Category: people

“Hugo Claus, one of Belgium’s most renowned authors despite his often caustic portrayals of his nation, particularly of its ambiguous role in World War II, died on Wednesday. He was 78.”

He was the first conductor to become a true media star, and dominated the American music scene for decades. But who was Arturo Toscanini, and what does his career tell us about the music world then and now?

The former director of the Metropolitan Opera, who retired two years ago, at 67, “has resurfaced at Theater Projects Consultants, a leading theater design firm, at its American headquarters, in South Norwalk, Conn.”

Ileana Sonnabend’s 20th-century art collection, one of the world’s best-known, may be sold to pay taxes on her $400 million estate.

Paul Potts is now an international singing sensation. “I was doing some work at home, and I’d come across the ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ website by accident — it was a pop-up and I meant to close it, but I maximized it. Then I filled out the application form and got to the bottom, where I could either submit or cancel it. I couldn’t decide whether I was too old or if I had enough talent.”

“Lydia Lopokova, the Russian ballerina who danced with Diaghilev and in 1925 became John Maynard Keynes’s wife, has been treated by most historians of Bloomsbury as one of the group’s more colourful but irrelevant satellites. Her dancing career has rarely been accorded more than a footnote, her presence in Bloomsbury represented by the occasional quirky anecdote.’

Harry Potter author JK Rowling has admitted she had “suicidal thoughts” while suffering from depression after her first marriage broke down.

As described in a profile in The New York Times in 1969, Mr. Asher was “noted for his distinguished list of authors, tweedy attire and accomplished renditions of Bach preludes and fugues on the piano.” He was routinely brought in by publishers to revive their flagging trade-book divisions.

Considered one of Minnesota’s leading contemporary novelists, Hassler died early Thuesday from complications of a degenerative neuromuscular disease that had ravaged him for more than a decade.

Arthur C. Clarke, the groundbreaking science fiction writer who died earlier this week, was a dedicated atheist who saw religion “as a symptom of humanity’s ‘infancy,’ something to be outgrown and overcome.” So why do so many of his works seem so, well, Biblical?