Category: people

“In the chapters concentrating on Balanchine’s last years and his death, in 1983, d’Amboise offers a chronologically chaotic collage of diary and recollection.”

“Frankly, he had to medicate himself to get through the pain. It was clear he didn’t have control of some of his motor skills. But that’s how much he wanted to conduct; he was prepared to put himself in jeopardy. But we had to have an intervention of sorts, and I had to say to him: ‘Jim, it’s not right for you, it’s not right for the audience.’ Nobody wants to see somebody suffer, especially somebody you have a relationship with.”

“The service was reaching its end, and lights faded on the stage. Many of us stayed, lined up to approach Balanchine on his bier. At my turn, I stepped up, touched his hand, petted it, really, tears dripped off my cheek. I leaned over to kiss his forehead. Luckily, I did not drip on his face. What did I expect? Balanchine’s forehead to be cold on my lips! It was warm.”

“In the three years he worked on the book he suffered ghastly pulmonary hemorrhages … A friend who served as his masseur was terrified by ‘how emaciated and martyrized was his body’ near the end, like ‘one of the haggard, medieval, carved figures of the crucified Jesus’.”

“A light bulb went on in my brain. I thought, ‘That’s it! Just play what’s on the page.’ I’ve followed that ever since. If it says, ‘Over-the-hill, angry woman with no makeup gets out of bed,’ that’s what I’ll play. I don’t mess it up with, ‘What’s her back story?'”

“Surprisingly for a writer whose latest literary works generally seem to cause a media kerfuffle in his native France and beyond, Michel Houellebecq’s new single seems to have slipped into the public domain with little fanfare. … Yet [his] new single … more than holds its own in the pop/ballad milieu.”

She “played the doomed Milanese streetwalker in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers and, moving easily from drama to comedy, became France’s most popular actress of the 1970s.”

“With his chiseled jaw, wavy locks and paisley bow ties, Mr. Fodor became an overnight media sensation. … New York magazine dubbed him the ‘Mick Jagger of classical music.’ … By the mid-1980s, Mr. Fodor’s swashbuckling ways spoiled many of his professional opportunities, and his career began to swirl out of control.”

“His hugely popular comic series Amar Chitra Katha, or Immortal Picture Stories, launched in 1967 with the goal of retelling stories from [Indian] mythology, still finds nearly three million buyers every year and is sold in 20 languages.”

At New York, where his title will be editor-at-large, Rich will write a monthly essay on politics and culture and edit a corresponding monthly section.