Category: people

“From the typical modernist immersion in tribal art and idols to minimalism, he experienced and expressed it all, yet he absorbed the influences and remade them, so that the work he produced could never be mistaken for anything but his. He was one of the most authoritative, expressive and subtle artists of his generation.”

“What I say is, if you didn’t have critics – even though they can annoy you and upset you – if you didn’t have a critic, who would tell you how it is? Because people won’t tell you.”

“Depending on whom you ask, [Helena] Blavatsky – a fat, chain-smoking Russian noblewoman with a profane vocabulary and reputation for occult powers – was either one of the major innovators of modern religious thought or a complete fraud, her books works of great erudition and synthesis or piles of pasted together rubbish. For a few years in the late nineteenth century, she was all the rage.”

He has asked his executors to destroy his archive after his death, saying, “I don’t want my papers lying around … No one has to read them.”

“Famous for eschewing fame, he did not go to writers’ conferences or cocktail parties, gave readings sporadically and did not publish a great deal, either.” Yet audience members in tears were a common sight at his (rare) public readings, and readers often told him that his work had changed their lives.

“[The reader] finishes, and the man brightens in his chair and points at his heart, mouthing to a visitor holding his arm, ‘Me?’ Yes, Jack Gilbert. That’s yours.” A profile of the poet (visited at his nursing home), published just one day before his death.

“Gergiev has become a roving ambassador with the open assignment of talking up Russia and its bright future during the second term in power of President Vladimir Putin.”

“Being an Arab woman and a modern architect certainly don’t exclude each other – when I was growing up in Iraq, there were many women architects. You cannot believe the enormous resistance I’ve faced just for being an Arab, and a woman on top of that. It is like a double-edged sword. The moment my woman-ness is accepted, the Arab-ness seems to become a problem.”

“Before her death last week at the age of 86, Valerie Eliot had spent the previous half-century forbidding impertinent journalists and scholars from accessing her late husband TS Eliot’s private papers. Even his published work was out of bounds, leaving biographers like Peter Ackroyd obliged to get creative with paraphrase rather than being able to quote directly. It was, said Mrs Eliot firmly, what Tom would have wanted.”

“In the prints and paintings that he produced from the mid-1960s on, Mr. Barnet ranged between a simplified form of realism and a poetic, visionary symbolism.”