Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (sketch) by John Singer Sargent

“The Point wasn’t to be true to life but to improve on it – to make it grander, stranger, more of a spectacle.”
The New York Times review of A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families by Michael [...]

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“I love this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. It suggests the subtle thoughts of ultimate civilization, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intense pleasures. It throws off bursts of fire and the sparkle of precious stones. It is redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the games of the circus, the [...]

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“Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.”
- From Nadja by Andre Breton.

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“His vocal writing is awkward and pointlessly angular, and he seems to have consciously tried to avoid cinematic flourishes, striving instead to compose a dutifully serious contemporary opera, complete with whiffs of pointillist atonality.”
- New York Times opera critic Anthony Tommasini writing about composer Howard Shore’s operatic version of The Fly.

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“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”
-  John Maynard Keynes, economist, philosopher and husband of ballerina Lydia Lopokova (and lover of Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey etc.)

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“Dark, vampy, mysterious, dangerous – she is edgy and cool. The gothic girl weaves a web, has a sting in her tail, is inspired by black magic and voodoo…She is the one that opens the Pandora’s Box, and to hell with the consequences! She is tantalizing after-dark trouble that dresses in the shadows of the [...]

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