Category: people

“In her life, as in her films, Rogers was a distinctly independent woman. She was so modern in her directness, her self-possession, her firm command of her expressive powers – let alone her career – that the arrival of her centennial year, twinned with Ronald Reagan’s, comes as a shock.”

“The first time I saw her she was screaming, shouting, angry, shaking her fist. The only word I could decipher was a name: ‘Sadie, Sadie, Sadie’. I just remember thinking: this woman’s free. But the irony was that even though this woman was being emotionally free, she was making references to the emotional entrapment of her life…”

The George Shearing Quintet’s first big hit was “September in the Rain,” in 1949. He wrote “Lullaby of Birdland” in 1952, naming it for the famous New York jazz club.

Doctors at Northwestern Memorial Hospital determined that Riccardo Muti’s fainting spell last week was caused by “a common heart rhythm disturbance” and have implanted a pacemaker.

“[She] was well known as a curator and an art historian specializing in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism when, in 1978, she was named curator of a new museum dedicated to 19th-century art to be housed in a defunct railway station, the Gare d’Orsay.” In 1994 she was named supervisor of all of France’s museums.

“[Any] efforts to publish the works have been thwarted by the daughters’ bickering; all must sign off on any plan to sell and release the material, which includes four journals that Malcolm X kept during trips to Africa and the Middle East in 1964, a year before his assassination.”

“It really was the title that persuaded me to do it. ‘Nixon in China’ struck my ear as a perfect title. It sounded right, it sounded clean, it sounded new, and it sounded like it belonged in the canon.”

“[The] Greek composer who wrote the music for the film Zorba the Greek, said in a television interview that he is an ‘anti-Semite and anti-Zionist.’ Theodorakis, 86, a hero in Greece, also said in the interview on Greece’s High channel that ‘everything that happens today in the world has to do with the Zionists’.”

“Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I’m finishing, even if it’s turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind.”

Says the author and playwright, now 76, of his series of television monologues, “They just came to me and I could do them. I can’t do them now. I think, ‘Oh, crikey, I’ll never be able to do that again.’ People think your life’s work is like a cushion and you can recline on it as you get older. It’s not like that.”