Category: people

“[He] found his way toward geometric forms that served as vessels for vibrant washes of color stained into the canvas. In successive series of paintings, he introduced subtle changes into geometric forms that evolved from circles, chevrons, stripes and diamonds and back again to the circle late in his career.”

“The man who played Dracula, Saruman and the Man with the Golden Gun is now … to release an album of ‘symphonic metal’, telling the story of his own direct ancestor, the first Holy Roman Emperor.”

“You hear about quirks and deviations with artists, but we were very fortunate. I can’t imagine a great man being more normal than he was. … There is this notion that Solzhenitsyn was so intolerant, that everything was black and white for him and, well – bollocks!”

“Kurt Westergaard has been living in fear since he drew his notorious Muhammad cartoon. But even that could not prepare him for being attacked in his own home by a Muslim seeking revenge.”

“[T]he 89-year-old crime writer’s forensic questions about his executives’ pay packets reduced [BBC director-general Mark Thompson] to a ‘stuttering wreck’, as one observer put it. … The writer may be elderly but her mind is, by one account, ‘as sharp as a cleaver’.”

“For years, the family’s simple white colonial bungalow has been left to decay; damaged in an earthquake it was an occasional home to stray animals and, more recently, a state school teacher. Now, after years of dithering and failed attempts by Orwell enthusiasts to restore the building, the provincial government says it is coming to the rescue in a bid to lure tourists to one of the most underdeveloped areas of India.”

For Tina Brown, there isn’t much of a downside to professional risk anymore. “One of the the great things about having had something that didn’t work out,” she said, “is: So what? I am fine.”

“First published in 1968, the AIA Guide [to New York City] tapped into and fostered a growing national awareness that America had an architectural past worth preserving, a present worth studying and a future worth debating.”

“It’s useful to recall that when he came onto the scene the dominant mode was a lighter, comic illustration, and Al Hirschfeld was the reigning master.” At The New York Review of Books, “Levine harked back to the loftiest ambitions of great 19th-century illustration. He wanted to be biting but at the same time searching.”

“Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25 1903 in Motihari, a tiny town in the impoverished eastern Indian state of Bihar, near the border with Nepal. … For years, the family’s simple white colonial bungalow has been left to decay; damaged in an earthquake it was an occasional home to stray animals.”