Pronounced Luther.

World War II — started by sixty kikes.

Pronounced Ezra Pound.

Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God.

Pronounced the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem — well before a State of Israel existed.

While also citing Adolf Eichmann as both gallant and noble.

To sit for John Singer Sargent, Yeats appeared in a velvet coat and a billowing bow tie — and then carefully arranged a lock of hair to fall across his forehead.

All this to remind himself of his importance as an artist, Sargent said he said.

The last time anyone mentioned William Saroyan.

Eleusis, Aeschylus was born in.

Colonus, Sophocles.

Salamis, Euripides.

T. S. Eliot missed military service in World War I because of a hernia.

Pound had astigmatism.

Andrea del Castagno’s masterwork, a last supper, was painted at the Convent of Sant’Apollonia in Florence in 1447.

And was not seen by other artists for four hundred years — because of the convent being closed to laypersons.

The state should keep me, Schubert once suggested. I have come into the world for no purpose but to compose.

Now that a certain portion of mankind does not believe at all in the existence of the gods, a rational legislation ought to do away with the oaths.

Wrote Plato — 2,310 years before an act of the United States Congress added the phrase under God to the Pledge of Allegiance.

Suddenly taking a moment to wonder — does anyone any longer make use of Morse code?

I pay well. But the wenches are all whores and pigs.

Says a Michelangelo letter about a servant problem.

André Malraux had reached Spain within two days of the start of the Civil War in 1936.

Living the classic impoverished artist’s life while a student in Milan, Giacomo Puccini was once forced to pawn his overcoat — as he allows one of his characters to do in La Bohème.

In El Diario de Madrid, February 1799, a first advertisement for prints of Goya’s Caprichos:

On sale at No. 1 Calle del Desengaño, the perfume and liquor store.

Beatrix Potter had to pay to publish The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

I am hungry. I am cold. When I grow up I want to be a German, and then I shall no longer be hungry and cold.

Wrote a Jewish youngster in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Not long before his death, Toulouse-Lautrec spent several months in a mental institution, being released only in care of a guardian whose portrait he then painted.

My keeper when I was mad, he inscribed it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s shockingly limited aesthetic sensibilities in every area except music. His virtual consecration of third-rate American pulp fiction detective stories, for instance.

Or his unashamed admission that Carmen Miranda and Betty Hutton ranked as his two favorite film actresses.

The earliest known reference to London by name, dated as long ago as 61 AD — in Tacitus.

Columbus, Mississippi, Tennessee Williams was born in.

In an Episcopal rectory.

Moments in which Novelist does something like leaving his desk to retrieve a book from across the room — and finding himself staring vacantly into the refrigerator.

Or tossing his keys into a drawer — without having opened the drawer.

In Meleager’s first-century BC anthology of Greek verse, an epigram in honor of an extraordinary woman —

The one who slept with only one man in her life.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, on realizing that he feels a certain kinship with Whitman:

As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a very pleasant confession.

Don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden: your father had an accident there.

John von Neumann was twenty-nine when he was appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton — for life.

André Gide had a sexless marriage with a first cousin.

In spite of his admitted homosexuality, he also had an illegitimate child by another woman.

In Vermeer’s paintings, repeatedly, letters being read or written.

In the real world — not one known word of any sort in Vermeer’s own hand.

Manet’s earliest major canvas, The Absinthe Drinker.

The only absinthe drinker here is the painter who perpetrated this madness, said Couture.

I’d rather not sing than sing quiet.

Janis Joplin said.

The Hiroshima survivor who remembered rushing into the street amid the chaos and tripping over someone’s severed head.

And hysterically calling out Excuse me.

A stark naked man standing in the rain with his eyeball in his hand.

Another survivor recalled.

The ashes of Shelley’s heart. Which Trelawney had scooped from the flames when the corpse was burned on the beach at Viareggio in 1822, and which were passed on to Mary — and were found in her copy of Adonais after her death in 1851.

Any asino can conduct. But to make music, eh? Is difficile!

Said Toscanini.

Rubens, in his early sixties — with arthritis so severe that both hands were paralyzed.

Rubens.

I’ve never read Shakespeare because the print’s too small.

Says someone in Odets.

Wondering how things worked at the Institute for Advanced Study. Come noon, might von Neumann casually poke his head into Einstein’s office and ask if he felt like lunch?

J. D. Salinger was awarded five battle stars as a staff sergeant in the European Theater in World War II.

Evelyn Waugh saw combat as a major with British commando units in North Africa, Crete, and Yugoslavia.

The Medieval poet Probus, whom Walafrid Strabo deemed superior to Virgil or Horace or Ovid — and whom no one any longer knows anything whatsoever about.

Paganini’s legendary showmanship. Which included sometimes deliberately breaking a string midway through a performance — and going on with only the remaining three.

Wallpaper, George Steiner dismissed much of Jackson Pollock as.

Extremely expensive wallpaper, Kenneth Rexroth made it.

Someone once asked Caruso if he considered himself the world’s greatest tenor.

Not unless John McCormack has suddenly become a baritone, Caruso said.

Why Diogenes had been noticed begging alms from a statue, a citizen wished to know.

To get into practice at being ignored, Diogenes explained.

The so-called Wicked Bible. Dated London 1632.

In which the word not was omitted in the seventh commandment.

Samuel Johnson’s compulsive inability to stroll past a picket fence without superstitiously touching each separate picket as he went.

Remembering that in the Odyssey Odysseus himself is not first seen until Book V.

And then is seen weeping.

Rudolph Valentino was dead at thirty-one.

Mithridates, he died old.

If you think you understand it, that only shows you don’t know the first thing about it.

Said Niels Bohr re quantum mechanics.

In an era when singers frequently embellished music to their own taste, Rossini once complimented Adelina Patti on an aria from The Barber of Seville — and then asked her who the composer was.

Claude Lorrain’s Coast View with Acis and Galatea, which Dostoievsky once saw in Dresden and writes in A Raw Youth of having dreamed about.

And writes in The Possessed of having dreamed about.

And writes in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man of having dreamed about.

Emily Dickinson’s refusal to sit for a photographer.

Henrik Ibsen was virtually never known to take off his hat without immediately combing his hair — having even glued a small mirror inside the hat to make use of when he did so.

September 23, 1835, Vincenzo Bellini died on.

April 8, 1848, Gaetano Donizetti died on.

There was no memorial of any sort for Byron in Westminster Abbey until 1969.

Still always slightly surprised to recall — that John McCormack died an American citizen.