Category: people

“Ariel Sharon, one of Israel’s most controversial and long-standing political and military leaders, has been depicted in a life-size sculpture as he is – more than four years after being felled by a massive stroke – comatose in a hospital bed.”

“For all of Percy Grainger’s many enthusiasms and talents, one hesitates to call him a renaissance man. Unless, that is, Michelangelo or Leonardo also made their own clothing from beach towels and flogged themselves raw with home-made whips.” And he’s one of the few artists to create and finance a museum about himself.

“Elton John has described today’s songwriters as ‘pretty awful’ and says he is ‘not a fan’ of TV talent shows. The singer told the Radio Times he refused to be a judge on American Idol ‘because I won’t slag anyone off’ and also found TV boring.”

While his name is unfamiliar in the US, in the Arab world he “is a renowned figure, if not everywhere a beloved one. He is an outspoken secularist … and a poetic revolutionary of sorts who has tried to liberate Arabic verse from its traditional forms and subject matter. Some of his poems are immensely long and immensely difficult and resemble Pound’s Cantos at their most impenetrable.”

“A household name in prerevolutionary Iran, Marzieh was as closely identified with her country’s music as the great Egyptian chanteuse Umm Kulthum was with hers. … [She] was silenced after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 but who re-emerged years later outside Iran as a singer and a highly public supporter of the resistance.”

The English filmmaker, who is Jewish, has cancelled a series of workshops he was to lead in Jerusalem. Leigh’s decision, made in protest over several recent Israeli government policies, has drawn a sharp public rebuke from the head of the film school that invited him.

“Listening to Hytner describe his career, you’d think everything was accidental – or, at least, happened en route to somewhere else. The truth is that Hytner has packed more into the last 25 years than most directors accomplish in a lifetime.”

“Your mind just processes [different media] so differently. So for example, I’ll tell a story and there will be a violin solo, which is really a kind of comment in music on the story. You can say things in a violin solo like ‘I doubt it, but it’s a very beautiful thing, but it’s also sad and in the end I think it’s kind of hilarious’.”

“You look at the children about to leave the home and you say, ‘I’ve done everything wrong, I was lenient when I should have been strict, strict when I should have been lenient, I was overwhelming them when I should have left them alone and I was absent when they needed me, but as you are going away I have a few thoughts I’d like to share with you and I’m going to be as succinct as possible’.”

“I once met [fellow author] Colin Thubron. He genuinely likes to go to places where he might get malaria. But I absolutely don’t want to get malaria and I don’t want to be uncomfortable. I don’t want to sleep on anything hard, or worry that an alligator is going to come up and take my leg off.”