Category: people

The Austrian investigative reporter committed his later life to the recovery of priceless paintings looted by the Nazis.

The critics hated most of the shows Spelling put on the air, yet that didn’t keep them from liking him. They also were quick with their praise when he came through with a “Family,” a “Day One” or a viewing experience as profound as “And the Band Played On.”

“The tenor was due to appear at Glasgow SECC on 5 July, Chatsworth House on 8 July, Southampton Rose Bowl on 12 July and Warwick Castle on 15 July. The singer suffered a setback while recovering from lower back surgery and is fighting an infection.”

“Fond of saying that ‘the man who dies rich dies disgraced’, Carnegie was the first great rags-to-riches American philanthropist – bluff, optimistic, intuitive and, as he got older and richer, increasingly sanctimonious. Born in 1835, he was the son of a jobbing weaver from Dunfermline who was reduced to poverty when hand-looms were supplanted by steam-powered ones. His mother, a proud and cultured woman, resorted to selling groceries and mending shoes to keep the family clothed and fed.”

Sasha Frere-Jones is pop music critic for The New Yorker. And he “occupies the somewhat unprecedented position of being both one of the most influential critics in the game — his colorful, incisive critiques are accessible enough for the layman, yet are revered by the cliquish music-crit community — while simultaneously moonlighting as would-be rock star.”

After a shoulder injury forced him off the podium, Levine worked on his health. “It allowed me to restart. Everything in the training, everything in the diet could be done without my having to save energy for rehearsals and performances. What’s very important to my work is the continuity and repetition, to be able to go deeper and to have the response of the orchestra, etc., deeper. This thing forced me — I never would have stopped — this forced me to use the time to get to a different state.”

“Does your typical academic write best-selling 900-page histories of the French Revolution that deliberately omit footnotes? Produce texts mixing scholarship with fiction, to the point where you cannot tell the two apart? Dash off art criticism for magazines like the New Yorker? Teach seditious graduate seminars on Writing History Beyond the Academy”?

Nobel writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s home town has rejected a proposal to rename itself. “The town’s mayor proposed renaming Aracataca after Macondo, the fictional setting for the writer’s most famous work, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Mayor Pedro Sanchez hoped the change would bring more tourists to the town. More than 90% of votes cast were in favour of the change, but only half the necessary 7,400 people went to vote.”

“Haruki Murakami would seem the very picture of the Japanese writer-prophet… it’s hard to recognise the writer often derided by the Tokyo literati as an apathetic pop artist – a threat to the political engagement of Japanese fiction… As dreamy and introverted as his disaffected protagonists, Murakami has no literary friends and never attends parties. He has spent large stretches of his adult life in Europe and America,” and his writing often seems more at home in the pop culture-soaked West than in his native land.

Legendary TV producer Aaron Spelling, the creative force behind Charlie’s Angels, Beverly Hills 90210, and other prime-time soap hits, has died a week after suffering a major stroke. “According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Spelling was ‘the most prolific TV producer of all time,’ producing more than 5,000 hours of television programming, including more than 300 hours of made-for-television movies and at least a dozen films.”