A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, silent, empty, pure white, and, at the end of it, the huge and majestic form of Saint Paul's Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes a real-life snow globe.
The creative output of that tribe was so immense, and their bohemian adventures so inspiring, that I wrote and published a historical novel, The Ashtrays Are Full and the Glasses Are Empty featuring many figures from the Lost Generation.
A prolific polymath, Sand published 70 novels, as well as travel writing, criticism, autobiography, political polemic and visionary essays on the interconnectedness of the natural world. She founded several politically progressive periodicals and became a highly successful playwright. But none of it came easy. When she burst on to the Paris scene in 1831 at 27, writing for Le Figaro, she became immediately notorious as a woman in a man's world.
The Oscar Wilde that entered Napoleon Sarony's New York studio in 1882 was fresh-faced, yet to pen the plays and singular novel that would make his name. But he was no unknown quantity. As captured by the photographer, Wilde was an aesthetic: his outfit of velvet jacket, silk knee breeches, and slippers crowned with grosgrain bows cutting the figure of a dandy who had captivated London society with his keen wit.
Ever feel like you're playing a character in your own life? Like you're constantly adjusting your personality based on who's in the room, what they might think, or what seems "acceptable" at the moment? I spent years doing exactly that. Morphing into whatever version of myself I thought would get the most approval, the least conflict, or the best opportunities. It was exhausting, and worse, I started losing track of who I actually was beneath all those masks.
For long, many in art, academia, and popular culture have trumpeted the Marquis de Sade as a symbol of poetic transgression against society's stiff mores. He was put on a high pedestal despite being a certified rapist who took orgiastic pleasure in hellish torture and abuse. Among his spiritual followers, so to speak, was one Jeffrey Epstein from Manhattan's Upper East Side. The latter had friends in high windows who celebrated him as a business and math guru with slightly eccentric taste in women.
Carved on the walls surrounding her sarcophagus were more than 150 ancient Greek poems in which Bilitis recounted her life, from her childhood in Pamphylia in present-day Turkey to her adventures on the islands of Lesbos and Cyprus, where she would eventually come to rest. Heim diligently copied down this treasure trove of poems, which had not seen the light of day for more than two millennia.
Tonight is the press night for Arcadia's second major London revival at the playwright's home from home, The Old Vic where he made his name with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. An extremely witty and intellectually dazzling masterpiece, the play in typical Stoppardian fashion examines man's drive to impose systems of order and disorder on the world, the dialectical tension that exists between art and science, sex, the laws of thermodynamics, chaos theory and landscape gardening amongst many other popular dinner table subjects.
