Category: people

He worked at the company for 23 years, from its first season, 1957, until 1980, conducting music from Mozart to Rossini to Stravinsky to Douglas Moore.

“Once he got it, he said, ‘It’s done, this is the instrument for the rest of my life’. Until one day it got dropped off the back of a truck.”

“I started to realize, I was doing political reporting, and I came to realize almost by accident that this guy Robert Moses had so much power. He wanted to build this bridge across Long Island Sound, and Newsday had me look into it.”

“Even though they worked hard at sanitising the letters, the family still worried that too much had been revealed. A year after the edition appeared Alice wrote to her son Harry: ‘People are putting a vile interpretation on his silly letters to young men. Poor dear Uncle Henry.'” Henry James, that is.

“As a semiotician, Mr. Eco sought to interpret cultures through their signs and symbols … and published more than 20 nonfiction books on these subjects while teaching at the University of Bologna … But rather than segregate his academic life from his popular fiction, Mr. Eco infused his seven novels with many of his scholarly preoccupations.”

“Without Craft’s exploratory and explanatory work, much of the most important music of the last 100 years would have been dismissed as difficult and inaccessible when, in fact, it was beautiful and true. For this we owe Craft, as irascible as he seems to have been, much thanks.”

“With her near-total retreat into private life in the mid-1960s, Ms. Lee had become, along with J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, one of the great literary enigmas of the 20th century. Often she was called a recluse, a description that was intriguing but inaccurate. Ms. Lee – Nelle Harper or just Nelle to friends – simply rejected celebrity.”

“Wilde’s life and work was shaped by strong, colorful and ambitious women just as much as it was by the men who conspired to bring him down. Here are some rather surprising facts about some of the women he knew.”

As he wrote in one famous opinion, “Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat. But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional ones.”