Category: people

In tune with her socialist politics, she created art for, and with, the people – but she also “revolutionised the field, shocking many studio potter colleagues, by evolving glazes of great richness and depth of colour to adorn reduction-fired stoneware; painting, sponging and slip-trailing complex semi-abstract decorative schema on bold simplified shapes; using piscatorial and amphibian casts as handles and knops; and taking inspiration from the ceramics of the Middle East, from the capricious mannerist Bernard Palissy, and from European rococo earthenware and porcelain and 19th century art pottery.” Whew.

249516 Aretha measures two to three kilometers, or less than two miles, across. It orbits between Mars and Jupiter, one of hundreds of thousands of known asteroids that reside between the two planets. It takes about five and a half years to make one trip around the sun.

Emilia Bassano, five years younger than the playwright, the daughter of one of Queen Elizabeth’s court musicians and the wife of another, ultimately became a published poet in her own right. Here’s a look at what we actually know about her – and at the (circumstantial) evidence for her Dark Ladyhood.

“The first time he left, I remember saying to André [Deutsch]: ‘It’s such a relief I don’t have to make myself like him any more.’ André roared with laughter and I realised he felt just the same. He was so moody and depressive. You only had to look at his face to see that he was genuinely suffering a lot of the time.”

“Dubbed the Queen of Soul in 1967, Franklin loomed over culture in several monumental ways. The daughter of a preacher man, she was born with one of pop’s most commanding and singular voices, one that could move from a sly, seductive purr to a commanding gospel roar. … For more than five decades, [she] was a singular presence in pop music, a symbol of strength, women’s liberation and the civil rights movement.”

“Of all Helen’s roles in the literary and artistic corpus (and it is a long career – she has been forgotten by not a single generation since she entered the written record 2,700 years ago), it is her part as fantasy whore that has been most tenacious. Her many sexual partners … are trotted out by ancient and modern authors alike as the gossip columns would the client-list of a high-class prostitute. And so Euripides calls her a ‘bitch-whore’; she is Shakespeare’s ‘strumpet’.”

“[He] helped introduce British readers to continental writers including Eugene Ionesco, Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet, and also championed edgy Americans, publishing Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and William S. Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch.” In 1966 he was convicted of obscenity for publishing Hubert Selby’s gritty novel “Last Exit to Brooklyn. The conviction was overturned on appeal, in a landmark free-speech case.”

The 71-year-old, who retired from City Ballet late last year amid controversial charges of violent bullying and sexual harassment, was found guilty for an incident that happened in late December. This is his second conviction on a charge of driving while impaired.

The general public was aware of her mostly as Carmela Corleone, who sang in the wedding scene, but she used a multi-octave voice and powerful stage presence to make a long career as a jazz singer; she numbered Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Dinah Washington among her admirers.

“It goes like this: More people on Earth have borne witness to Frank Oz’s characters, be it puppet or person, than any other artist in recorded human history. Between the Muppets (in all its forms), the Star Wars franchise, and Sesame Street, Oz has had a part of three of the biggest entertainment juggernauts of the last-half century.” Oz’s response? “My mind isn’t able to grasp that, it’s too large a concept.”