The Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks, whose platinum solo album The Other Side of the Mirror Hine produced in 1989, said: “It seemed that we had made a spiritual agreement to do a magic album in a fabulous Dutch castle, at the top of the mountain. Whenever Rupert walked in, the room was on fire. There was a connection between us that everyone around us instantly picked up on.”
Holland’s slightly short of castles on mountains…..
For the deer on the Isle of Rum it was mating season, but for Gerald Lincoln the nights were lonely. He was on the island to study their breeding cycle, and would not see his girlfriend for weeks at a time. As the chance to see her approached, Lincoln noticed something strange. His face stubble seemed to grow faster. To check that this was the case, he decided to weigh his shavings every morning, and indeed they were heavier by the day. From this he deduced something remarkable: that the level of testosterone, which determines the pace of beard growth, must be controlled by the cerebrum, the part of the brain from which complex thoughts emerge. The more he thought about his girlfriend, the higher his testosterone rose and the faster his beard grew.
He wrote a paper about it, which the prestigious scientific journal Nature agreed to publish. Highly unusually, the piece appeared anonymously, to spare his mother from the knowledge that he was having sex before marriage.
The truly old days, there was also that interim moment when it would have been her father spared such news.
Alan William Parker was born during a bombing raid in London in 1944. He grew up on a council estate in Islington, north London, in 1944.
Imagine growing up in just the one year…..
He was also a regular at the parish church. True to form, he turned up for the service every Sunday dressed as a Cossack.
But this is damn good advice:
an improbable engagement in 1979 with the Royal Opera to play non-singing parts in productions of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes and Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini. The brothers feared such a highbrow enterprise was beyond their compass but were reassured when Roy Kinnear advised: “Look at your contract. Does it say you have to be good?”
Otherwise, though, he rarely backed down from in-your-face lyrics.
The 1990 song Simple Man suggested lynching drug dealers and using child abusers as alligator bait.
His In America in 1980 told the country’s enemies to “go straight to hell”.
and:
He said in 1998 that he kept touring so much because “I have never played those notes perfectly. I’ve never sung every song perfectly. I’m in competition to be better tonight than I was last night and to be better tomorrow than tonight.”
Daniels said his favorite place to play was “anywhere with a good crowd and a good paycheck”.
And yet this is indeed, not just because he’s a boss some levels up, a lovely little line:
That is especially true when the person who made you order the salad rather than the burger, or stop at the second glass of wine — the person, in fact, for whom you were happy to do those things — is no longer there.
Robert Colville on the death of his wife.
Losing a loved one before their time is an awful thing, and I can’t save my children from going through it.
Be thatBe that as it may, Cillian de Buitléar, James’s producer, insisted that she took the business of being an entertainer seriously. “She wasn’t messing around, despite her unorthodox time signatures,” he said. “There was a certain amount of guessing you had to do when she started doing a cover version of a well-known song in rehearsal, but I suppose you could say she was reinterpreting it.”
Could actually be a British one, perhaps readers can tell us whether it spreads further:
Des Seabrook obituary
Blunt Lancastrian rugby coach who inspired his team to beat the All Blacks
This is back in amateur days of course. So, the day job?
His day job during the week was teaching geography
At Worth the geography bloke was also a (or the?) coach at Rosslyn Park. Really not sure whether it’s sporty types become geography teachers or there’s something they put in the water when training the geography teachers.
We have some NZ types here occasionally – same thing happen there? And there’s a Saffer or two, anyone else?
As just recently noted, it’s also the obits where the very English writing ends up:
he was rarely inhibited by sensitivity when it came to enforcing his will…….Perhaps at times he was a little too refreshing in his frankness…..A hip replacement did not deter him from taking up skiing, but he broke his new hip on a trip and was not tempted to go again.
Lovely stuff.
On cultural matters, Dicks was known to his wife as Phil, short for philistine. He believed that opera and ballet should be stripped of their subsidies, describing their practitioners as “the arty-farty crowd who walk around with their hands in somebody else’s back pocket”. He also demanded that the Prince of Wales “dip into his own pocket [or] get a loan from his mum” to save Antonio Canova’s sculpture The Three Graces for the nation and declared that “my pensioners could have two weeks in Eastbourne for a quarter of what it costs to send some [art] curator poncing off to Venice”.
Burnstock hoped for greater things than pre-eminence in the study of goldfish guts. The study of brown trout guts did not exactly satisfy him either, though he did become the world’s leading expert in that too. “Not exactly a highly competitive field,” he later conceded.
Her great-grandfather had been a tailor to Emperor Franz Josef of Austria and her grandfather Franz William Kaupe arrived in England in the 1890s to avoid conscription and carry on his father’s trade as a court tailor in Savile Row. As small boys, Ann’s father and two uncles were sent to work in the attic workshop of a large house in Sistova Road, Balham, to learn tailoring skills.
William became a master tailor in Burlington Arcade on Piccadilly and made uniforms for senior officers of the army, navy and air force throughout the Second World War. While her brothers had careers as a structural engineer and architect, Ann was attracted to tailoring from an early age. Her initial forays involved cutting up her bedspread and making her first evening dress, at age 13, from “bilious green satin”. Far from pleasing her father, he seemed appalled, demanding to know: “Why doesn’t the thread match?”
As Iris Love was hunting for the temple of Aphrodite in the summer of 1967, the goddess gave her a sign. Love, an American heiress and archaeologist whose quixotic image rankled her mustier colleagues, was sailing down the west coast of Turkey in search of the site of the temple when she saw a pod of dolphins, creatures associated with Aphrodite. She followed the pod into the bay of Knidos, where she knew the ruins were buried. “It was August 3, two days after my birthday,” she recalled, “and I thought, this is a great present. And when I saw Knidos itself, somehow I knew that this was part of my destiny.”
The temple was one of the most elusive monuments of the ancient world. It had housed the Aphrodite of Knidos, a statue sculpted by Praxiteles in 365BC and widely copied there after.
After all, logically, everyone knew is was at Knidos, right?
Oliver Duncan Stanley was born in Liverpool in 1925, son of Bernard Stanley, a factory machinist whose parents came to Britain to escape Jewish persecution.
Fairly sure that’s meant to mean persecution of Jews, not by. And yet we’d all agree that “Nazi persecution” would be that by, not of.
A group of scientific friends from Cambridge were planning a trans-Sahara expedition from Morocco to Algeria in 1970 and needed a navigator. He accepted with alacrity and the expedition members became friends for life. As well as plotting the route, Pigott doled out the expedition’s rations, including one Mars bar per day per man. After two weeks the team doctor pointed out that everyone had lost weight other than the rations officer. Pigott came clean, confessing to his chocolate addiction.
This looks a little odd, don’t you think?
John Lucas was born in Lavender Hill, London, in 1929, the son of Joan (née Randolph) and Egbert, an Anglican clergyman who soon took a parish in Guildford. The family then moved to Durham, where his father was appointed dean, and where John grew up in the shadow of the cathedral.
Educated first at the Dragon School in Oxford, where he was unhappy, he found the rigorous intellectual culture of Winchester College more congenial, and went from there to Balliol College, Oxford, to study chemistry on a scholarship. In an early display of his polymathy, he soon switched to maths, and then to Greats, in order to study the Greek philosophers. At Balliol he became friends with Peter Tapsell and Dick Taverne, future Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs. Having taken his MA in 1954,
Erm, do you actually take an MA at Oxford? M.Sc etc, yes, but isn’t an MA just a BA plus 10 years and a fee?
While in the army he met Julia Williamson, a glamorous divorcée who had once been deb of the year. They married in November 1964, though the marriage was dissolved in 1971 and Julia then married Sir Nicholas Nuttall, Bt, a fellow officer who had been Beresford’s best man.
A brawny 5ft 9in, Franzese had frequent brushes with the law in his youth. He was drafted into the US army during the Second World War but discharged after an internal evaluation described him as “psychoneurotic with pronounced homicidal tendencies”.
Great qualifications for a mafiosi and you’d sorta think they’d find a use for them in a war.
Most Albanians view Hoxha’s 40-year rule, when the country was cut off from the world much as North Korea is now and a pervasive secret police clamped down violently on dissent, as a dark period in its history that caused widespread misery and triggered a massive exodus after communism collapsed.
But Nexhmije Hoxha, who was jailed for nine years for embezzlement soon after Albania became the last country to topple communism in 1990, stayed loyal to his memory.
“When the standard of living was compared to the west, it can be considered modest, but there was an egalitarian spirit,” she said in a 2008 interview.
Few would – or do – defend Albania’s lost years on the basis of that headline.
It’s disgusting how many defend Cuba’s on that same basis.
He collected ceramics and for many years had a house in Tangiers.
Although West never stopped indulging in what he called the “rough trade” and had a fondness for S&M and threesomes,
North Africa was, for a time, something of a cliche among that set.