Category: people

“In his autobiography, Confessions, the description is clear: ‘To understand the full extent of my delirium at this moment you would have to know how easily my heart is fired by the least thing and with what energy it plunges into imagining the object that attracts it, however worthless this object may sometimes be.'”

She’s been depicted in portraits and statues, served as a hero of folk tales and an icon of civil rights and feminism, made into a parody Barbie doll, and even helped Abraham Lincoln slay vampires. Now she’s going to join Lincoln in the ultimate domain of dead white males – on American money.

“‘To be or not to be,’ said Hamlet, prince of Denmark, ‘that is the question.’ Yesterday, Hamlet’s creator was; today, he is not. Of that there is no question. The poet, playwright, actor and theatrical-company shareholder William Shakespeare (sometimes spelled Shakspeare, Shagspere, Shaxpere, Shaxberd or any number of blessed ways) died today, April 23, 1616, at home in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was, more or less, 52.”

“The film-maker worked with Sean Connery on Goldfinger and Diamonds are Forever and Roger Moore on Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun. … He [slao] worked with Michael Caine on Battle of Britain and the Harry Palmer thriller Funeral in Berlin and with Harrison Ford on the 1978 adaptation of Force 10 from Navarone.”

“In 1575, after fighting in military campaigns against the Turks in the Mediterranean, the Spaniard was captured by Barbary pirates and taken to Algiers. There, he was kept as a slave for five years. … Cervantes told and retold his own account of enslavement: in plays, poetry and novellas … [and in] the tale told by a captive in Part 1 of Don Quixote.”

“We are post-nothing. If anything, the past few in this country have taught us that we’re not post-racism, we’re not post-sexism, we are post-nothing.”

“In a career spanning almost half a century, Wemba became known as the ‘the king of Congolese rumba.’ He was also a style icon, popularising the cult movement known as the Sapeurs.”

“In 1975 she quit teaching and decided to devote her career to editing and publishing books that might captivate minority children and also reflect their lives.”

“Sometimes he hated technology; sometimes he loved it. But more than that, at his best Prince was technology, a musician who realized that making music was not his only responsibility, that his innovation had to extend to representation, distribution, transmission and pure system invention.”

“What is it like to play one of the most famous faces in the world – and what makes so many want to do so? … Two who have done exactly that on stage say there is one crucial element for getting into character …”