Category: people

“Maurice Sendak brought his artistic talents to over seventy works by other writers, always making them more interesting.”

“Chinese police told dissident artist Ai Weiwei on Thursday he could face bigamy and pornography charges and barred him from travel, despite lifting strict bail conditions imposed after his detention.”

“The Australian star, best known for his ITV show Clive James on Television, but also a prolific novelist, poet and cultural critic and commentator, was diagnosed with leukaemia, kidney failure and lung disease in 2010.” In an interview on BBC Radio 4, he said, “I don’t want to cast a gloom, an air of doom, over the programme but I’m a man who is approaching his terminus.”

Not long before landing the lead in Aaron Sorkin’s new HBO series The Newsroom, Daniels was about to leave his profession. Major studios weren’t casting him; independent producers couldn’t afford him. “I was tired of being the guy they’d tell, ‘Look, we’d love to have your 55 films of experience and< we have no money,'”

“The accessible works of art he painted depicted sports and other leisure activities with bold, distinctive strokes on a canvas that invariably brimmed with color. He was so successful that as early as 1976 The [L.A.] Times called him ‘in market terms … a bigger success than Rembrandt – or any other painter’.”

“Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei called an appeal hearing against a tax fine unfair after police warned him to stay away and blocked journalists from approaching the cramped court room which only had five seats.”

“On Sept. 14, 1822, as legend tells the tale, Jean-François Champollion burst into his brother’s Paris office at the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, flung a bundle of drawings upon the desk and cried, ‘Je tiens mon affaire!’ (‘I’ve done it!’).”

Taylor Plimpton: “My father’s voice was like one of those supposedly extinct deep-sea creatures that wash up on the shores of Argentina every now and then. It came from a different era, shouldn’t have still existed, but nevertheless, there it was … You heard it and it could only be him.”

“The American soprano was in recital at the Utzon Room [at the Sydney Opera House] and in concert with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra next week, but a hip operation has forced her to withdraw.”

North American theatre fans, who mostly know of Corden because of his comic virtuosity in One Man, Two Guv’nors and his heartfelt Tony acceptance speech, are likely unuaware that, just a few short years ago, Corden was one of the most reviled actors in Britain. William Langley (in a none-too-friendly way) explains.