Category: people

“Dubbed the ‘Picasso of India,’ Husain’s work is a blend of cubism and classical Indian styles that fetches millions of dollars on international art markets. His depictions of naked Hindu goddesses enraged zealots who attacked his house, vandalized shows displaying his work and drove him to flee India. For years, galleries were too frightened of protests to display his work.”

Says the Nigerian poet/playwright/Nobel laureate, “I’ve always resented – secretly resented – the amount of time which I’ve been compelled to spend on political activism, but I also recognize the fact that I wouldn’t be what I am, even as a writer, if I did not …”

“Like these clowns, Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn and all this bunch of clowns. I won’t speak to them. When you’ve earned your living on the stage for 10, 15 years, then come and tell me how to earn mine.”

“The King’s Speech star commissioned the research when he guest edited Radio 4’s Today programme in December. For his edition, he asked scientists to scan the brains of politicians to see if there were any differences depending on political leanings. The paper, hailed as a ‘useful contribution’, has been published in the journal Current Biology.”

The popular image of Stein as hero of modernism, literary genius and gay icon – an image that Stein worked mightily for decades to cultivate – obscures both Stein’s actual writing and the history in which she took part. Holland Cotter looks at two exhibitions in San Francisco that illuminate the real Stein.

“As a translator, [he] helped bring the work of Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet of the early 20th century, to an English-speaking readership. He also translated the poetry of Federico García Lorca” as well as poems and plays by Cervantes and Calderon de la Barca.”

“Pity V.S. Naipaul: every couple of years or so the dyspeptic writer makes a pronouncement so extreme that it sounds like a plea for attention, a desperate attempt to shock, yet he is so profligate with his scorn that he is nothing if not predictable. This time around, his target is the woman writer, a species whose work and ‘narrow’ concerns, he says, is ‘unequal to me’.” (He makes a special point of picking on Jane Austen.)

Diana Athill, who edited 18 of Naipaul’s books while at publisher Andre Deutsch and who is now a bestselling author herself, said of his remarks on female writers, “He always tended toward irritability, and it seems he is losing his grip. It is ridiculous. Taking myself out of it, you only have to think of authors like George Eliot, or Jane Austen – you cannot take it seriously.”

“[She] drew on her experience as the chief press liaison for the Metropolitan Opera from 1975 to 1989 to write Molto Agitato: The Mayhem Behind the Music (2001) … [Her] earlier book, Arthur Fiedler: Papa, the Pops and Me (1994), a memoir of her father, depicted him as more dysfunctional than his avuncular persona let on.”

Lata Mangeshkar, who has sung for more than 1,000 films and is one of two singers who dominate Bollywood song (the other is her younger sister, Asha Bhosle), has reacted angrily to a press report that she is retiring. “I believe that I was born to sing and will continue to do so as long as I live,” she Tweeted.