I’m beside myself with joy, he was heard to say when a date was set.
Billie Holiday sang with an Artie Shaw band in a New York hotel ballroom in 1938.
And was not only not allowed in the hotel dining room, but made to come and go through the hotel kitchen.
Hillel. Unable to afford tuition.
And who almost froze to death listening to classroom lectures on an outside window ledge.
Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which characters depart Verona by ship — when the city is nowhere near the sea.
Shakespeare’s King John — in which the Magna Carta is not once mentioned.
Santa Monica, California, Miles Davis died in.
At forty-two, teaching at the University of Chicago, Thorstein Veblen had still not been promoted above the rank of instructor.
Brahms was forty-three before he completed his first symphony.
A symphony is no joke — unquote.
This will never do.
Pronounced the opening sentence of a review by Francis Jeffrey of Wordsworth’s The Excursion.
It is rain upon rocks. Who can understand him. Said Byron of the same poem.
Five hundred years, virtually to the year, before the Taliban:
Ornaments, women’s jewelry, perfumes, mirrors, cosmetics, chessboards, playing cards, lutes, harps, carnival masks, books, illuminated manuscripts, paintings especially of women, more—
Into Savonarola’s Bonfires of the Vanities.
The friendship of Wittgenstein and John Maynard Keynes.
The many to whom, for years, Robert Schumann was known only as Clara Wieck’s husband.
And are you musical too, Mr. Schumann?
Melville, late along, possessed no copies of his own books.
Pope’s legs were so thin that he wore three pairs of stockings to partially disguise them.
Kant, in the same predicament, had to contrive special devices to keep his stockings up at all.
José da Silva, the Portuguese-Jewish playwright who was forcibly converted to Christianity — and then was burned alive by the Inquisition for secretly continuing to practice Judaism.
With one of his plays being performed in a Lisbon theater on the same afternoon.
Sophocles may have choked to death on a grape. Well past ninety.
Any number of literary works were flung into Savonarola’s conflagrations with the rest. With printing still in its essential infancy, how many irreplaceable single copies of Greek and Latin manuscripts were lost?
The fact that Isaac Babel was executed in a Moscow prison cellar.
The strong possibility that the manuscript of a novel confiscated at his arrest still exists in Stalin-era files.
William Harvey’s medical practice fell off radically after the publication of his treatise on the circulation of the blood.
’Twas believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained, explains John Aubrey.
Georges Seurat, who was dead at thirty-one.
And had sold only two paintings in his life.
Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein, who both studied under Leopold Auer.
Who studied under Joseph Joachim.
To whom Brahms dedicated his only violin concerto.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
Said Cervantes, in Part II of Don Quixote in 1615.
Said Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621.
Said Saint Ambrose — in the late fourth century.
Raphael’s stanze in the Vatican—
Where horses were stabled during the sack of Rome by armies of Charles V.
Picasso, in his seventies, discussing form and structure in art.
Then tossing aside an ink-stained desk blotter with the comment: Jackson Pollock.
Author still uses a typewriter instead of a computer because?
Can he really say? Why does he still listen to music on 33⅓ rpm long-playing vinyl phonograph records?
The still extant bill of sale for fifty-eight pairs of gloves that Balzac purchased at one time.
Many of Ronsard’s poems were set to music in his lifetime.
Deaf from sixteen, he never heard them.
Giorgio de Chirico’s habit of doing new versions of his better known works, with faked dates decades after the fact, and then insisting that these were the originals.
Ouspensky, at the very commencement of World War I, taking note of a military truck loaded with crutches.
For limbs that had not yet been lost.
In 1827, an earliest Paris production of Hamlet, in English. With Hugo, Dumas, Eugene Delacroix, Berlioz, Alfred de Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, and Gerard de Nerval all known to have attended.
If it would please God that I might go and tend sheep with my sister and brother.
Said Joan of Arc, after her first several victories.
Clemenceau, to a new private secretary:
Certain letters you will have to draft yourself. Now listen: a sentence consists of a noun and a verb. If you want to use an adjective, come and ask me first.
Tolstoy kept a portrait of Dickens on the wall in his study.
Handel hung in Gluck’s bedroom.
Women, in ancient Greece, were not permitted to do the shopping.
Shakespeare’s sonnets, published in 1609, many probably written in the 1590s.
The realization that there had never been a sonnet in English at all until ca. 1540, when Sir Thomas Wyatt translated Petrarch.
Vaslav Nijinsky spent the last thirty-two years of his life in an insane asylum.
Thirty-two.
In addition to his native German, Heinrich Schliemann spoke English, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Polish, Greek, Russian, Arabic, and Latin.
Most of which he had taught himself.
In addition to his native French, Jean-Francois Champollion spoke Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, Chaldean, Sanskrit, Persian, and Chinese.
And possibly others.
For some years, Marcel Duchamp was the second-ranked chess master in France.
Giordano’s Andrea Chénier—which concludes with Chénier and Madeleine di Coigny strolling off hand in hand toward the guillotine.
Who in real life probably never met.
Claudio Muzio. Elisabeth Rethberg. Rosa Ponselle. Zinka Milanov.
Jane Austen, at the thought of attending an opera:
Very tiresome.
Priests ought never to have children — except by married women.
Says Rousseau in the Confessions.
The lunatic woman’s suffrage demonstrator, affronted by its nudity, who repeatedly slashed the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery in London in 1914.
Lucrezia, wife of Andrea del Sarto, model for so many of his exotic Madonnas. Long after his death, a young apprentice is rendering a copy of one in a Tuscany church when an ancient shawled creature who had been at prayer pauses beside him. At last a hand lifts: