“The files may finally lay to rest rumours about how Christie’s snatched the Ganz commission from under the noses of rival auction houses. It is also a masterclass in the art of hedging by one of the world’s most successful financial speculators.”
Tag: 04.07.16
Every Night A Singer Destroys This Artist’s Painting (And A New One Has To Be Created)
“It took artist Gerard Gauci a week to paint the whimsical portraits of sopranos Meghan Lindsay and Peggy Kriha Dye, which grace the stage of the Elgin Theatre in Opera Atelier’s Lucio SillaLucio Silla. But it only takes one minute for them to be destroyed when enraged dictator Lucio Silla punches one painting and stabs the other.”
Shakespeare First Folio Discovered On Scottish Island
“Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare studies at Oxford University, said her first reaction on being told the stately home was claiming to have an original First Folio was: ‘Like hell they have.'”
So You’ve Just Won A Literary Prize And More Money Than You’ve Ever Had – How Do You Handle It?
“It’s great to receive a big wad of cash, of course, especially when you’re a writer with an erratic income trying to cobble together a living from part-time day jobs, intermittent advances, peripatetic teaching gigs and the occasional one-time grant. But unexpected sums bring unexpected burdens, both practical (What does this mean for my tax situation?) and psychological (Am I a fraud who does not deserve this money?)”
The Anti-Celebrity Of Great Pianists
“[He] turns out to have been a poor (and uninterested) self-promoter. … He never entered a major competition. He was uninterested in late Romantic concertos. … His book Piano Notes (2002) remained conspicuously silent about his own career. A mind of insatiable curiosity produced one of the greatest writers about music from any era. No surprise that his pianism was both misunderstood and undervalued.”
The Neglected Hodgepodge That Is Brussels (And Why It Doesn’t Work)
“Brussels, that magnificent repository of history, with its Renaissance guild houses and nineteenth-century palaces built on fortunes made in the Congo, is the capital of Belgium, but few Belgians take much pride in it, in the way the French are proud of Paris, or the British of London. To many Belgians, Brussels is a strange city of immigrants, refugees, and foreign grandees. It is still a capital in search of a nation. And if you include the EU, it is also a capital in search of an empire, or a federal state, or whatever it is that Europe is destined to become.”
Why Our Cities Need Public Squares
“The public square has always been synonymous with a society that acknowledges public life and a life in public, which is to say a society distinguishing the individual from the state. There were, strictly speaking, no public squares in ancient Egypt or India or Mesopotamia. There were courts outside temples and royal houses, and some wide processional streets.”