Announced the Reverend Patrick Brontë, in the mid-1840s, to his other offspring.
Karl Marx was for some years a London correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune.
Attempting to detour the young Thomas Aquinas from a career in the church, his family once arranged for a seductive woman to be sent to his rooms.
Whom he chased off with a flaming brand from his hearth.
Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, oh give me back my heart!
For a time, Rilke and Cocteau had apartments in the same Paris building — evidently without ever becoming acquainted.
Every passenger in the non-smoking section of a plane that crashed off Norway in 1948 was killed.
Bertrand Russell had been smoking — and was one of those able to swim to safety.
Ravel once composed music for Diaghilev that Diaghilev never used.
And which almost led to a duel between them.
April 23, 1554, Gaspara Stampa died on.
I don’t very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them.
Said Georgia O’Keeffe.
Harvard was founded in 1636.
The University of Mexico — in 1553.
One of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published.
Edmund Wilson called This Side of Paradise.
Not a lovable man.
John O’Hara said of Scott Fitzgerald himself.
Occasions on which one has seen it transliterated as Theodor Dostoievsky.
A tea-time bore.
Dylan Thomas called Wordsworth.
A son of Einstein’s died in a mental institution at fifty-five — having been confined there for a third of a century.
The relatively recent revelation that Einstein had also had an illegitimate daughter.
Unhesitatingly specifying Pound’s anti-Semitism as the reason, Yevgeny Yevtushenko once refused to appear on the same podium with him at a literary event.
Teddy Dostoievsky?
The Duccio Madonna and Child purchased by the Metropolitan Museum in 2004 for more than $45,000,000.
Which is eight inches wide and eleven inches high.
Jan Peerce. Leonard Warren. Richard Tucker. Robert Merrill.
The Lower East Side. The Bronx. Williamsburg. Williamsburg.
Jacques Derrida failed his entrance exams to the École Normal Supérieure. Twice.
People are exasperated by poetry which they do not understand, and contemptuous of poetry which they understand without effort.
Said Eliot.
We cease to wonder at what we understand.
Said Johnson.
Sir Thomas Beecham once told an orchestra that a certain passage in Mozart should sound innocent — quote — like a breath of spring. It should float on the air like a voice from another world.
When the musicians stared emptily:
Oh, well, anyway, play it legato.
A real good guy.
William Carlos Williams called Emily Dickinson.
A bitchy little spinster.
Denise Levertov saw her as instead.
Géricault’s intensity when at work on The Raft of the Medusa:
The mere sound of a smile could prevent him from painting, someone said.
Ingres’ judgment that the finished version ought to have been removed from the Louvre or even hidden away altogether:
Is it in such horrors that we should find pleasure? Art should teach us nothing but the Beautiful!
If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.
Said a 1920s Texas governor opposed to the teaching of foreign languages.
Persia, as it was still then called, Doris Lessing was born in.
Nobody comes. Nobody calls.
Because bookshops are among the very few places where one can spend time without spending any money, George Orwell noted, any number of practically certifiable lunatics are guaranteed to be regularly found in most of them.
I’ve finished that chapel I was painting. The Pope is quite satisfied.
Wrote Michelangelo to his father, after four years’ effort — and with no further need to let fall brooms or lumber.
So impoverished was Linnaeus as a university student that the closest he could come to repairing worn-out shoes was to stuff the holes with paper.
The general acceptance that it was Antonello da Messina who taught Venice the Flemish method of painting with oils rather than with tempera.
Venice — and thus Italy.
More floggings than meals.
Haydn remembered from his childhood.
Trying to imagine E. M. Forster, who found Ulysses indecorous, at a London performance of Lenny Bruce — to which in fact he was once taken.
Trying to imagine the same for a time-transported Nathaniel Hawthorne — who during his first visit to Europe was even shocked at the profusion of naked statues.
January 22, 1945, Else Lasker-Schüler died on.
Raskolnikov. Minus the last two letters, the word translates as dissenter.
While the pseudonym Gorky means the bitter.
Fifty years after combat in World War I, David Jones could still be momentarily panicked by an unexpected explosive sound like that of a backfiring truck.
And now we three in Euston waiting-room.
Latin, Greek, Italian, and German, George Eliot read.
Latin, Greek, Italian, and French — Mary Shelley.
Hindi, not English, Rudyard Kipling’s first language was.
People who pronounce the word ask as if it were spelled with an x.
As for that matter it was, until the late sixteenth century.
If God had not created breasts, I would not have become a painter.
Renoir once unseriously announced.
A woman’s breast or a commonplace milk bottle — my feelings remained the same when painting either.
Corot soberly insisted.
Nobody comes. Nobody calls —
Which Novelist after a moment realizes may sound like a line of Beckett’s, but is actually something he himself has said in an earlier book.
The name Copperfield came from a sign Dickens had noticed on a shop in a London slum.
Chuzzlewit likewise.
Nothing but obscenities and filth.
Being all Conrad could find in D. H. Lawrence.
Disgust and horror, recorded Abigail Adams after a blackface performance of Othello:
My whole soul shuddered whenever I saw the sooty heretic Moor touch the fair Desdemona.
The revolver with which van Gogh shot himself had been borrowed. Van Gogh having claimed he wished to fire at crows that were annoying him as he painted.
The first requirement for a composer is to be dead.
Said Arthur Honegger.