In 1760, one year after Handel’s death, a biography by a Reverend John Mainwaring.
Apparently the first ever written of a composer.
Like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.
Says an Anthony Powell character about growing old.
Toscanini’s seven-year affair with Geraldine Farrar — which he ended only when Farrar finally insisted that he leave his wife.
Ernest Hemingway’s entire front-line service in Italy in World War I, before he was wounded by shell fragments, had added up to less than one week.
Handing out cigarettes and chocolate at a Red Cross canteen.
The greatest kindness we can show some of the authors of our youth is not to reread them.
Said François Mauriac.
Being reminded that Fermat was a magistrate — for whom mathematics was fundamentally a hobby.
I am half sick of shadows, said
The Lady of Shalott.
Tirra lirra, by the river
Sang Sir Lancelot.
Wondering if there is any viable way to convince critics never to use the word tetralogy without also adding that each volume can be readily read by itself?
Alessandro Manzoni spent five years on the first two drafts of I Promessi Sposi — and twelve more on the final version.
Lulu slept naked because she liked to feel the sheets caressing her body and also because laundry was expensive.
Readily read?
A drawing by Rubens, in Rotterdam, of Achilles driving his spear into Hector’s throat — with his left hand.
When Homer specifically describes him as using his right.
The Trojan War will not take place, Cassandra!
I will make you a bet on that, Andromache.
— Reads an exchange in Tiger at the Gates.
I just pretend.
Explained Laurence Olivier.
A pale, gentle, frightened little man.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife described a not yet middle-aged Thomas Hardy as.
Berlioz read every Fenimore Cooper novel as quickly as it appeared.
And admitted that fully four hours after he finished The Prairie he was still weeping over the death of Natty Bumppo.
The classic orator Hyperides, who divided his time between homes in Athens, Piraeus, and Eleusis.
Depending upon which of his mistresses he felt like visiting.
Georges Simenon’s affair with Josephine Baker.
Chardin died at eighty — without ever once in his life having ventured farther away from Paris than the forty miles to Fontainebleau.
Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault.
Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.
Johnson told Boswell.
Chingachgook —
Pronounced Chicago, I think, said Mark Twain.
Altogether impoverished in his early years in Paris, for a time Juan Gris did not even possess a bed — and slept on newspapers.
Kees van Dongen’s admission that there were occasions during his own early Montmartre years when he was forced to filch milk and/or bread from neighborhood doorsteps — with an accomplice named Picasso.
Let there be Maecenases and there will be no lack of Virgils.
Said Martial.
Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half foundered because of it — that’s all right.
Says a last unfinished letter of van Gogh’s found after his death.
The poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of inspired madness.
Said Socrates.
Gris was dead at forty. Of uremia.
August 28, 1947, Manolete died on.
Recalled from Eastern European ghettos, virtually until the very last residents were evacuated to Nazi death camps — schoolchildren reading Yiddish editions of The Prince and the Pauper and Around the World in Eighty Days.
God of forgiveness, do not forgive those murderers of Jewish children here.
Said Elie Wiesel, visiting at Auschwitz a half-century later.
Wait. Don’t carry away that arm till I’ve taken off my ring.
Said Raglan during surgery after Waterloo.
Learning that there actually was an apple tree outside Newton’s window at his mother’s home.
Indeed an entire apple orchard.
Not a composer. A kleptomaniac.
Stravinsky called Benjamin Britten.
The appointment of a woman to public office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.
Determined Jefferson.
As many as five little-documented years passed between Shakespeare’s departure from the Globe, at forty-seven or forty-eight, and his death in Stratford.
After thirty-seven plays, and probably parts of others, plus the poems — did he have no inclination to write anything in those last years?
Or does there appear a possibility that he sometimes collaborated with others and/or doctored their work anonymously?
Poetry makes nothing happen.
Auden said.
I will not go down to posterity speaking bad grammar.
Said Disraeli, correcting one of his final speeches.
Whether posterity will give us a thought I don’t know. But we surely deserve one.
Wrote Pliny the Younger to Tacitus — in the early second century AD.
I’m a poet, I’m life. You’re an editor, you’re death.
Proclaimed Gregory Corso to someone in the White Horse Tavern — who shortly commenced punching him through the door and across the sidewalk.
Taking no more account of the wind that comes out of their mouths than that which they expel from their lower parts.
Leonardo described his response to critics as.
Ancora imparo, said Michelangelo at eighty-seven.
Still, I’m learning.
More true poetical genius as a painter than possessed by perhaps any other.
Joshua Reynolds saw in Julio Romano.
Me retracto de todo lo dicho, I take back everything I told you.
Announced Nicanor Parra at the end of each of his poetry readings.
Everything useful is ugly.
Said Gautier.
I never saw an ugly thing in my life.
Said Constable.
The rumor that Gainsborough deliberately painted his Blue Boy to mock Reynolds’ academic insistence that blue was a color for use in backgrounds only.
Nicanor Parra’s day job —
Professor of theoretical physics at the University of Chile.
Miroslav Holub’s —
Chief research immunologist at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Franz Kafka, the gravestone names him.
Apropos of his Doctor of Laws degree.
Superimposed metastatic disease would be difficult to exclude in this region.
Reads a gladsome evaluation in the analysis of Novelist’s most recent bone scan.
So debilitatingly paranoid was Kurt Gödel in his later years, over imagined plots to poison him, that he essentially refused to eat.
And died weighing no more than sixty-five pounds.
Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.
Says the narrator of a Gilbert Sorrentino story.
The world has no pity on a man who can’t do or produce something it thinks worth money.
Says Gissing in New Grub Street.
And to this day is every scholar poor:
Gross gold from them runs headlong to the boor.
Says Marlowe, in Hero and Leander.
October 8, 1963, Remedios Varo died on.
We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant.
Pointed out the disaffected Muslim Wafa Sultan in 2006.
As Dickensian as anything Dickens ever wrote.
Graham Greene labeled W. C. Fields.
Maidservant gallantries, Constanza accused Mozart of.