The claim that John Wesley preached more than forty thousand sermons.
Marc Blitzstein. Elliott Carter. Aaron Copland. David Diamond. Roy Harris. Walter Piston. Roger Sessions. Virgil Thomson.
All studied with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau.
Dave Brubeck studied with Arnold Schoenberg and with Darius Milhaud.
Corbière died of tuberculosis at thirty.
Novalis died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight.
Laforgue was twenty-seven.
Basically every justification for persecution on the part of the Inquisition was at hand in St. Augustine.
As anyone’s justification for censorship is ready in Plato.
J. R. R. Tolkien died of a chest infection while hospitalized for something else.
Ausonius once composed a poem to his writing paper.
The literary fame of The Bonfire of the Vanities condemns the taste of its age.
Mary Mapes Dodge.
Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
Don’t come to us with your troubles. If you can’t make enough money to live on, you can jump out the window or drown yourself.
Which Maria Callas vehemently denied having said to her mother.
The vasty hall of death.
Émile Verhaeren died in a fall under a train.
Arcangelo Corelli owned paintings by Bruegel and Poussin.
Adrienne Lecouvreur died of what was apparently rectal cancer.
Though in the Cilèa opera is poisoned, which had been a rumor.
But in either event was buried by torchlight in a field beside the Seine — as an actress, forbidden sanctified ground.
Maria Caniglia. Magda Olivero. Renata Tebaldi.
One of St. Teresa of Ávila’s grandfathers was Jewish.
Jongkind died mad.
Hugo Wolf died mad.
Blake, at their only meeting, re Constable’s pencil sketches: Why, this is not drawing, but inspiration.
I always meant it for drawing, Constable said.
The peculiar immortality of Sulpicia.
Six love poems, totaling only forty lines, and customarily tacked onto the collected work of Tibullus.
For two full thousand years.
Callas died in Paris, of a heart attack.
And was buried from a Greek Orthodox church on the rue Georges Bizet.
Tatiana Troyanos died of cervical cancer.
Writer’s pleasure in realizing that the translation of Rabelais he most recently read was done by the father of Tanaquil LeClercq.
The Hay Wain.
Billie Holiday died of a kidney infection after years of heroin abuse.
Mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens.
Who but my darling Greensleeves?
And Arthur was so bloody, that by his shield there might no man know him, for all was blood and brains on his sword.
Sir Thomas Urquhart. Peter Motteux.
Did Miss Linda Stillwagon ever see the poem?
John Singer Sargent died reading Voltaire.
Please, sir, I want some more.
Does Temple Drake ever go back and graduate from the University of Mississippi?
Merle Hapes. Junie Hovious.
Is it in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Greensleeves is mentioned? Even twice?
Gluck died after a series of strokes.
Worms feed on Hector brave.
Siegfried Sassoon threw his Military Cross into the Mersey in disgust with the waste of war.
Mina Loy, already suffering advanced spinal osteoarthritis, died of pneumonia.
In one of his less balanced periods, Robert Lowell penciled in some revisions in Milton’s Lycidas.
And insisted he was the author of the entire poem.
An anthology of extraordinary suicide notes.
Or of any suicide notes. Is there such?
Dorothy Parker died of a heart attack.
Kenneth Tynan died of emphysema.
He doesn’t want me to have a life of my own.
Says Sonia Tolstoy’s Diary.
Machiavelli died of unidentified stomach spasms.
Addie Joss died of tubercular meningitis.
Are we ever told what Addie Bundren dies of?
Lawrence Durrell was found dead in a bathroom.
Paulette Goddard died of heart failure.
Why does Writer sometimes seem to admire the Iliad even more when he is thinking about it than when he is actually reading it?
Augustus Montague Toplady.
Ignorant asses, John Webster repudiated the Elizabethan theater audience as.
Get thee to a brewery.
Sailing the circumference of Lake Geneva, Byron and Shelley took time to pay homage at the house in Lausanne where Gibbon had written a great deal of The Decline and Fall.
Hey, Dad, sharp this for me, please?
Theodore Watts-Dunton was said to sometimes hide Swinburne’s shoes — as a way of keeping him from drinking.
From the King James Ecclesiastes:
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
From the Revised Standard Version:
A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.
From the King James Song of Solomon:
Our vines have tender grapes.
From the Revised Standard:
Our vineyards are in blossom.
James Baldwin died of cancer of the esophagus.
Michael Harrington died of cancer of the esophagus.
S. S. Orizaba.
You never have music here, do you.
It makes me nervous.
Mozart was addicted to billiards.
Frances Farmer died of throat cancer.
Martha Argerich.
André Breton died of heart failure precipitated by massive asthma attacks.
Eddie Poe, Edgar Allan was commonly called.
Leslie Howard died in a plane shot down by the Germans in World War II.
William Gaddis died of prostate cancer.
Velázquez was unconditionally dismissive of Raphael as a painter.
George Meredith died of what was called a chill.
Arrigo Boito died after catching the same in church.
John Gay died of what was called colic but was most probably stomach cancer.
Wallace Stevens once worked briefly as a newspaper reporter.
And was assigned to cover Stephen Crane’s funeral.
Zane Grey was a dentist.