“George Psalmanazar claimed to be a kidnapping victim who was snatched from Formosa (now known as Taiwan) by a Jesuit named Father de Rode of Avignon.” And that’s just the start of it …
“The atheist Shakespeare theories” – which have been around for about a century now – “may be gaining currency, but … he has been called everything from a closet Catholic to an apologist for the Protestant state religion; the truth, one suspects, is murkier.”
“It is only Shakespeare whose language and characters have taken on a life of their own, enabling his work constantly to accommodate itself to the new. There is a quotation for every occasion, a character parallel for every figure in public life.”
“I knew García Márquez’s colonels and generals, or at least their Indian and Pakistani counterparts; his bishops were my mullahs; his market streets were my bazaars. His world was mine, translated into Spanish. It’s little wonder I fell in love with it – not for its magic (although, as a writer reared on the fabulous […]
Says the man who went from co-scripting Andrei Rublev to making the Oscar-nominated Runaway Train to getting fired from Tango & Cash: “Freedom is not a guarantee of good art. The best art comes in the war or the plague.” “[Art] can help politics when politics are ready to be changed. Not before.” “Opera is […]
“She’s been described as gracious, thoughtful and reserved, someone who only speaks up when necessary. And 17 days ago, she reluctantly stepped into the spotlight in a last-ditch bid to save San Diego Opera from extinction.”
“A rarity in classical music for his simultaneous careers as a professional pianist and a music critic … [and] known for his humor, wit and encyclopedic memory of recordings and performances, Mr. Goldsmith was a frequent contributor Musical America and High Fidelity magazine … as well as a prolific writer of liner and program notes.”
She adores “the unnerving exhilaration of writing scenes in the middle of the night and handing them to actors at ten o’clock the following morning. The buzz of that is like nothing else. It’s the pressure, and the fact that you are thinking on your feet.”
George Schlatter “was buds with the Rat Pack. He made stars out of unknowns Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin and was fired from ‘The Judy Garland Show’ after five episodes because he and CBS disagreed about his vision for the variety series.”
“Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, which helped awaken Australians to the plight of the Aborigines, was translated into 11 languages. The Australian Film Institute named the movie version the year’s best film, and it won prizes at a dozen film festivals around the world.”
“There is something terribly ironic about writing about Alistair MacLeod on a deadline. I bet he’d find it funny. I would too if I wasn’t in tears.”
“She installed what she called her ‘Rainbow Tribe’ in a 15th-century chateau in the South of France and charged admission to tourists who came to hear them sing, to tour their home, or to watch them play leapfrog in their garden.”
“[In his novels, he] mythologized the history of an entire continent, while at the same time creating a Rabelaisian portrait of the human condition as a febrile dream in which love and suffering and redemption endlessly cycle back on themselves on a Möbius strip in time.”
The case stems from a 2012 Rolling Stone interview in which, to some eyes, Dylan appeared to equate Croatians with Nazis. The judge ruled that, since Dylan gave the interview in the U.S., he couldn’t be liable – but the publisher of the French edition of Rolling Stone could.
“Mr. García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers — Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them — […]
“The Onion is my favourite humour site, a parody of news. And one of my favourite headlines in the Onion was “World death rate holding steady at 100 per cent”. So yes, in that sense, we’re all doomed.”
“Over three decades [he] became a major figure in describing and documenting the city’s cultural transformation from regional byway to the national main stage.”
Responding to the pounding she took in the media last year for misunderstood remarks about the former Kate Middleton, Mantel says, “I do think the level of public debate is debased. To know how far it is debased – well, you have to be on the receiving end of a hate campaign like that to […]
The two authors – novelist/essayist Kincaid and longform journalist Weschler – join scholar Rich Blint and radio host Brian Lehrer to talk about Baldwin’s life and his ideas on love and race. (audio)
In addition to being a busy ensemble singer and marketing professional (as well as custodian of a magnificent moustache), Dinsmore co-created and administered The Crossing, a professional chamber choir which, over only eight years, has become one of Philadelphia’s best ensembles of any kind.
“Given his work ethic and the fact that it’s only 4pm, Marriner could probably conduct a quick opera and record a string quartet before the day’s out. Doubtless there’s more coming from the Academy of you-know-where conducted by you-know-who.”
“Mr. Kaiser, who steps down as president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Sept. 1, will become co-chairman of IMG Artists, the performing arts management agency, IMG announced on Monday.”
“So many of King’s tweets contained spoilers that the author began to capitalise the film, TV show and books he was exposing.”
“Mr. Ho, who was of Chinese descent, considered himself a ‘popular avant-gardist.’ He was inspired by the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and by the ambitious, powerful music of African-American bandleaders including Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Sun Ra and especially Charles Mingus. But he rejected the word jazz, which he considered a pejorative term […]
Or, how a soon-to-be-former German professor (he gave up on getting tenure) acquired more than 67,000 followers for his “compendium of utopian negation”. (Sample: “The Tickle Me Werner Herzog doll I got for Christmas only laughs when I tell him the universe isn’t utterly indifferent to our pain.”)
“When they suggested Judi Dench, I couldn’t believe it. I nearly fell off my chair. She’s famous all over the world, you know! I was over the moon. A lot of my friends thought I’d gone soft, because they didn’t believe that it was true. I was so glad to be able to say, ‘Actually, […]
“LBJ was certainly aware of the vagaries of power. He believed that it was important to do everything you could and to use everyone around you in order to further your goals. But at the end of the day there would come a reckoning and power would recede and you would lose your effectiveness. And […]
“In his log-cabin retreat Halliwell-Phillipps kept, and obsessively curated, his huge collection of ‘Shakespearean rarities’. This consisted of ‘about fifteen hundred separate articles’ – a cornucopia of manuscript papers and parchments, early quarto editions, play-bills, portraits, maps and curios carved from the sacred mulberry tree.”
Kamila Shamsie: “I am deeply critical of American writers for their total failure to engage with the American empire. It’s a completely shocking failure.”
“When Stephen Jay Carlton was hired on July 1, 2009, at an annual salary of $75,000 plus full medical benefits, the balance sheet for the Symphony at the fiscal year ending June 2009 showed about $500,000 in endowment funds with close to $10,000 in the checking account. On Sept. 20, 2013, when the alleged fraud […]