Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu which was published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.
Charades is a parlor or party word guessing game. Originally, the game was a dramatic form of literary charades: a single person would act out each syllable of a word or phrase in order, followed by the whole phrase together, while the rest of the group guessed. A variant was to have teams who acted scenes out together while the others guessed. Today, it is common to require the actors to mime their hints without using any spoken words, which requires some conventional gestures. Puns and visual puns were and remain common.
In Search of Lost Time, first translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past, and sometimes referred to in French as La Recherche, is a novel in seven volumes by French author Marcel Proust. This early 20th-century work is his most prominent, known both for its length and its theme of involuntary memory. The most famous example of this is the "episode of the madeleine", which occurs early in the first volume.
Quiz Show is a 1994 American historical mystery-drama film directed and produced by Robert Redford. Dramatizing the Twenty-One quiz show scandals of the 1950s, the screenplay by Paul Attanasio adapts the memoirs of Richard N. Goodwin, a U.S. Congressional lawyer who investigated the accusations of game-fixing by show producers. The film chronicles the rise and fall of popular contestant Charles Van Doren after the fixed loss of Herb Stempel and Goodwin's subsequent probe.
Edmund Wilson Jr. was an American writer, literary critic and journalist. He is widely regarded as one of the most important literary critics of the 20th century. Wilson began his career as a journalist, writing for publications such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. He helped to edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Wilson was the author of more than twenty books, including Axel's Castle, Patriotic Gore, and a work of fiction, Memoirs of Hecate County. He was a friend of many notable figures of the time, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. His scheme for a Library of America series of national classic works came to fruition through the efforts of Jason Epstein after Wilson's death. He was a two-time winner of the National Book Award and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.
Vanity Fair is a left-wing American monthly magazine of popular culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast in the United States.
Prince Pierre of Monaco, Duke of Valentinois was the father of Rainier III of Monaco. He was a promoter of art, music, and literature in Monaco and served as the head of the country's delegation to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and to the International Olympic Committee.
Louis James Lipton was an American writer, actor, talk show host, and dean emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University in New York City. He was the executive producer, writer, and host of the Bravo cable television series Inside the Actors Studio, which debuted in 1994. He retired from the show in 2018.
Answered Prayers is an unfinished novel by American author Truman Capote, published posthumously in 1986 in England and 1987 in the United States.
Bernard Pivot was a French journalist, interviewer and host of cultural television programmes. He was chairman of the Académie Goncourt from 2014 to 2020.
Inside the Actors Studio is an American talk show that airs on Ovation. The series premiered in 1994 on Bravo where it aired for 22 seasons and was hosted by James Lipton from its premiere until 2018. It is taped at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University's New York City campus.
Spicks and Specks is an Australian music-themed comedic television quiz show in which the host, Adam Hills, asks two teams, of three people each, varying music-themed questions in different games. Team leaders are Myf Warhurst and Alan Brough. Members of each team vary from episode to episode; one per team generally comes from the world of music and the other from comedy. Scores are kept, but the prize for the winners is simply personal satisfaction. Many games are named after, or otherwise reference, well known song titles.
Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect. In the 19th century a branch of historical linguistics, dialectology is today by some considered a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features. Dialectology deals with such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor and synchronic variation.
Where the Stress Falls, published in 2001, is the last collection of essays published by Susan Sontag before her death in 2004. The essays vary between her experiences in the theater to book reviews.
The confession album, or confession book, was a kind of autograph book popular in late-nineteenth-century Britain. Instead of leaving free room for invented or remembered poetry, it provided a formulaic catechism. The genre died out towards the end of the century, with occasional brief revivals in the twentieth century. The same kind of form is now found in the Dutch vriendenboek, and German Freundschaftsbuch, used by small children; and the questions that the confession album contained live on in the Proust Questionnaire often used for celebrity interviews.
Apostrophes was a live, weekly, literary, prime-time, talk show on French television created and hosted by Bernard Pivot. It ran for fifteen years from January 10, 1975, to June 22, 1990, and was one of the most watched shows on French television. It was broadcast on Friday nights on the channel France 2.
Bouillon de culture was a weekly, cultural, prime-time, talk show on French television created and hosted by Bernard Pivot. The show ran from January 12, 1991 to June 29, 2001 ; it was broadcast on the channel France 2. The show originally aired on Sunday evenings, but it was quickly moved to Friday nights, taking the same time-slot as Pivot's previous literary talk show Apostrophes (1975–1990) which it had replaced. The show covered a wide range of cultural topics, especially literature.
My Struggle is a series of six autobiographical novels written by Karl Ove Knausgård and published between 2009 and 2011. The books cover his private life and thoughts, and unleashed a media frenzy upon their release, with journalists attempting to track down the mentioned members of his family. The series has sold half a million copies in Norway alone and has been published in 35 languages.
Gina Palerme was a French actress and dancer.
Robert Dreyfus was a French writer and journalist who wrote for Le Figaro. During World War I, between January 1916 and February 1919, he was employed in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, working in the ministry's "diplomatic information service" where he compiled a valuable body of documentation concerning the workings of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His contributions earned him a knighthood in 1920.