Category: people

“Robust of constitution, Mr. Zeitlin, who performed on a 1734 Guarneri del Gesù, continued touring until he was well into his 80s. At Eastman, he gave his last major recital in February, two days before his 90th birthday, in a program of Schubert.”

Kapoor: “I have always been interested in involuted form, which is often vaginal, female. It would be dishonest not to recognise that it’s blatantly sexual. You can’t be coy about it. Art is good at intimacy: it can say, ‘Come here, be part of this’, beckoning. It’s a tool of intimacy.”

“Her father sold subscriptions to the works that Gennie completed. Among those who signed up were Rutherford B. Hayes, the former president, and Theodore Roosevelt, then a student. Soon, Gennie and her helpers were circulating lithographs of such quality and precision that some top American ornithologists took notice.”

“It’s a real wrenching thing to go from being a private person to being a public person, especially when you’re being autobiographical. But it’s what everyone wants – to get everyone’s attention, to have your music make a living for you, to be validated in that way. So I’m a little embarrassed that [in ‘Hey Mister, That’s Me Up on the Jukebox’] I complained about getting what I wanted so badly.”

“Leonardo was a scientist and an artist at the same time and in a way totally unimaginable today. CP Snow’s famous image of the ‘two cultures’ of art and science, a great divide in the modern mind, did not apply in the 15th and early 16th centuries when Leonardo lived.”

“What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility – America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts. … That kind of salvation does not come from Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Ballmer saying, ‘OK, I’ll write a $2 million bonus check to the IRS’.”

The painter “shot to the top of the list after he donated £78.1m worth of paintings for charitable causes. His donations are more than double his estimated £34m wealth.”

“She contemplates the kind of writer she wants to be, wondering – in a swoop of ambition and possible megalomania – how to be as good as Tolstoy. … There’s ego and insecurity and the continuous plotting of her own public face … though she’s not without an inkling of her public function and renown (from 1975: ‘My role: the intellectual as adversary’).”

“Samuel L. Jackson works. It’s all but impossible to turn on a TV set any night of the week without happening on one of his movies (and sometimes two or three). Hence his anointment by Guinness World Records as ‘the highest-grossing film actor’ of all time.”

“Klein burst on to the photography scene in the early 60s with a series of books about cities – New York, Rome, Moscow and Tokyo – filled with raw, grainy, black-and-white photographs that caught the energy and movement of modern urban life with scant regard for traditional composition. The first, Life Is Good & Good For You in New York (1956), once it got published, earned him the opprobrium of both critics and other photographers alike. ‘They just didn’t get it,’ he says. ‘They thought it should not have been published, that it was vulgar and somehow sinned against the great sacred tradition of the photography book. They were annoyed for sure.'”