Category: people

“It sounds like the premise for a novel: Two brilliant sisters from Sheffield, England pursuing their writing careers side by side. Omnipresent comparison and competition. A feud. Veiled barbs in books. Studied indifference in interviews. Fame favoring first one and then the other.”

“Mr. Hollander’s wit, inventiveness and intellectual range drew comparisons to Ben Jonson and 17th-century Metaphysical poets like John Donne.”

The countertenor voice “had disappeared from British concert life for the two centuries between the age of Handel and the mid-1940s, when Michael Tippett enlisted the Canterbury Cathedral singer Alfred Deller for his revival of the music of Henry Purcell. By the 1950s, John, too, was a soloist, sometimes appearing alongside Deller.”

“Five years ago, the [then 85-year-old] author Emma Smith decided she wasn’t going to write any more.” But then she got taken out to lunch … and persuaded.

We just can’t look away from this guy who took away free aspirin from his employees and has, um, had an impact on bookstores and now owns the Washington Post.

Will Self and his 11-year-old son were following a British tradition of long, rambling walks when police got called in to protect the boy. The author is … er … not best pleased.

He asked repeatedly to be deported, even writing letters to Stalin himself. “The manoeuvre was impossible to fault. Since hundreds of officially sponsored reviews of ‘work had stated that he had no place in the Soviet Union and that he would ‘never change’, he would agree.”

“Early, the experience of seeing art was, in my life, on an almost parallel track with words.”

“Classically, we have defined ourselves by the things we love. By the place which is our home, by our family, by our friends. But in this age we’re asked to define ourselves by hate. That what defines you is what pisses you off. And if nothing pisses you off, who are you?”

The collection “includes diaries, scrap books, heavily annotated scripts, photographs including hundreds of rare early colour photographs she took herself while on tour, and thousands of letters to an extraordinarily wide circle of friends and acquaintances including the Queen Mother, Graham Greene, and Winston Churchill” (not to mention husband Laurence Olivier).