Category: people

“As a critic and author, Mr. Bayley was acclaimed for his dissections of Goethe and Pushkin as well as of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Henry James.” He drew an international readership, wide praise and some condemnation for Elegy for Iris, his account of his wife’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease.

His a cappella octet “reimagined Bach and Mozart with driving jazz rhythms and playfully scatlike vocals – and put centuries-old classical masterworks on the pop charts.”

“Mr. Verna was directing the Army-Navy football game for CBS Sports in 1963 when he ran the first instant replay on television, changing the way sports were viewed by fans and, over time, refereed by officials. His invention, for which he received no patent or payment, is considered one of the most momentous in sports and entertainment history.”

“While not known most widely for its literary fiction, Playboy was for many years one of the few mainstream monthlies that published ambitious short stories. Ms. Turner became fiction editor in 1980 and guarded that tradition, shepherding works by John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Bob Shacochis and other acclaimed writers into pages better known for Playmates and other pinups.”

A young Japanese harpist who went to Venice to study and met and married a wealthy nobleman, she spent her adult life discreetly but lavishly funding major performers and institutions – and sometimes taking personal care of them.

“In the postwar era, Wilson marshaled the dominant Abstract Expressionist style – loose brushwork and wide swaths of color – to record real places, from the endless skies of her Midwestern childhood and the seascapes of Long Island’s East End to Tompkins Square Park in New York City.”

“Being an actor is a strange thing that came up in my life, and I’ve had great good luck with it … I take myself much more seriously as a writer, but I understand why people might not like my writing. I mean I really understand why it’s not as popular as the writing of some other people. … I actually don’t understand why I haven’t been taken more seriously as an actor, in the sense of being given better parts.”

“Often experimental in structure, mixing diary entries with intensely lyrical passages, [Tadeusz] Konwicki’s work was not always political, though his anti-Soviet novels, published underground, are among his most esteemed works.”

“When I got the diagnosis in January of 2014, it was a catastrophe for me. Everything that was normal to me up to that point was gone all of a sudden. No one had died of cancer in my family. I had always assumed I’d die of something else.”

“Ms. Obraztsova became such an admired favorite of the Soviet cultural establishment that the authorities in Moscow allowed her frequent opportunities to perform abroad as a shining representative of Soviet artistic greatness.”