Devon, Jean Rhys died in.
The myriad Anna Akhmatova poems, written over decades, which she or friends were forced to immediately memorize.
Because under Soviet rule she was afraid to put them on paper.
Sick-of-it-all. Desperate. Brokenhearted. Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband.
Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They’ve seen it done every day of the week, but they can’t do it themselves.
Said Brendan Behan.
Utterly remote from the interests of the people and the state.
Being a typical party functionary’s comment on Akhmatova’s work when she was expelled from the Writers’ Union.
The rioting at the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913—
Cocteau’s recollection of himself, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and Nijinsky holding an exhausted postmortem on a carriage ride through the Bois de Boulogne in the hours afterward.
Who wrote this fiendish Rite of Spring.
What right had he to write the thing?
Jackson Pollock was classified 4F because of psychiatric problems and thus never drafted in World War II.
Jack Kerouac was given a Section Eight discharge from the army for mental instability but subsequently served in the merchant marine.
Pietro Spina.
Forgetting to remember that Tintoretto’s name comes from the fact that his father was a dyer.
Or that Correggio’s comes from the name of the small town where he was born.
Moll Flanders, in a burka.
Anna Karenina, in a burka.
Scarlett.
Bernini once sculpted a marble bust of Charles I of England whom he had never seen.
Van Dyck had done portraits at three different angles — which were shipped to Rome for Bernini’s use.
It cautioned all ladies of quality not to run off with blackamoors and it warned all good wives to look well to their linen.
Said Thomas Rymer, finding at least some trifling merit in Othello.
Motiveless malignity.
Our first aim is to serve God and spread the Christian faith.
Said Cortés.
I have come to take away their gold.
Said Pizarro.
Max Beckmann was severely shell-shocked in World War I.
David Jones the same.
Palma, Majorca, Joan Miró died in.
Diderot, who was known to gesticulate excessively in conversation — and was seen to slap Catherine the Great repeatedly on the thighs.
At which the empress was merely amused.
Amy Levy. At twenty-eight. In 1889.
Blake was given a pauper’s funeral.
And buried without a headstone.
Scott Fitzgerald was three years older than Hemingway.
And one year older than Faulkner.
Dylan Thomas was one day older than John Berryman.
Anne Hathaway died seven years after her husband, at sixty-seven.
The first pianist to perform with the side of the piano facing the audience was Liszt.
Out of vanity over his profile.
Dame Myra Hess. Her recitals in London during the Blitz.
Not only eager to talk about himself, but reluctant to have the conversation stray from the subject.
Said Thoreau of Whitman.
As overrated as Citizen Kane.
Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd were for a time roommates.
Nikos Kazantzakis was a pupil of Henri Bergson’s.
Otherwise presumably educated souls who could not for the life of them point out Thermopylae on a map.
Or the Rubicon. Or Trafalgar.
Nathaniel Hawthorne never learned which side won the Civil War.
John Gower died blind.
So much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.
The London Athenaeum called Moby Dick.
Schoolboy drivel.
Edith Wharton called Ulysses.
Lynwood Thomas Rowe.
George Orwell’s decision that his real name should be used on his grave.
Gabriel Fauré played the organ at the funeral of Paul Verlaine.
Sviatoslav Richter sat at the piano for hours as mourners viewed Pasternak’s open coffin.
The legend that Diogenes died in Corinth on the same day as Alexander the Great in Babylon.
Kiss me, Hardy.
How long did Schiller leave the rotten apples in his desk before replacing them with less-rotten apples?
Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time—which was composed and first performed in a German prisoner-of-war camp.
October 25, 1400. The death of Chaucer. October 25, 1415. Agincourt.
Billie Holiday’s bank balance at her death registered a total of seventy cents.
Though hospital attendants found $750 taped to her leg.
Saint Jerome slept with works of Aristotle under his pillow.
Taking it for granted for so long that one no longer thinks to be astonished—
That Milton, blind, dictated Paradise Lost.
Biblia Graeca Septuaginta, fol. 1594, Frankfurt.
The volume with which Johnson once knocked down his bookseller employer Thomas Osborne during an argument.
Lex clavatoris designati rescindenda est.
Remembering that Bizet’s Carmen is based on a novel by Prosper Mérimée.
Not remembering that the Mérimée is in turn based on a narrative poem by Pushkin.
Do you lack anything?
I do. That you stand out of my sunlight a little.
Statius, today unread.
Who is given more space in the Divine Comedy than anyone except Virgil or Beatrice.
Recanati, near Ancona, Beniamino Gigli died in.
Michael Faraday’s father was a blacksmith.
Sarah Josepha Hale.
As a form of preventive medicine, Voltaire took an enema at least three times a week.
Hart Crane did not finish high school.
George Gershwin did not finish high school.
John Cheever did not finish high school.
Marlon Brando did not finish high school.
‘Twas brillig.
Albert Einstein’s estate came to no more than $65,000.
Karl Marx left less than two hundred and fifty pounds.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
Gigli’s legato.
There is such a thing in this state of Louisiana as the Napoleonic code, according to which whatever belongs to my wife is mine also — and vice versa.
One’s response if asked to answer quickly: What language did Jesus speak?