“At 84, the man considered by many to be the world’s greatest living painter—and its priciest, too, at least at auction, where his record stands at $46.4 million for 1986’s Abstraktes Bild, just behind Jeff Koons’s $58.4 million sculpture Balloon Dog (Orange)—is still vigorously creating work. But before he created these paintings, he had barely put brush to canvas in four years.”

“Melville fell in love with the dashingly handsome older author the first time they met, and his forbidden passion drove him to create the symbol of impossible longing that now represents American literature to the rest of the world: the white whale. Moby-Dick has never before been considered a work of romantic longing, but here are five reasons to believe that Melville’s masterpiece is a profound statement of love denied.”

“Could sensory processing help explain the personalities of people we might otherwise just think of as ‘sensitive’? Might people with Sensory Processing Disorder even be at the extreme end of a spectrum of sensitivity that developed as an evolutionary advantage?”

“He made his name in Reginald Goodall’s highly acclaimed Ring Cycle with English National Opera in the late 1960s and went on to work with many of the leading singers of the day, including Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti and Montserrat Caballé. It was a remarkable journey, comparable in many ways with Jon Vickers’s transformation from Canadian lumberjack to acclaimed Heldentenor.”