Category: people

“His writing… has hardly been mentioned, let alone assessed, by his most severe western critics; it is his political choices for which he stands condemned. They are indeed deplorable, but do we ever expose the political preferences of Mo Yan’s counterparts in the west to such harsh scrutiny?”

“Armstrong, who most biographers say was childless, believed until his death that he had a child. What’s more, the woman he regarded as his daughter has surfaced and says Armstrong supported her and her mother for more than 15 years, sending them monthly checks from his manager’s office.”

“In a series of tweets, the actor gave an explanation for a bizarre twist Tuesday in which a major British [tabloid] newspaper quoted him as saying he had cancer, and then McKellen’s agent claimed he didn’t.”

“At some level he realised that merely being a prodigiously talented painter was not enough. At first, it was his art that fascinated the public, but later his wealth (his brand value) became the fascinator itself.” He carefully controlled how much of his product was on the market, “excited demand with a continuous stream of new styles … [and] understood the media and the value of social networking.”

He described the audiences that flooded his legendary appearances at Woodstock and Monterey as “these strange young weirdos … shrieking, shouting, smoking, masturbating and copulating – all in a drug-crazed state … I used to tell them, ‘You don’t behave like that when you go to hear a Bach, Beethoven or Mozart concert.'”

His real significance was in championing and incarnating an expanded definition of glass-box international-style modernism to include the voluptuous, the emotional and even the startling. Or, as Niemeyer liked to put it, playing off the best known catchphrase in architecture, “Form follows feminine.”

“As a renowned writer and lecturer on music who was also a concert pianist of no small reputation, Mr. Rosen was among the last exemplars of a figure more typically associated with the 19th century: the international scholar-musician. If as a writer he was known for aqueous lucidity and the vast, ecumenical sweep of his inquiry, then as a pianist he tended to rate a similar description.”

Robert Gottlieb: “Now people, if they think of Dickens’ children at all, say, ‘Oh, they were failures.’ But they weren’t. … What’s interesting is not just that he expected so much of them, but that we, because they are the children of Charles Dickens, expect so much from them.”

“Mr. Lescher epitomized a kind of Old World ideal of author’s agent — courtly, literary and invisible — reflecting both his nature and his wealth of contacts in the book world, where he began his career as an editor and something of a wunderkind. He was named editor in chief at Henry Holt & Company before he was 25.”