Category: people

“Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton has revealed her latest role – sleeping in a glass box for eight hours at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”

“Watkins was described as ‘Mr Lead’ by jazz great Dizzy Gillespie; as well as the Bond films he played with the Beatles, Elton John, Eric Clapton, Frank Sinatra, the London Symphony Orchestra and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.”

“The letters do not yield steamy intimate detail. But they do make clear that Cather’s primary emotional attachments were to women, while also laying to rest what the volume’s editors, in interviews, called a persistent urban legend: that of the fanatically secretive author eager to erase any record of shameful desire.”

“This is my profession, and it is my hobby, and I live in love with what I do,” the pianist and composer said in 2006. “Even if I wasn’t successful, I did it because I liked it, and I’ll keep doing it until I die.”

“I do not, nor have I ever, said or believed that God hates homosexuals (or anyone else). I said that some of His followers believe that. … I am damn sorry. If I could repeat the evening, I would make a clearer distinction between a set of beliefs I abhor, and my human sympathy for the folks who hold them.”

“When people ask if she seemed high or drunk, she didn’t. She seemed like someone who had actually gone off medication – anxious and rocking back and forth and a lot of activity and about to explode with emotional anxiety. … At one point in the first set she even said, ‘You all seem very nice, but I’ve been in rooms of nice people before and sometimes they turn on you.'”

“For decades Willa Cather has been a peculiar enigma in 20th-century American literature: beloved by ordinary readers for vivid evocations of frontier life … but walled off from closer personal scrutiny by some of the tightest archival restrictions this side of J. D. Salinger.” That will change next month.

“A post mortem found ‘no obvious natural causes’ for the death of British artist David Hockney’s assistant” – 23-year-old Dominic Elliott – “who died after falling ill at the painter’s home … in Bridlington in northeast England early on Sunday.”

“India’s supreme court has ordered the Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt, the most high-profile of the 100 men and women who were convicted for the 1993 Mumbai serial bombings, to return to jail for a further three-and-a-half years.” Dutt was convicted of possessing illegal firearms purchased from the bombers, though he was cleared of any personal involvement with the disaster.