Category: people

During the curtain call after a recent Vancouver performance of her longstanding solo show Dickens’s Women, the actress publicly berated a lady in the front row who chose not to join the rest of the audience in the usual standing ovation.

Said the maestro and Putin confidante, “Why go to the Cathedral of Christ to make a political statement? Why with screaming and dancing? … I am told by too many people that those girls are potentially a very good business proposition. Suppose that someone created all this in order to produce another touring group earning millions and millions? Anna Netrebko didn’t need to do something like this.”

Michael Feinstein says that he ” had a brilliant way of incorporating … very modern musical language into his playing that was masterful, yet he also could instantly switch to creating a dance arrangement for Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe.” Yet he’s best remembered for an affair with Monroe that led to a rather embarrassing moment for Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra.

“Not only was he a pioneer of concrete poetry, in which the typographic style of the letters is as important as the meaning and rhythm of the words,” Dom Sylvester Houédard “also wrote extensively on new approaches to art, spirituality and philosophy as well as collaborating with artists including Gustav Metzger and Yoko Ono, and the composer John Cage.”

Liz Mohn, the power behind media giant Bertelsmann and the merger of Random House with Penguin: “The planned combination will give authors from all genres even more publishing options for the success of their books.”

On sitcoms: “It’s very nerve-racking. You rehearse very nicely all week, and then on Sunday night when you do a recording you have a car crash.”

“Composer, adventurer, opportunist and benefactor” – as well as painter and critic – Peggy Glanville-Hicks was born in Melbourne 100 years ago this month. “[She] had an international career and enjoyed a mid-century artist-bohemian lifestyle that brought her into contact, sometimes intimately, with prominent creative figures of the day. Paul Bowles, Anaïs Nin, Yehudi Menuhin – even Theo Flynn, Errol’s old man – were close friends.”

“The life and death of Robert Schumann is, to most appearances, a case history of romantic excess. The composer did his best to embody the spirit of the age, placing emotion above reason, venerating nature and creating the art that the Zeitgeist demanded.” He also threw himself into the Rhine and ended his life in an asylum.

The king of the ancient Greek gods was, of course, notoriously randy, with a long and confusing roster of paramours and offspring – just the sort of thing to appeal to inventive and geeky data-visualization designers. The team responsible for this graphic managed to include Zeus’s ancestors and relatives as well, along with the sources in which each liaison is mentioned.