Category: people

“Where do I find it all? In my character. Never in myself. I will never, never use something from my own life. I feel it is too dangerous. If you wake up an old pain, for example, because you have to cry in a scene, then how do you put that pain back to sleep again?”

The aristocratic writer “spent nearly three years [there] in the 1850s, living among Cossacks who were then engaged in the struggle to tame the Chechens.” Tolstoy “warned then of the pitfalls of Russia’s quest to tame the restive region in the Northern Caucasus.”

“Matt Turney, a principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, died on Dec. 20 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. … Tall, serene and lyrical, Ms. Turney did not fit the stereotype of the Graham performer.”

The South African’s “first collection of poetry was published while he was still in prison. Sirens, Knuckles and Boots was printed in Nigeria as he was forbidden to teach, write or publish at home. His writing was celebrated for its lyrical intensity and his earlier works for their narrative complexity, although some critics found his later political works akin to sloganeering.”

“Louisa made herself a brand,” says Alcott scholar Harriet Reisen. “She suppressed the fact that she had written pulp fiction that included stories about spies and transvestites and drug takers.”

“A scholar has found evidence that a distraught Vincent van Gogh slashed his ear after learning that his brother, Theo, on whom he depended financially and emotionally, was about to get married.”

“As president of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance since 2000, Ms. Amsterdam doubled the organization’s membership to 385 arts and cultural nonprofits and greatly expanded its reach to the broader community.”

He “was a permanent fixture of the London art world for five decades, though permanence was hardly the most distinctive attribute of so peripatetic a character, whose diverse career encompassed teaching, writing, publishing and dealing, as well as the directorship of one of the capital’s leading public galleries [Whitechapel].”

“I think it’s my stage of life, isn’t it? Is it middle age? I’m just worried about people. I have a kind of Rolodex of worries. ‘Which one shall we have today?’ It’s my nature. But then I worry about that too. It upsets me. … That’s something that I’ve had to really fight with, is not being able to trust people, because they keep dying,”

A film critic who made a splashy debut with a piece on “Psycho” in Cahiers du Cinéma, “Mr. Wood never lost sight of the ethical and political aspects of film. This tendency became more acute after he came out as a gay man in the 1970s and took a sharp turn to the political left.”