Category: people

“The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has refused to release footage for a major new documentary about Benjamin Britten because the composer was a pacifist and a ‘deserter’, an award-winning film-maker has claimed.”

“The granddaughters of the former South African president appeared in the first episode of Being Mandela on Sunday night.” The 13-episode series Being Mandela focuses on how the two sisters “carry on the family legacy while juggling motherhood in Johannesburg.”

“[He] turned his apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker into a distinctive approach to making sculptures and paintings that defy easy categorization.”

“At the time of her death by suicide – 50 years ago, on February 11, 1963 – she was a published novelist and an acclaimed poet; beyond that, she was also a statuesque, stylish American married to the celebrated English poet Ted Hughes. … The secrecy surrounding Plath’s suicide, as it turns out, masked more than just the ugly details of her death.”

“If there is a lesson from the 1485 fall of Richard’s House of York, it’s that there are worse things than judicious appeasement.”

“Mr. Ehrlich, 70, has been producing the Grammy Awards show for 33 years, and over that period he has become known for making the three-and-a-half-hour show into a forum for collaborations, historic reunions and spectacles that are perhaps unimaginable anywhere else.”

“He handily sidestepped the reigning art movements of the day, indulging elements of Minimalism (in his sculptures) and Pop art (in his paintings) while playfully ignoring their strictures.”

“Though he was reluctant to be seen as a role model on the basis of his race, rather than purely for his musical accomplishments, he still understood, he said, that young black musicians regarded him as a role model, much as they had revered his aunt, the great contralto Marian Anderson.”

They “must choose a few dozen peers from this year’s especially large group of about 500 candidates. It is not a pretty business.”

Gombojavyn Mend-Ooyo, “considered the country’s poet laureate, and an important figure in the fight to retain its traditional culture. As its fast-growing economy puts its modernization into overdrive and draws its population away from its nomadic roots, he has his work cut out for him.”