Category: people

“[She] won an Emmy for her role as Blanche Devereaux, a sassy Southern belle on the series that ran from 1985 to 1992. She also played Bea Arthur’s best friend in Maude in the early 1970s.”

“As the Hay festival kicks off, with world-class authors being interviewed on stage all week, we invited writers to … ask themselves questions journalists never ask.” Nadine Gordimer, Chang-Rae Lee, Lady Antonia Fraser, Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Jeannette Winterson, Roddy Doyle and others join in.

The legendary (and polarizing) Cuban ballerina “is either a sly fox of the highest degree or an endearing old lady who wears a scarf – ears covered – with the élan of Little Edie in Grey Gardens. In all likelihood she’s both; her demeanor can turn on a dime. … [She] is quite sharp with what seems to be a selective understanding of English depending on the question.”

The composer recounts his life in five parts: The Record Store Apprenticeship, The Taxi-Driving Years, The Record Label Mogul, Collaborating With Leonard Cohen, and The New School.

“On Christmas Day last year, Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to 11 years in prison for his part in creating Charter 08, a document calling for greater freedoms and democratic reforms in China. On Tuesday … PEN announced that it has learned that Liu Xiaobo has been moved from a detention center in Beijing to Jinzhou Prison in Liaoning.”

Among the inspirations for Ohno’s work were “the wartime horrors he witnessed firsthand after being drafted in 1938 into the Japanese Army, in which he served for nine years, one of them as a prisoner of war in New Guinea. The rawness of Butoh has often been attributed to the experience of living through Hiroshima.”

“Haney was working as a photojournalist for the Montreal Gazette in 1979 when he collaborated with Scott Abbott, a Canadian Press sports reporter, to invent Trivial Pursuit. While both were convinced that their new game would sell, they had no idea just how successful it would become.”

Dennis Hopper, seen in passing in a corridor, “gave off the most incredible aura of need. … [He] struck me as typifying a malady of our time, which we may name and define thusly: Hopper’s Disorder, the inability to be there, the urgency to be everywhere so desperate that one is effectively nowhere.”

In a remembrance of Art Linkletter, Cavett writes, “Someone, I guarantee, will react to this with the pre-recorded, ‘How can you speak disrespectfully of the dead?’ Truth is, I have always found it remarkably easy. Why anyone, by dying, should thereby be declared beyond criticism, innocent of wrongdoing, suddenly filled with virtue and above reproach escapes me.” (Sure enough, readers join in with mixed comments on Linkletter and his legacy.)

“Shakespeare was a professional writer and writers have love affairs, rivalries, cash crises, prejudices, off-days, children and mortgages. The assumption is that we know very little about this side of his life. But it’s amazing just how much is known and how fascinating it is.” Question 1: “Was he gay, straight or just sex-mad?”