Category: people

“At times he has seemed like the Howard Hughes of classical music: a pill-popping hypochondriac who wore gloves, a scarf, overcoat and flat cap even at the height of summer.” 25 years after the pianist’s death, a number of his famously close-mouthed intimates have talked about Gould for a new documentary.

In June he went to the consulate in Berlin for a work visa for the Met job and was forced, he said, to stand for hours in a stifling room with 50 other visa applicants. When he finally reached the consular official, “He said to me, ‘Why don’t you laugh?’ ” Mr. Stein recounted. “I said, ‘I stay here for two and a half hours standing and I am an old man.’ “

“With an unyielding liberal stance rendered in savage black and white, Conrad both thrilled and infuriated readers for more than 50 years. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, a feat matched by only two other cartoonists in the post- World War II era.”

“His obsessive drive … produced a two-dimensional record of his shaggy life, rendered in varying styles by numerous illustrators. Now only his widow and the artists he worked with are left to narrate his final chapter, a tale of bruised feelings and allegations of opportunism, with nothing more at stake than the writer’s modest legacy.”

“In general terms, I learned that the brain is always busy. In particular, if a sensory input – whether it be vision or hearing or kinesthesia – is taken away, there will be some sort of compensation, and the cortical systems involved in those representations will become hyperactive.”

In 1929, a French perfume mogul who loved Proust’s work happened to meet the writer’s family – which was preparing to destroy Proust’s manuscripts and personal possessions. By means of friendliness, kindness, flattery and bribery, the magnate managed to rescue most of the Proust archives.

“What happened under Stalin was horrendous, but in point of fact, Marx never really worked out a solution, it was not his doing. But he was an absolutely astonishing reader of history, and of class. His analysis of capitalism is being proved in America every day.”

“[His] movies included science fiction, police thrillers, a look at office politics in Japan and a mood piece about ancient India, but his big success was Tous les Matins du monde,” a period piece about the Baroque composer Marin Marais starring Gérard Depardieu and his son Guillaume.

David Gayle on a dance performance he gave at his hoe when he was a boy: “I danced with a couple of girls to a wind-up gramophone and the children who came to watch paid a penny for the show, which included a glass of lemonade and a biscuit. I wrote the order of the programme on a scrap of paper.”

“The sounds are cleaned up. It’s an open secret and an industry standard. This goes for everyone, even Susan Boyle’s audition was smoothed out in post-production to give it the best possible sound.”