BP will hope that having a new partner will work out better than it did for Anna Karenina, who flung herself in front of a train after the disintegration of her relationship with her replacement Russian lover.
Pablo Picasso: "Good artists copy, great artists steal."
No one has ever bothered to explain what "good" or "bad" jazz really is. When you see a live performance, you may be watching a 60-year-old musician playing a 100-year-old piece.
Of Nabokov's 19 fictions, no fewer than six wholly or partly concern themselves with the sexuality of prepubescent girls.
The painter was also a shrewd businessman; he mixed indigo and madder to replicate the effect of the period's most expensive pigment, Tyrian purple, which was extracted from sea snails and worth more than its weight in gold.
CNN's challenge is to attract more viewers when no one is shooting anyone or blowing anything up.
Back when newspapers were king, Charles Brownson, an American congressman, used to say that one should never quarrel with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.
Artists came to paint and sculpt, writers to write, deadbeats to die, and a large share to drink and misbehave.
Only twice did George Martin, the Beatles record producer impose himself: at the start, insisting that they replace Pete Best as their drummer, and at the end, when he agreed to record "Abbey Road" if they stopped fighting.
Socrates's bugbear was the spread of the biggest-ever innovation in communications – writing. He feared that relying on written texts, rather than the oral tradition, would "create forgetfulness in the learners' souls… they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves." Enos Hitchcock voiced a widespread concern about the latest publishing fad in 1790. "The free access which many young people have to romances, novels and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth." (There was a related worry that sofas, introduced at the same time, encouraged young people to drift off into fantasy worlds.) Cinema was denounced as "an evil pure and simple" in 1910; comic books were said to lead children into delinquency in 1954; rock'n'roll was accused of turning the young into "devil worshippers" in 1956; Hillary Clinton attacked video games for "stealing the innocence of our children" in 2005.