Category: people

Atwood, in a Reddit Ask Me Anything: “I cannot tell you how strange this feels. I wrote the book hoping to fend it off, and I believe it will be fended off: America is very diverse, a lot of people have been jolted out of political slumber and are paying attention, and the Constitution still stands.”

His brightly colored paintings on wood made him one of Britain’s most popular living artists. While most of them appeared abstract, he insisted for his entire career that he was a figurative painter.

“[He] was celebrated in Latin-jazz circles for more than 40 years, initially as a byproduct of his cultural foundation as a Bronx-born Puerto Rican. But he was wary of being typecast, preferring to describe himself as a ‘world artist,’ and playing … a Peruvian bamboo bass flute, a Romanian pan flute, Bolivian pan pipes, and various other kinds of flute from around the world, typically traveling with more than a dozen varieties.”

The man wrote constantly, and he would do it on anything: notebooks, hotel pads, envelopes, menus, sheet music … Bill Hayes, Sacks’s widower, showed a bunch of his notes to Maria Popova, who transcribed some of the best ones.

Bartolomeo Scappi, who was the personal cook of popes and author of the earliest illustrated cookbook, was the first man known to have scoured different cities for new ingredients and recipes and to have invented new dishes just for the sake of creativity. His banquets were renowned among prelates and nobles all over Europe.

No, he’s not back on TV, but he is talking to New York magazine’s David Marchese about retirement (“I’m lonely, I can’t stop talking. This is like visitors’ day at prison for me.”), late-night TV today (he never watches), and what he’d do if he got The Donald on camera.

“The awful thing is, I’m very aware when I’m being difficult, but I’m usually so scared. And that’s shaming, at the age one is. Because every time I start anything, I think, ‘This time I’m going to be like Jude, and it will all be lovely, it will be merry and bright, the Quaker will come out in me.’ But it never works.”

“[He] was an imposing presence in any opera house; his height appeared greater than the 6ft 2in he claimed, his voice sounded deeper than the booming basso profundo he was billed as, and his personality exuded warmth and charm both on stage and off.”

When she started teaching at LAMDA in 1955, “traditional movement training might have involved elocution, fencing and a bit of traditional dance … Trish’s genius lay in creating a methodology and approach” – which came to be known as Pure Movement – “that worked from impulse (initial mental, emotional and physical responses) and release (letting go of habits of movement), so that actors could adopt the physical signals that help an audience recognise a character on stage or screen.”

Mr. Hays had been a Bible salesman, an apparel salesman and a majority shareholder in a business employing college students to sell magazine subscriptions every summer. And he and his wife adored Paris, and French art. “The gift — the largest foreign donation of art to France since World War II — was announced by President François Hollande in a ceremony at the Élysée Palace in October after months of negotiations with the couple.”