Category: people

Joan Fontaine was “loathsome”. Merle Oberon was a “silly little amateur”. Olivier’s hatred for Marilyn Monroe was “one of the strongest emotions I had ever felt”.

“In 2006, Mo Abudu experienced what Oprah Winfrey would call an ‘aha moment’, ditching a 20-year career in human resources to try her hand at television. Seven years later, Abudu’s show – Moments with Mo – …is the first TV talkshow to have been syndicated across Africa.” And she’s just launched her own Africa-wide TV network, Ebony Life.

“[He] was widely regarded as a master of … in particular the peppery chacareras and romantic zambas from the northwestern part of the country where he grew up. He also studied harmony and music theory and said it was his life’s work to ‘give another dimension to folklore’ by bridging indigenous and classic sounds. Starting in the late 1950s, he appeared on stages from Paris to Washington to Tokyo.”

“By singing the words ‘I’m not the kind of girl,’ Harry – or her persona – admits that there exist many varieties of girl, as many as there are shades of lipstick, or verses in the Bible, or varieties of rock on the path to Lourdes. There are many kinds of girl, and Debbie has the right to pick exactly which kind she is. But she is also fated to be a specific kind – and maybe this kind of girl falls prey to dejection and wants a listener’s sympathy.”

“Kseniya Sobchak is a celebrity, TV figure, and socialite, … whose late father was mayor of St. Petersburg and, in the early nineteen-nineties, a kind of mentor to Vladimir Putin … [She] is an attractive woman of about thirty known for her audacious, even provocative, talk about any matters from politics to sex.”

“Once, he considered himself a radical; but if his politics haven’t mellowed, he has become more realistic about what’s possible.”

“For more than a decade, le grenier de Picasso (Picasso’s attic) has been occupied rent-free by a private cultural organisation, the Comité National Pour l’Education Artistique (CNEA), which has maintained it as a venue for exhibitions and children’s workshops. Now the building’s owners want it back and have issued an eviction order, sparking a bitter legal row over the future of the studio.”

“For me, this is such a staggering overvaluation that it recalls P.G. Wodehouse’s line about “the raised eyebrow and the sharp intake of breath” — and yet there is no questioning the sincerity behind such statements, and they are not as rare as one might think.”

“His earliest successes came in the 1950s at Sun Records, where he ran the soundboard for the recording of early rock ‘n’ roll classics by Jerry Lee Lewis and others. He also engineered the so-called Million Dollar Quartet session featuring Mr. Lewis, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins. Three decades later Mr. Clement returned to the Sun studio to help produce U2’s hit album Rattle and Hum.”