Category: people

“After stints as literary editor of both the Spectator and the New Statesman, Miller co-founded the London Review of Books in 1979, editing it until 1992 and, according to an essay by his former colleague Andrew O’Hagan, once correcting the great Seamus Heaney, a long-time friend of his.”

“Lest Americans think we have cornered the market on boneheaded, reductive and entirely symbolic political arguments, the British are currently discussing whether Hilary Mantel – the two-time Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall – ought to be investigated for fantasizing about killing a dead woman.”

“Hogwood’s scholarship, symbiotically related to his performances, is just as important as his music-making, and he leaves an outstanding legacy of books, articles, and lectures that are required reading and listening for anyone interested in Handel, Haydn, or the wider story of how music relates to social and cultural contexts from the baroque to the 21st century. To talk to Hogwood was to encounter a mind and personality of inspirational perspicacity, intellectual clarity, and delicately mischievous wit.”

“Hogwood worked with many leading orchestras around the world and was considered one of the most influential exponents of the early-music movement. The conductor founded the Academy of Ancient Music (AAM) in 1973 and directed the academy across six continents for some 30 years.”

“Wheeler’s ECM albums of the Seventies – recorded with Norma Winstone and John Taylor – remain a touchstone of quiet and unflamboyant ensemble playing. Wheeler, also a flugelhorn player, was a fine composer, as he showed in works such as Jigsaw, with its clever harmonic patterns.”

“Over the course of nearly forty years, [Leon] Botstein – a historian, writer, and conductor – has built Bard in his own polymath image,” revamping the curriculum, packing the faculty with well-known intellectuals, founding alternative high schools, operating degree programs in prisons … Everything but running sports programs and hitting alumni up for money, the way normal college presidents do.

“A brunette beauty with a warm, sultry singing voice, Bergen was a household name from her 20s onward. She made albums and played leading roles in films, stage musicals and TV dramas. She also hosted her own variety series, was a popular game show panelist, and founded a thriving beauty products company that bore her name.”

“In his poetry, he was perhaps best known for his anthologised poem ‘Scotland’, which concludes ‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!’ and he was renowned as a fine essayist” who wrote for The New Yorker for 40 years.

Patinkin, who died Sunday at age 79, was “a crucial figure in the development of improvisational comedy in Chicago and a mentor to generations of American and Canadian comedians, as well as aspiring theatrical directors and other theater artists.”

Bergen was 84. According to critic Rex Reed, “Bergen was a legendary ‘A-list, New York Oscar party host’ — he remembers watching the Oscars one year on Bergen’s bed while sitting in between Paul Newman and Lucille Ball — but Bergen was even more passionate about women’s rights.”