Context & Continuity

WNYC - Our Lenny

A 13-day Exploration and Celebration of Leonard Bernstein’s Enduring New York Legacy

Some excellent on-demand shows here:  [more]

@ t/ Intersection of Jerry Hall and Tom Stoppard...

From The Guardian, 8.16.9:

The words of Jerry Hall, model and actress, 53

On the man who has most stimulated her mind

Tom Stoppard ... Alain de Botton ... No, Henry Kissinger.

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Even More on Stoppard

For the burgeoning file, All Things Stoppardian, here's an interview from all the way back in January from the London Evening Standard.

Tom Stoppard: My passion

Stoppard's wholehearted embrace of Englishness has become as much a part of his established persona as his autodidactic intellectual brilliance. He left Pocklington school at 17 to work as a reporter and drama critic for the Western Daily Press in Bristol, but after his first stellar stage success with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in 1967, he bought into the whole package. Cricket, watercolours, country houses, first editions of Dickens, the lot. As his eminence grew — not just in theatre, radio and television but increasingly as an adapter and polisher of screenplays — there was the CBE, the knighthood, the Order of Merit.

His Englishness seems a sort of decorous carapace. It prevented any autobiographical detail from seeping into his early work, and prevents him ever discussing his two marriages, or his relationship in the Nineties with his sometime muse Felicity Kendal. It even, apparently, shielded him from self-examination or deferred grief when he learned, after his mother's death, that he is wholly Jewish and lost all four grandparents and three aunts in the Nazi death camps.

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The Hurffington Post, 8/4/9: Tom Stoppard and Laura, Euna and Atwar

"Journalists of your generation," said British playwright Tom Stoppard yesterday to a roomful of students gathered at the Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change, "very often and quite rightly are considering things you'd like to change in the world -- if possible, by Tuesday. You could hardly do worse than write a play about them. I've always felt that journalism, and I include very definitely television journalism, has far more immediate leverage."

Yesterday a call to action by a Tony and Academy-award-winning playwright. Today, our attention here in Austria turned to North Korea to watch the drama of the pardoning of two television journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who had been sentenced to 12 years at hard labor for entering North Korea illegally.

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