To get a sense of just how divisive Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership was, one need only look at the British pop charts during her reign (1979-90). In 1980, The English Beat were already demanding her ouster with a catchy ska anthem called “Stand Down Margaret.” By 1988, former Smiths frontman Morrissey was fantasizing about putting “Margaret on the guillotine” and wondering “when will you die.” (He later claimed to have been questioned by Special Branch over the lyrics.) A year later, Elvis Costello gleefully envisioned “tamping the dirt down” on her grave. She would hold out until 2013, managing to induce deep levels of disgust in her opponents more than 30 years after her transformative rule. They banded together in an attempt to make “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” the No. 1 song the week of her death. (It reached the second spot.) To her legions of fans, she was the most consequential British leader since Winston Churchill, breaking the back of the miners unions, lowering taxes, defeating the Argentinian junta in the Falkland Islands, and revivifying the British economy.
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When he died in March, Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's Marxist caudillo, left a disastrous legacy: an utterly destroyed economy, astonishing rate of inflation, scarcity of basic goods like milk and rice, one of the highest murder rates in the world, and a politically polarized society that looked to be on the brink of civil war. Loud, crude, and intellectually unsophisticated, Chavez was but another in a long line of Latin American saviors, whose only real legacy was an absurd cult of personality and a clutch of Western fans devoted to his reductionist, reactionary, and anti-American politics. Today, his embalmed body lies in a mausoleum (an honor only afforded to noted democrats like Lenin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh). He died of cancer, claiming until his ignominious end that it was the CIA who infected him with the disease.
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Nelson Mandela engaged in both armed and intellectual struggle against an authoritarian and racist white-minority government, was jailed 27 years for his resistance, and emerged, as most obituarists were quick to point out, with a felicity for compromise and an astonishing lack of bitterness towards his persecutors. When commentators and journalists confidently predicted that post-Apartheid South Africa, which he led until 1999, would further Balkanize on racial lines and ultimately spiral into civil war, it was Mandela that managed to hold the nation together. He attracted fawning celebrities and provoked multiple slobbering biopics. But Mandela was that rare leader: a politician uncomfortable with beatification but wholly deserving of hagiography.
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Born Pauline Friedman, she and her twin sister, Esther (who became Ann Landers), both studied psychology and journalism in college, where they collaborated on a gossip column. Both played the violin and were married in a double wedding ceremony. In 1958 and a recent arrival in San Francisco, she cold-called the editor of the Chronicle and told him she could write a better advice column than the one she’d been reading in the paper. When they met, the editor was unimpressed with her meager credentials, but he gave her a stack of letters seeking advice and told her to come back in a week with her answers. She returned the letters and the answers in an hour and a half. She was hired that day, and Dear Abby was born. She took the name Abigail from the Book of Daniel: “Then David said to Abigail … Blessed is your advice, and blessed are you.” Millions would agree with him for half a century.
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He was like a big kid without a mean bone in his body. He was so nice he never got thrown out of a game. He liked to play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on his harmonica. The boyishness extended even to his stance at the plate, where he looked, it was said, “like a kid peeking around the corner to see if the cops are coming.” After that it was all grown-up business, and anyone who underestimated him never made the same mistake twice. As Leo Durocher once said, “There’s only one way to pitch to Musial—under the plate.” His contemporaries Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio got more of the spotlight back east, but out in the Midwest, Musial was king, a lifelong Cardinal who thrilled fans with his power at the plate and more than that, with his consistency. His career high of 3,630 hits was exactly divided: 1,815 at home and 1,815 on the road. He drove in 1,951 runs and scored 1,949. But he was never dull, once hitting five home runs in a doubleheader. Some players are lucky enough to get a statue of themselves installed outside a baseball stadium after they retire. The Cardinals gave Stan the Man two statues, and they’re probably still wondering if that was enough.
Dilip Vishwanat
The Irish writer Seamus Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995, was perhaps the most celebrated poet of his generation, in an era when a general reader might have a hard time naming a living poet at all. So well-known was he that he was nicknamed Famous Seamus, with his easily recognizable mane of unruly white hair and jolly cheeks that seem to overwhelm his pencil-thin eyes and lips. Heaney’s verse was often charged with being “accessible,” as if poetry was somehow supposed to be unfathomable. He sold more books in Britain than any other living poet of his time, and he was one of U.S. president Bill Clinton’s favorite poets. When Heaney was struck by a near-fatal stroke in 2006, Clinton paid him a visit, and the president joked that he named his dog Seamus after the poet. In 1995, Clinton quoted Heaney’s play The Cure At Troy during a speech in Londonderry about the Northern Ireland peace process: “When History says, don't hope/ On this side of the grave./ But then, once in a lifetime/ The longed-for tidal wave/ Of justice can rise up,/ And hope and history rhyme.” It is, of course, no sin that important poetry is also easily quotable—Heaney was instantly acclaimed after he published his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966, which features the now-classic poem “Digging,” celebrating Heaney’s father and grandfather, who were very good with a shovel. “I’ve no spade to follow men like them./ Between my finger and thumb/ The squat pen rests./ I’ll dig with that.”
Mario Carlini - Iguana Press
Dutch, as his friends called him, was not only one of America's greatest crime writer—he was one of America's finest writers, period. Sure, many of his books were turned into films—3:10 to Yuma, Out of Sight, Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, Hombre—but his characters were already very much alive, silver screen or no. Dutch wrote the best dialogue since Evelyn Waugh, so if you want to hear what the American voice sounds like, just open one of his 40-odd books and enjoy.
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O’Toole was one of the last links to the golden age of English acting. Noel Coward said that if O'Toole were any prettier, Lawrence of Arabia would have been called Florence of Arabia. He was a handsome actor, but it was his voice that was the last word on English sophistication. Lawrence of Arabia made him a star overnight, but anyone who's seen him do Shakespeare will recognize a born thespian.
Anonymous
For a halcyon time in the 50s and 60s, American comedy broke away from the stand-up routine into a world of improvisation and free association that nurtured geniuses ranging from Bob and Ray to Nichols and May. But no one could top Jonathan Winters for truly inspired comic riffing or surreally endearing characters (Elwood P. Suggins, Maude Frickert). There was something almost other-worldly about his comedy, which he tacitly acknowledged when asked, after being institutionalized for a nervous breakdown, what he had learned from the experience: “Never come down alone.”
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The Nigerian author Chinua Achebe wrote the first and still the best Great African Novel, his debut Things Fall Apart of 1958, about the decline and fall of the proud Okonkwo, leader of a collection of villages among the Ibo people of Nigeria who are besieged by changes wrought by British colonization. He went on to write about the Ibo in No Longer at Ease, and was something of an oracle when his fourth novel, A Man of the People, ended with a coup, and a bloody one actually broke out on Jan. 15, 1966, the day the book was published. The accuracy of A Man of the People’s events was such that the Nigerian government that took over after a counter-coup (and genocide) thought that Achebe must have been a conspirator, and he was forced to flee to Britain, and then the U.S. At the center of Achebe’s legacy is his clear analysis of Africa, which the world sees as a homogenous continent of malfunction and despair. Achebe attacks the use of Africa as an empty metaphor, which he voiced in a now-legendary Chancellor’s Lecture he gave at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, on Joseph Conrad’s racism.
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Country star George Jones was great at doing two things: wrecking his life and singing. He was one of the greatest American voices, category bar none. He wasn't much of a songwriter, a guitar player, nor was he particularly good looking (he was called Possum because he kind of looked like one). But every time he sang into a mic it was magic. When he wasn’t singing, Jones was a hard-partying train wreck. His addiction to drugs and drink and his antics were so epic that he was called “No Show Jones," for all the concerts he missed. But boy, could he sing.
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Clancy was the author of dozens of military thrillers, including the bestselling Jack Ryan series, and the movie adaptations of The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, and The Sum of All Fears made millions at the box office, with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit still to come in 2014. He made millions more co-founding the game developer Red Storm Entertainment—now that's a multimedia empire.
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The Sopranos changed television, setting off the current great scramble for high-quality cable dramas. It would have never happened were it not for the charismatic, magnetic performance of Gandolfini as Tony Soprano.
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What if every one of the 30,000 folks who bought The Velvet Underground's first album, to riff on Brian Eno's quip, had actually started a band? They still would not have written as many great songs as Lou Reed did during his short time as the group's frontman and during his long career as a solo act. That early success didn't cling on to "All Tomorrow's Parties," "Heroin," "Pale Blue Eyes," "Rock and Roll," and, for god's sakes, "Sweet Jane," all of which were perfect pop songs of the most profound variety, will forever be one of the great mysteries and tragedies of rock. Think of all the gritty classics we might have gotten with 10 years of Velvet, whereas Reed had to move back in with his parents after the band broke up. But then again, "Satellite of Love," "Walk on the Wild Side," "Perfect Day," Berlin, and New York were still to come.
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Doris Lessing was born in what is now Zimbabwe, and many of her 50-odd novels drew on her exotic childhood. But she is best known for 1962’s The Golden Notebook, which was considered a “feminist Bible” of sorts. It chronicled the mental breakdown of the writer Anna Wulf as she records her life in five notebooks (one of them gold-colored) about family, women’s liberation, Stalinism, Africa, and, most innovatively, sex, with topics like affairs and orgasms and menstruation talked about openly. In 2007 she became the oldest Nobel laureate for literature, at the age of 88.
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