Category: people

The singer and activist “discusses his friendship with Martin Luther King, his relationship with President John F Kennedy, and the humiliation that led him to become more heavily involved in the fight against racial segregation.”

“[The] key to understanding Frost is to do exactly what the poet does: to take both sides by taking neither. … You will never find his apple-pie versifier divorced from his terrifying reaper, any more than you will find his colloquial voice unbound from formal meter. … Frost is an exacting, serious, honest poet, but he is neutral to the point of scariness.”

As the artist-superstar, who grew up poor, once wrote: “Food is my great extravagance. I really spoil myself, but then I try to compensate … My conscience won’t let me throw anything out, even when I don’t want it for myself. … I’ll buy a huge piece of meat, cook it up for dinner, and then right before it’s done I’ll break down and have what I wanted for dinner in the first place – bread and jam. I’m only kidding myself when I go through the motions of cooking protein: all I ever really want is sugar.”

“The hoaxer introduced himself — sort of — to entertainment journalists and insiders last week with the launch of www.peterbart.org, claiming he was the real Bart, gay and engaged to be married to Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly.”

“With his lanky build, boyish smile and winsome drawl, Mr. Griffith was one of the most recognizable figures on television for more than five decades” – as the sheriff of fictional Mayberry, North Carolina on The Andy Griffith Show and as a canny Georgia attorney on Matlock.

“But before he was Mayberry’s wise sheriff or Atlanta’s revered lawyer from the country, Griffith took on a quite different role in Elia Kazan’s brazen 1957 cautionary tale, A Face in the Crowd. He played a ‘Demagogue in Denim,’ as another character in the film describes him.”

“Although he first came to fame as a writer for radio,” Sykes – who was fascinated by silence (and, cruel irony, ultimately went deaf) – fulfilled his ambition by writing and directing several films that were virtually wordless.” This in addition to being Britain’s most admired postwar comedy writer and having a brilliant career acting on stage and television – most notably in a long partnership with Hattie Jacques.

“After being arrested in 1974 by the Savak, the shah’s secret police, the Iranian writer Mahmoud Dowlatabadi asked his interrogators just what crime he had committed. ‘None,’ he recalled them responding, ‘but everyone we arrest seems to have copies of your novels, so that makes you provocative to revolutionaries.'”

In preparation for this year’s event in Key West, “one Frank Louderback, an attorney and regular entrant, made all manner of plans for the Papa-off. When he learned that they would clash with work commitments, he requested that the case he was working on be postponed. The judge’s response is totally badass.”

“Like a lot of American singers, [she] first made her name in Europe, where she triumphed especially as Marie in Berg’s Wozzeck and in the title role of his Lulu … Throughout her career, she enjoyed successes in the standard repertoire as well, especially works by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Puccini and Strauss.”