Category: people

“The Royal Opera House has just announced it will be recreating the great dame’s Covent Garden dressing room as part of its mini-residency at the Lowry centre in Salford [near Manchester], featuring her makeup cases, her shoe-darning kit and the tutu she wore in Swan Lake.. Nostalgic ephemera maybe, but powerful stuff for [fans].”

He spent most of his career as a major star in the Verdi and bel canto repertoire in Europe. Yet he didn’t make his Metropolitan Opera debut until the age of 69 “(though he would gladly have sung there decades earlier, he said, if only the Met had asked him nicely).”

La Baker “is a gilded banana skirt and a feathery hairpiece, a spit curl and a sculpted brow – not the rumpled woman in a bathrobe, dark glasses, and shower cap in the photo in the kitchen at the Château des Milandes,” which had just been repossessed. The estate’s current owner has made the house into a monument to the singer and the extraordinary activities she undertook there.

“I don’t go looking for stories [for This American Life] with the idea of wrongness in my head, no. But the fact is, a lot of great stories hinge on people being wrong. In fact, we’ve talked as a staff about how the crypto-theme of every one of our shows is: ‘I thought it would work out this way, but then it worked out that way’.”

William Sydney Porter “probably would have remained an obscure hack” if a former employer hadn’t accused him of theft. “As Prisoner No. 30664, he started to submit short stories to magazines in Manhattan. He used the name O. Henry, which he possibly borrowed from a prison guard named Orrin Henry. The most notable phase of his life was about to begin.”

“She held open house once a week for artists, where she would criticise their work with sometimes brutal frankness. Her sharpness, non-conformism, mysterious, uncomfortable work and great age made her the embodiment of the artist as rebel and wise-woman combined.”

“Earlier this year, the former president and chief investment officer of LJH Global Investments LLC said goodbye to 18 years in finance to focus on producing, promoting and advising on art. A longtime collector and museum patron, involved with London’s Tate Modern, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and other institutions, he is now putting his insider’s experience to work.”

“After coming to prominence in the 1950s, he received commissions from major American orchestras; his solo and chamber works were given premieres by distinguished artists like the pianist Gary Graffman, the violinist Ruggiero Ricci and the Budapest and Tokyo String Quartets.”

“David was a positive influence in the evolution of architecture throughout our city, for a long time. I think he was objectively critical and perceptive, and he urged us to strive for the highest standards, without yielding to compromise or accepting mediocrity.”

“The architecture critic at the Dallas Morning News from 1983 to 2006, Dillon died suddenly this morning at his home in Massachusetts of an apparent heart attack. He was 68. His death comes as a shock because David had managed to beat an earlier bout with cancer.”