Category: people

“By the time Bud Spencer attracted legions of Italian spaghetti western film fans, including Quentin Tarantino, he had done more than most people do in a lifetime … He worked as a multi-sport Olympic athlete, politician, entrepreneur, pilot and, yes, an actor.”

“Snowden’s body might be confined to Moscow, but the former NSA computer specialist has hacked a work-around: a robot. If he wants to make his physical presence felt in the United States, he can connect to a wheeled contraption called a BeamPro, a flat-screen monitor that stands atop a pair of legs, five-foot-two in all, with a camera that acts as a swiveling Cyclops eye.”

Q: “You’ve said that when you look at yourself in the mirror you see a guy who got fired three times. Do you think there will ever be a point when you’ll look in the mirror and see the dude who changed the game with Between the World and Me?”
A: “No, because that remains to be seen. And the game could get changed back.”

“Müller was recognized as an ‘old school’ conductor who worked with two generations of opera artists around the world. He was also known for his scholarly study of singing and at least once stepped in to perform a major tenor role in La Traviata at a San Diego Opera dress rehearsal.” He conducted 45 productions at the company over 31 years.

“As fellow actor Lina Basquette said: ‘She wasn’t well liked amongst other women in the film colony. Her social presence was taboo, and it was rather silly, because God knows Marion Davies and Mary Pickford had plenty to hide. It’s just that they hid it, and Clara didn’t.'”

“Rising from an apprenticeship as a welder in Liverpool’s dockyards to a pinnacle of international success on the world’s opera stages, Alberto Remedios, who has died aged 81, traced an almost mythological career path, appropriate for the singer who so memorably incarnated the role of Siegfried in Wagner’s Ring.”

“I can’t think unless I’ve got a pen or a pencil in my hand, with a big old yellow legal pad.”

“Published in 1977, almost a decade after his yearlong sojourn in Vietnam and after he had recovered from his own bout of depression brought on by his war experience, the book was a sensation, an acutely observed, acutely felt, wisely interpretative travelogue of hell, deeply sympathetic to the young American conscripts, and deeply skeptical of the political and military powers that kept them there.”

“In his nearly 40 years working for The Times, Mr. Cunningham operated both as a dedicated chronicler of fashion and as an unlikely cultural anthropologist, one who used the changing dress habits of the people he photographed to chart the broader shift away from formality and toward something more diffuse and individualistic.”

“It was once said of Voltaire, by his friend the Marquis d’Argenson, that ‘our great poet forever has one foot on Mount Parnassus and the other in the rue Quincampoix. The rue Quincampoix was the Wall Street of eighteenth-century Paris … By the time d’Argenson made his remark, in 1751, Voltaire had amassed a fortune. He owed it all to a lottery win. Or, to be more precise, to several wins.”