Category: people

“Her reputation as difficult? Where could you have heard that, asks Ms. Paige, groomed to an armored polish in a sweater set and perfectly blow-dried hair and seated at a back table at Sardi’s. And indeed she’s so charming, so earthy and amused and unafraid of telling an impolitic joke, that either she has mellowed, or generations of the local press were wrong.”

“I was a hostage a half year ago. Now I paid the ransom and I feel [I’m] being robbed – but, you know, officially, eh?”

The B.C.-born author was “at the end of his rope” when the fateful envelope from Canada finally arrived at his Portland home. “My hands were shaking and my wife and my mother were there,” he recalled. “There was this really intensely dramatic moment. When I opened it up and got [the grant] we all erupted in cheers. It was a really fine moment for me.”

Following roughly a decade in the New York experimental dance scene during the 1950s and ’60s, Feuer “moved to Sweden in 1963 and became a close collaborator of Ingmar Bergman as well as a theater director and filmmaker in her own right.”

“Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has handed over a $1.3m (£820,000) bond to the government in order to begin an appeal against a massive tax bill.”

“The writer Salman Rushdie hit Twitter on Monday morning with a flurry of exasperated posts. Facebook, he wrote, had deactivated his account, demanded proof of identity and then turned him into Ahmed Rushdie, which is how he is identified on his passport.”

Crime novelist Lindsay Ashford finds that the symptoms Austen suffered before her death at age 41 are very consistent with those of poisoning by arsenic, which was widely used in medicines at the time.

“Hours before the deadline for paying the 15m yuan (£1.47m) fine, tax officials told the artist and human rights campaigner he could not use his mother’s house as collateral and that there were problems with the funds he had raised in a public appeal.”

“Mr Achebe said the concerns he raised about Nigeria when he first rejected the award in 2004 remain unresolved. At the time, Mr Achebe said the situation in poverty and violence-hit Nigeria was becoming worse.”

When Errol Morris interviews Stephen King about his new book about the assassination of JFK, King doesn’t suffer fools gladly. “I’m prepared for trouble when the book comes out. Conspiracy people guard themselves pretty jealously.”