The man sitting in front of me should be awarded an MBE for Services to Older Women. Not that Stephen Vizinczey wrote the global bestseller, In Praise of Older Women - which has sold over seven million copies since it was first published in 1965 - out of charity or condescension. No. He wrote it out of love: a love he still feels viscerally, more than 50 years since the book's publication in Britain.
Late November saw Rules Don't Apply, Warren Beatty's first film in fifteen years, bomb at the US box office, making just a million dollars from over 2,000 screens and ranking as one of the worst Thanksgiving weekend debuts in film history.
Sir Elton John's art collection, amassed entirely since he "dried out" in 1990, includes paintings by starry artist friends such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.
My father used to say the most wonderful thing," says Christopher Rauschenberg. "It was something like, 'I feel sorry for people who think that soap dishes or Coke bottles are ugly, because they're surrounded by that stuff, and it must make them miserable'."
Martin Roth announced earlier this month that he is ending what is arguably the most successful directorship in the long and sometimes troubled history of the world's greatest decorative arts museum, the V&A. During his five-year reign, attendances have tripled to three million.
Last autumn, the Pitts, as they then were, released a curious Euro-art-movie called By the Sea, directed by her and starring them both, about a couple with raging marital problems at a French seaside resort. Few saw it, and the critical reception was generally unkind - it was accused of being a vanity project, a wispy and vain white-people-problem movie by the superstar couple de nos jours.
I can't say I've ever been much of a cat person, but until now I'd never felt a deep and unassuageable longing to chase one down the street with a flame thrower. That's all changed, though, thanks to Nine Lives, a film in which Kevin Spacey turns into a cat, and which makes the Garfield movies from ten years ago look like peak-form Billy Wilder.
Something extraordinary has happened at the Old Vic. A much-loved, ingeniously funny and clever Hollywood film has made a triumphant theatrical rebirth - in a show that looks, on first viewing, equal to, and perhaps better than, the movie.
When staging a blockbuster art exhibition, it is usual for curators to call on the leading museums of the world to loan their finest objects.
Margaret Drabble, an English novelist, biographer and critic, asked, "Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?"
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