Category: people

The British philosopher Isaiah Berlin inspired progressives with his optimism for humanity – but his letters show an entirely different point of view about young Baby Boomers.

“Of Mr. Capote’s prose it is hard to speak temperately. It is some sort of jargon quite unfamiliar to me. Of the information he seeks to convey, I am no judge. I have a distant acquaintance with a few of the subjects.”

A scion of Jewish Palestine’s high-culture aristocracy, a veteran of Israel’s war of independence, a prolific author with an innovative (not to say quirky) prose style, and a provocative commentator on his nation’s social and political issues, Kaniuk struggled for acceptance in literary circles (and a decent income) until a 2010 memoir made him into a national celebrity.

Nicole Krauss: “He used to say that in 1941, he was killed by the Einsatzgruppen in Ternopil, Ukraine, even though he was eleven at the time, and busy eating sour cream on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. When he was seventeen, he volunteered for the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, fought bloody battles for Israel’s independence in the Judean hills, was shot in the leg, and died in the arms of a nun who quoted the second century rabbi Ben-Azzai in Germanic Hebrew.”

“Even though we know governments do all kinds of things I was shocked by the information about the US surveillance operation, Prism. To me, it’s abusively using government powers to interfere in individuals’ privacy. … I lived in the United States for 12 years. This abuse of state power goes totally against my understanding of what it means to be a civilised society, and it will be shocking for me if American citizens allow this to continue.”

“[Kambiz] Hosseini’s scathing and hysterical news podcast is an essential part of the weekly media diet of Iran’s middle class. Produced by the New York-based International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, and incorporating sound bites from the week’s headlines and commentary from Hosseini, the show channels the pathos of a generation desperate to intervene in a meaningful way in Iran’s political charades.”

“There’s nothing left for me to sing. I’ve done most of the roles I could do. I don’t want to play Juliette. At my age? Please! Or Lucia or Adina or anything else like that. That’s why I’m quitting. You have to love your repertoire. For a while I thought it was fun, but no. On to something else.”

Rioter Yekaterina Samutsevich: “Legal, paid music performances: We’re offered them to this day and we always turn them down. It’s just not what we’re interested in. In addition, there’s all sorts of commercial activities; we’ve been approached to make profit, and we’re against that. We’re also against any sort of public statement. What we specialize in are guerrilla performances.”

“[While he] conducted around the world, including in Rome, at London’s Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires and, for many years, at the Maggio Musicale festival in Florence,” he was best known for his 35 years as artistic director of Lyric Opera of Chicago, which he heped make into one of the world’s top companies.