Category: people

The multiply-honored actress gave up performing for politics nearly two decades ago and has been the MP (Labour) for a north London constituency since 1992. But with voters tired of Gordon Brown’s government and intrigued by the Liberal Democrats, she faces the real prospect of defeat at the hands of an opponent too young to remember her acting career.

“Some of the most personal correspondence that Marilyn Monroe wrote in her life, as well as the messages, both intimate and trivial, that she jotted for herself will be published for the first time in a book planned for the fall.”

Along with the posthumous publication of and acclaim for her book Suite Française “came charges from a handful of critics that Némirovsky, killed because she was a Jew, was herself an anti-Semite who courted extreme right-wing friends and wrote ugly caricatured portraits of Jews.” A new biography says that the truth was far more complicated.

He was “a jazz historian and critic known for his pugnacious, highly personal essays and biographies of such jazz greats as Oscar Peterson, Woody Herman and Johnny Mercer.” He was also a lyricist and composer and “had the distinction of collaborating with a pope: He translated poems written by Pope John Paul II when the latter was a Polish priest named Karol Wojtyla.”

“No Sondheim song comes easy to me. You depend on Rodgers and Hart for that. Those songs have easy brilliance. Stephen Sondheim gives you complicated brilliance. But once you get him, you got him. He makes you think a little bit. But those hours in a rehearsal room learning a song – those hours are rough.”

“Once back from the hospital I gingerly opened the container: nothing in there looked remotely like anything from an anatomy book. Now, … if I wanted to preserve my ‘souvenir’ on dry land I needed to have a taxidermist extract the fatty tissues from the bone so it wouldn’t go rancid. One hundred thousand dollars of medical bills and I still needed a taxidermist.”

Joni Mitchell, the Canadian singer-songwriter, has lambasted Bob Dylan as a ”plagiarist” and a ”fake”. In a rare interview, Mitchell, 66, attacked her fellow folk musician after an interviewer for the Los Angeles Times casually noted that both had changed their names, in Dylan’s case from Bobby Zimmerman. ”Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake,” she said.

“Rosenblum, who as the Long Wharf”s executive director was involved in virtually every aspect of its operations, came to the theater in 1970, when it was just five years old. There he forged an extraordinary 26-year partnership with the theater’s artistic director, Arvin Brown, one of the longest-tenured leadership tandems in the last half-century of regional theater.”

He “was one of the most important British writers of the postwar era. He made his name with the novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and the collection of short stories The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959), and he is still routinely perceived as a member of the kitchen-sink branch of the Angry Generation.”

“At first, I thought that the series’ portrait of Nikki might be a little bit mean, but then I remembered that back in the days when Nikki and I were still pals, she suddenly, without the slightest warning, wrote a nasty and vituperative post about one of my columns. We haven’t spoken since.”