“The 250-year history of circus would have been very different if a man from Newcastle-under-Lyme had got on better with his father, and been happy to become an apprentice cabinet maker. … Philip Astley … in 1768 drew a 13 metre (42ft) diameter ring on the ground and filled it with men and women standing on the backs of cantering horses plus clowns, jugglers and other marvels – [and thus] the modern circus was born.

“‘Michael set a new standard for the viola,’ [violinist Arnold] Steinhardt, [Tree’s Guarneri colleague,] said. ‘Now orchestras are not filled with failed violinists playing the viola, but with sensational violists,’ performers whom Mr. Tree encouraged to treat the viola as an integral part of an ensemble, rather than a backing voice supporting a violin’s melody or cello’s ostinato.”

Bochco also created “LA Law” and “NYPD Blue.” His “boundary-pushing methods as a producer could make some network executives skittish. But they often deferred to him and were ultimately rewarded with strong ratings and critical kudos, a combination that was less common in the pre-Peak TV era of the 1980s and ’90s.”

The poet, who wrote for many years in obscurity, “kept small stacks of paper in every room of the farmhouse — just in case. She wrote whenever the rhymes blossomed: sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes at the chirp of dawn, sometimes in the summer fallow tractor, where she’d draw a finger across the dusty windshield. She started with a single line, a single rhyme, and ‘then you have to fill in all this other garbage,’ she once said, with the sort of dry, self-deprecating humor that often infused her verse.”

She denies this firmly, but … wow. “Her more than 30 books have covered topics including linguistics, psychoanalysis, literary theory and feminism. Her many prestigious honors include the Vaclav Havel Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize and France’s Commander of the Legion of Honor.”(Every single humanities grad student for the past 30 years is saying, “I KNEW IT.”)