Sir Tom occasionally shades into Saint Tom, thanks to a notably ample collection of friends who remark on his generosity and kindness. He remembers birthdays, he lends money when others are in need, his wit always beguiles. He is an unstoppable correspondent, keeping in touch with everyone, including long-ago landladies, and for 50 years he wrote once or twice a week to his mother. But Hermione Lee astutely observes that his charm can be a form of concealment, a means of detachment. Overall, a “familial feel” characterizes his working relationships, yet his four sons encountered a frazzled man at breakfast who’d worked half the night. – The Atlantic

“When Professor Herbert began delving into Impressionism, the field was threatened by a kind of anemic gentility, arid formalism and French literary theory. His method, by contrast, was to locate works of art within a matrix of social and biographic details, while being careful not to reduce them to the politics of their day, or of ours.” – The New York Times

In fact, he was a very promising art student, excelling at plants in particular, but a professor who worried that he couldn’t support himself as an artist suggested he go into botany — and the rest is history. His career came full circle: one of the 300 uses he came up with for peanuts was to make inexpensive paints. – Forbes

He wrote the screenplays for a remarkable number of important films: Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Belle de Jour, and That Obscure Object of Desire; The Tin Drum; The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Cyrano de Bergerac; The Return of Martin Guerre; ulian Schnabel’s Vincent van Gogh biopic At Eternity’s Gate. In addition, he was a professor, a novelist, and the playwright responsible for director Peter Brook’s nine-hour stage adaptation of the Hindu epic Mahabharata. – The Hollywood Reporter