Alicia Markova almost never in her career weighed more than ninety-eight pounds.

Was it Brigid Brophy who gave up on a certain Virginia Woolf novel when she discovered that Woolf believed one needed a corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne?

February 25, 1547, Vittoria Collona died on.

The first time that Ethel Waters sang Stormy Weather, in a show at the Cotton Club, she was given no fewer than twelve encores.

A Metropolitan Opera audience once demanded so many curtain calls after a Renata Tebaldi Desdemona that she finally came back out with her coat and hat on.

All the fruit will fall from any tree beneath which a menstruating woman happens to sit.

Says Pliny’s Natural History.

While also announcing that women who sneeze after making love are almost certain to miscarry.

The film Carmen Jones, with Dorothy Dandridge.

In which the dubbed lyric soprano voice is that of a very young Marilyn Horne.

The 1915 Cecil B. DeMille film of Carmen itself, with Geraldine Farrar.

Silent.

Stephen Crane was officially cited for bravery while a foreign correspondent during the Spanish-American War. At Guantánamo.

Will no one free me of this turbulent priest?

Canterbury, Joseph Conrad is buried in.

The only exercise I get these days is walking behind the coffins of my friends who took exercise.

Said Peter O’Toole in his late sixties.

Karl Marx regularly read Shakespeare aloud to his young children.

????A scheme of Robert Boyle’s, roughly 330 years ago, as recounted in Aubrey’s Brief Lives:

At his owne costs and chardges, he gott translated and printed the New Testament into Arabique, to send into the Mahometan countreys.

Every word of importance is already in the Koran. Anything in any other books can only be pernicious.

Having been the Muslim rationalization for destroying all 700,000 volumes in the great library at Alexandria in 642.

Is T. S. Eliot the only poet one can think of who could have spent a year on his own in Paris at twenty-three — and managed to have no sexual encounters whatever?

You have but two topics, yourself and me, and I’m sick of both.

Johnson once told Boswell.

I come of a people who do not even acknowledge Jesus Christ. Why am I supposed to acknowledge Abstract Expressionism?

Asked Jack Levine.

The porphyry disc near the center of the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, marking the spot where Savonarola was burned at the stake in 1498.

The statue of Giordano Bruno on the spot in the Piazza Campo de’ Fiori, in Rome, where he was burned in 1600.

Not distinguished looking in any way — neither handsome nor ugly, neither fat nor thin, neither tall nor short.

Said George Eliot of Dickens.

A peculiar face — not handsome, very ugly indeed.

Said Charlotte Brontë — of Thackeray.

No course in Shakespeare was taught at Harvard until as late as the 1870s.

Quentin de La Tour, harmlessly deranged in his later years — and frequently seen talking to trees.

Another of Novelist’s economic-status epiphanies:

Walking four or five blocks out of his way, and back, to save little more than nickels on some common household item.

While needing to stop to rest at least two or three times en route.

Writers are the beggars of Western society.

Said Octavio Paz.

There is no way of being a creative writer in America without being a loser.

Said Nelson Algren.

Finding oneself momentarily startled by a reference in Gorky’s diaries to Tolstoy chatting with Chekhov.

On the telephone.

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night.

Says the King James translation of Psalms 91:5.

Thou shalt not nede to be afrayed for eny bugges by night.

Says Miles Coverdale’s earlier version.

A designated area for booksellers existed in the central market in Athens as far back as in the fifth century BC.

The report from that same era to the effect that Aeschylus gave up writing after members of an audience were killed when a tier of wooden benches collapsed during a performance of his work.

At least one of Modigliani’s sculptures was carved from a discarded construction-site stone — because he could not afford to pay money for something better.

Jean-Baptiste Lully’s confessor once refused to grant him absolution unless Lully agreed to destroy the score of a recent opera, which the confessor believed blasphemous. Lully let the work be burned and was properly shrived.

With an extra copy safely set aside.

Neither Graham Greene nor Evelyn Waugh ever learned to drive a car.

I always said God was against art and I still believe it.

Said Edward Elgar — while impatiently awaiting acclaim.

All artists are bores.

Unquote. Clement Greenberg.

By the sentence of the angels, by the decree of the saints, we anathematize, execrate, curse, and cast out Baruch Spinoza, the whole of the sacred community assenting —

This trivial and vulgar way of union; it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life.

Declaimed Sir Thomas Browne — about sex.

Organized Christian denominations and their individual congregations:

Chain stores and their retail outlets, Thorstein Veblen called them.

Duke Ellington and Miles Davis are buried in the same Bronx cemetery.

Chopin was buried in Père Lachaise in Paris — but with Polish earth later sprinkled on the grave.

— There shall be no man speak to him, no man write to him, no man show him any kindness, no man stay under the same roof with him, no man come nigh him.

The greatest novel ever written.

Kingsley called Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

November 6 or 7, 1944, Hannah Senesch was executed on.

As his once extraordinary fame in France’s literary world faded, Chateaubriand also became extremely hard of hearing.

He only thinks he is deaf because he no longer hears himself talked about, Talleyrand said.

Virgil was five years older than Horace.

Wondering when and where the last casual streetcorner conversation in Latin might have taken place.

Norma loquendi.

The rumor that Frieda Lawrence’s lover after Lawrence’s death, whom she asked to transport Lawrence’s ashes from France to New Mexico, indifferently dumped them — and substituted no one knows what before the Taos reburial.

Mouse-poor, Robert Graves describes John Clare as having been.

Drunk as a mouse.

Chaucer somewhere writes.

A sub-human species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our time.

General George S. Patton compassionately described Jewish concentration-camp survivors as.

Picasso. Cézanne. Matisse. Braque. Bonnard. Renoir.

All of whom painted portraits of Ambroise Vollard.

Cartier-Bresson. Brassaï. Man Ray. Lee Miller. Robert Doisneau. Robert Capa. David Douglas Duncan. Cecil Beaton.

All of whom photographed Picasso.

George Washington’s will called for the freeing of his slaves.

As had Aristotle’s for the freeing of most of his — 2,100 years earlier.

More’s Utopia, in which women are granted full and equal rights to education with men — dated 1516.

Pulmonary fibrosis, Marlon Brando died of.

Don’t keep talking to me about nature, said Corot. All I see out there are Corots.

A 1940 letter from Béla Bartók, new in New York, about attempting to go by subway from Forest Hills, in Queens, to lower Manhattan —

And spending three mystified hours underground before sneaking shamefacedly home — his words — without ever achieving his destination.

Turner’s eternal stovepipe hat.

Eliot’s bowler.

Saul Bellow’s fedora.

A precious, priestly, hothouse darling.