Category: people

“His paintings, depicting crumpled paper, paper bags and paper-wrapped packages tied with string, put technical virtuosity at the service of an imagination shaped by old master painting, especially the work of 17th-century Spanish artists like Zurbaran, Cotan and Velazquez.”

“Sir Terry Pratchett, the fantasy writer who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2008, said yesterday he had started the formal process that could lead to his own assisted suicide at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.” He says he has received the consent forms: “The only thing stopping me [signing them] is that I have made this film and I have a bloody book to finish.”

“At the age of 63, and with an Academy Award in his pocket for The Fog of War, America’s most obsessive nonfiction filmmaker … has found himself at a peak of activity, with a new documentary coming out next month, a feature film in the works, and … most notably – after 40 long years of writer’s block – Morris has suddenly become a prolific writer.”

“Why burn down the opera houses? [Boulez] laughs: that was just an irritated aside in an interview. ‘I did say burn them down, but it would be far too costly. It would take too many Red Guards.’ … But he’s still serious about the abolition of libraries. ‘How good it would be,’ he once wrote, ‘to wake up and find that one had forgotten everything, absolutely everything’.”

Joan Bakewell: “The play portrayed many of the events of the affair between us, with an accuracy verging on the literal. At the time when he first sent me the script, I was deeply distressed to have our private affair so glaringly presented on stage. In the years since then, I have come to regard it as a brilliant exposition of loyalty, love and betrayal between people who care for each other.”

“To her admirers, [she] is the gracious grande dame of Cuban classical ballet. To detractors, she’s a conservative cultural czarina who has clung to power even longer than Fidel Castro.”

“My moment of pure feminist rage came when I was a very young academic wife in Durham in the early sixties. … Access [to the student union] was restricted to male students, who debated there as the ones in Cambridge had done. But it was the only place where the university had any social life … I protested to male students I met at college gatherings. They could not see what was worrying me.”

After beginning his career on French-Canadian television, L&eacuteveillée developed into the standard-bearer for le chanson in Quebec; he found a measure of international fame when he was discovered by Edith Piaf, for whom he wrote several songs.

After fleeing Franco, fighting with the French Resistance, and surviving the Buchenwald death camp, Semprún became something of a Spanish Elie Wiesel, writing acclaimed books about the lingering effects of fascism and the Holocaust. (He won an Oscar for the screenplay to Costa-Gavras’s Z.)

“In The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers, Mr. Bernstein described a childhood defined by grinding poverty and the unspoken divide separating Jews and Christians living on opposite sides of the same working-class street.” The book brought the nonagenarian a measure of fame, as did his next two volumes of memoirs.