Category: people

Janet Turner “became a much admired role model for women in the design business at a time when few made it into the boardroom. … She was also a powerful proponent of lighting design as a profession in Britain. Until the late 80s, lighting schemes had generally been the province of architects and lighting manufacturers. The emergence of a new breed of specialist designers and consultancies was something she keenly supported.”

“Evil itself, Morrison says, is, ‘completely boring’: the thing she finds ‘intellectually fascinating’ is how people respond to it.”

“Keefe posed as Rosie not for Rockwell but for his photographer, Gene Pelham, in two sessions, lasting about two hours in all. She was paid $5 (roughly $144 in today’s dollars) per session.”

“If the Democrats felt the lack of a Wagnerian Valkyrie on their side, the role is now filled. And what’s more, they have found someone who can bridge the awkward gap between Ms Clinton’s supporters and Obama’s people. Norman is that rare thing, a prominent member of both camps.”

“He could have a fanboy’s enthusiasm for his favorite genres – he was big on Bollywood before Bollywood was cool – but he never checked his brains at the popcorn stand. He was of a generation of critics who disputed cinema the way Lutherans and Papists once faced off over theology. But he was nothing if not a sporting polemicist.”

“The documents, written in 1965 at the Granada police headquarters and obtained by the Guardian, are the first ever admission by Franco-era officials of their involvement in the death in 1936 of the author of Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba.”

“Of the 1,000 richest people in the UK and the 250 wealthiest in Ireland, the list puts Irish band U2 at third place with £431m. Pop veteran Sir Elton John and Rolling Stones’ frontman Sir Mick Jagger follow with their fortunes, thought to be worth £270m and £225m respectively.”

With “The Mirror and the Lamp,” Professor Abrams almost single-handedly conferred legitimacy on the study of Romantic poetry, which had been held in low regard by the followers of New Criticism, then in its ascendancy.

The all-too-irrepressible filmmaker, in one of the few interviews he’s given since his unfortunate Nazi joke got him banned from Cannes in 2011, talks about anxiety, AA, rebellion, Dogme, and why he puts so much sex in his movies (He comes from a nudist family).

“An Austrian-born Holocaust refugee who became a highly regarded chronicler of his abandoned homeland, capturing in works of history and fiction the Viennese society at the fin de siècle and on the eve of two world wars,” Morton was best known for A Nervous Splendor: Vienna, 1888-1889 and Thunder at Twilight: Vienna, 1913-1914, as well as a history of the world’s most famous banking family The Rothschilds.