Category: Biography
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Ian Fleming’s Bond
Essay · Literature & Culture The Man Who Cannot Be Killed James Bond was created in 1952 by a bored, unhappy, recently married former intelligence officer writing his first novel in a Jamaican house he had built to escape from England, and he has refused to die for seventy years. The refusal is the most…
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Georges-Eugène Haussmann
Essay · Architecture & History The Man Who Demolished Paris to Save It Georges-Eugène Haussmann did not build Paris. He destroyed it, systematically and at enormous speed and with the full authority of an emperor behind him, and what he built in its place was something that had not previously existed: the modern city, with…
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Arthur Jafa
Essay · Art & Ideas The Question He Has Been Asking for Thirty Years Arthur Jafa has organised his entire artistic life around a single question: how do you make a Black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of Black music? The question sounds like a problem of aesthetics. It is, in fact, a…
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The Human Condition According to Shakespeare
By Bergotte The series has moved, so far, through poets who held clear philosophical positions: Homer’s unflinching mortality, Ovid’s philosophy of change, Dante’s architecture of love. William Shakespeare holds no clear philosophical position. He holds all of them. He is the writer who most completely refused the consolation of a settled view, who gave the…
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The Beatles
Essay · Music & Ideas Four Men and the Thing They Were Saying The Beatles did not set out to have a message. They set out to make girls scream, to get out of Liverpool, to be bigger than Elvis, and they achieved all three with a speed and a completeness that left them, by…
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Carrie Fisher
Essay · Literature & Lives The Princess Who Wrote Her Way Out Carrie Fisher was a movie star who became a writer, which is the reverse of the usual trajectory and considerably the more interesting one. The writing she produced — the novels, the memoirs, the one-woman shows, the screenplay work, the wit deployed in…
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Debbie Reynolds
Essay · Film & Lives The Girl Who Outlasted Everything Debbie Reynolds was not the most critically celebrated actress of her generation, nor the most artistically adventurous, nor the one the serious film culture tended to reach for when it needed an example of Hollywood at its best. She was something rarer and in some…
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Albert King
Essay · Music & Lives The Velvet Bulldozer Albert King was six feet four inches tall and played a right-handed guitar upside down and left-handed, without a pick, bending strings that were already fighting him — strung the wrong way, the tension reversed, producing a sound so specific and so irreducible that no one who…
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The Human Condition According to Dante
By Bergotte No work of literature begins more universally than the Divine Comedy. Not with a king or a war or a cosmogony, but with a man — any man, every man — who has lost his way in the middle of his life. Dante Alighieri wrote the greatest poem of the Middle Ages and…
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Frank Bowling
Essay · Art & Lives The Painter Who Crossed Every Ocean Frank Bowling arrived in London from British Guiana in 1953 with no art education and a desire to be a poet, and became, across the following seven decades, one of the most significant painters working in the English language — a phrase that would…
