Lowell Thomas, the first newscaster voice most Americans (and British people) heard on their first radios, “helped pioneer a more sober style of journalism. Lowell quickly realized that there were people among his hundreds of thousands and then millions of listeners who would write letters and complain to his network if he got things wrong. Because [the radio broadcast] had so many listeners and he was such a dominant figure, what happened there also spread to other iterations of radio, then TV, then newspapers. Lowell contributed to the fact obsession that journalists have today.”

“It seems that what happened was that Cliburn simply stopped growing, as though he was trapped in a creative stasis like a bug in amber. One thinks of James O’Neill, a distinguished actor who was the father of Eugene O’Neill. In later life, he only took on one role—Dumas’s Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo—and eventually played it more than six thousand times around the world. He made a great deal of money, but reproached himself for what he considered the squandering of his gifts. Likewise, Cliburn returned again and again to the Tchaikovsky concerto, long after he had ceased to have fresh insights into it.”

“[She] made it her mission in the 1970s and ′80s to cover art and artists overlooked by the mainstream press through the journal Art-Rite, which she helped found, and in the pages of Artforum.”

“There is no one in the British cultural world more single-minded, more monkishly devoted to the arts as a civic and public necessity, more able to bend events to his will. … When he arrived at the Tate in September 1988, it was an affectionately regarded and faintly parochial museum; he left it earlier this month one of the most powerful forces in the international art world.” In a Guardian Long Read, Charlotte Higgins looks at Serota’s career as he moves on to lead Arts Council England, the country’s cultural funding body.