Category: people

“My father was knowledgable, he’d tell his own versions of Arabian Nights, Panchatantra fables. … Everyone thinks that Rashid Khalifa, ‘the Shah of Blah’ in [my children’s] books, is a send-up of me but that’s based on my memory of my father telling these stories. I became a writer because I got addicted to story.”

“It is four years since the publication of Gomorrah, [Roberto Saviano’s] description of life under the Camorra, the Neapolitan crime syndicate.” The book and the subsequent film adaptation made him famous, wealthy and a hero to many. It also made him a target, and he now lives in Salman Rushdie-like hiding.

“Author VS Naipaul has pulled out of an international writers’ conference in Istanbul over objections to his previous criticism of Islam. The award-winning writer had been expected to attend the European Writers Parliament as a guest of honour.”

She met the novelist at a book-signing in Arkansas in 1975 – when he was still married to his fourth wife and having an affair with the woman who would become his fifth. As spouse no. 6, Norris stayed with Mailer and managed his career and family for nearly three decades, while doing creative work of her own and being publicly frank about her husband’s flaws.

“[He] was one of the pioneers of unconventional vessel-based handbuilt forms that celebrated the earthy plastic of clay.”

“Working from exactly the same motives that now attract such scorn towards Angelina Jolie and Sean Penn, she chose, during the Franco-Prussian war, to turn the Odéon Theatre into a military hospital, ministering with great effectiveness and dedication to the injured, the maimed and the dying.”

The author of The History Boys and The Habit of Art “is all these things, cheerily miserable, miserably cheerful, dictatorially diffident, a mousey egomaniac, and he’s damned if he’s going to explain his contradictions to anybody.”

Pete Mattaliano: “What the hell does Jill Clayburgh need to be coached on? I should be getting coaching from her!” The answer: “She’s just been cast in Barefoot in the Park and is nervous about it.” In tribute to the late actress, Mattaliano recounts his memories of the coaching sessions.

The great British actor was a founding member fo the Royal Shakespeare Company. Now his ashes have been interred under Row A in the new RSC theatre opening this week in Stratford-upon-Avon.

“David Rees, a New York state-based cartoonist for, among others the Nation and Rolling Stone, is your guy, blade at the ready. He describes himself as a ‘craftsman’ who ‘practices the age-old art of manual pencil sharpening’.” The price: $12 per pencil.