Category: people

“Given that his great subject has always been himself, it is Mr. Roth who dominates the screen. … He is, for 90 minutes, marvelous company — expansive, funny, generous and candid.”

“Above all, he was renowned for the range of tonal colors he could coax from his instrument — no mean feat considering that in the wrong hands, the harpsichord can sound like rain on a tin roof.”

“The dedication page of‘Red Doc > reads simply: ‘To the randomizer.’ The term suggests, in light of Carson’s work, all kinds of tantalizing possibilities: an ancient deity or a private muse or some kind of supercomputer deep in an undersea cave, powered by whale song and squid tears and sea-filtered traces of honey-wheat Grecian sunlight.”

“The 83-year-old actor … was 15 minutes into a performance of his one-man show, FDR, in Gary, Ind., when he started struggling with his lines and left the stage disorientated with paramedics at his side, according to news reports.”

“At a time when comedy is as filthy as it’s ever been – the industry euphemism is ‘edgy’ – [Jim] Gaffigan, working clean, has become one of the hottest comedians in the country.”

It was a military academy in Württemburg called the Hohe Carlsschule, and Gott in Himmel, was it twisted.

Todd Robbins “is among of the last in a dying breed: a spectacle-creating live performer who aspires not to the Vegas-style stardom parodied in Jim Carrey’s new sendup The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, but rather to attaining a middle-class income and carrying on the waning tradition of the Great American Sideshow.”

“According to executive director Virginia Dajani, officials couldn’t decide whether he belonged for his words or for his music, so they settled on making him an honorary member, joining such previous choices as Meryl Streep, Woody Allen and a filmmaker who has made a documentary about Dylan, Martin Scorsese.”

“[She] has earned her role because she can turn around a book in three months and because she uses her reporting skills to substantiate her subjects’ stories for publishers. Finally, she has a motherly presence that is comforting to women who are about to expose raw truths of a sordid past, allowing her to establish a level of trust with them quickly.”

He’s best known today as the man who standardized Tuscan as the common literary tongue of Italy, but he was also a renowned art collector, an architectural historian and preservationist, secretary to a Borgia pope and eventually a cardinal himself, and a writer who pioneered the format of the modern book and of the then-wildly popular “pocket book”.