Archives for May 2021

“A memorandum is wrtten not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.”

Dean Acheson (quoted in The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 8, 1977)

“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifies in a contemptible struggle.”

Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents

Harry James and his big band play Lester Young’s “Lester Leaps In” on The Ed Sullivan Show. This episode was originally telecast live by CBS on February 14, 1960:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“She raised her head and he saw her eyes, that gleam, that look that could change his life if he let it.”

Elmore Leonard, Rum Punch

From 2017:

Alas, the American Orient Express went bankrupt before I could book a trip to nowhere, and I doubt I’ll get another chance to relive the good old days of luxury train travel. Not enough Americans love trains to make it worth anybody’s while anymore. Unlike me, they see them as slow, bumpy, exasperatingly uncomfortable ways of getting from point A to point B, not as the miraculous vehicles of romance about which Johnny Mercer and Jimmy Van Heusen wrote so evocatively and well….

Read the whole thing here.

“It’s only in one’s older age that one does one’s best work. Youth and old age are the two greatest moments; middle-age is the enemy of art.”

Orson Welles, in conversation with Peter Bogdanovich

Tanaquil Le Clercq and Jacques d’Amboise dance Jerome Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun on the CBC’s “L’heure du concert” in 1955:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“There’s a rule, I think. You get what you want in life, but not your second choice too.”

Alison Lurie, Real People