely a hunt for such deeply buried evidence. As an aid to future biographers and anyone else interested in pursuing the mystery of Updike’s prodigious talent, I’d suggest paying attention to his lifelong love affair with cartooning, a passion that burned hottest when he was young but remained warm until his dying days, when he ceased to draw but still repeatedly referred to the comics he had loved in childhood.”
I was realizing more and more that my artistic journey was creating dramatic and lasting effects, not only on the generations to come, but on all living beings and I refused to continue down that path. I thought: “This is going exactly against the very nature of dance, which is to be ephemeral.”
“Most art lovers won’t recognize the name Milton Hebald. But it’s safe to assume that tens of millions of people have seen his work: sculptures, installed in prominent public places in Los Angeles and New York City, that include a monumental display of the 12 signs of the Zodiac that stood for decades at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport.”
“Throughout her work, Ms. Summers was fascinated by the interplay of form and movement, something, she realized, that dance and film could exploit both singly and in combination. Through film, she was able not only to capture the motion of a dance itself, but also to add contrapuntal movement through camera work and cutting.”
“According to Curbed, Bradbury’s house was purchased by “starchitect” Thom Mayne, of the firm Morphosis, and his wife, Blythe Alison-Mayne. Mayne, who is on the faculty at UCLA, is a winner of the Pritzker Prize. Bradbury, who typed “Fahrenheit 451″ on a pay-as-you-go typewriter at the UCLA library, was presented with the National Medal of Arts in 2004.”
“We have people we admire, like Einstein, saying mystery is the most beautiful thing a human being can experience. Yet everywhere in our culture everything that is truly mysterious is immediately dismissed. In a way I think science is the modern religion and at times I despise it as much as I despise other religions, because it really will only accept stuff that fits its masculine ability to define the world.”