Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime

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Lady Killearn

The Dowager Lady Killearn, who has died aged 105, remained, in old age, as vivacious, colourful and controversial as she had been as the glamorous young wife of Britain’s wartime ambassador to Cairo. An only child, Jacqueline Aldine Leslie Castellani was born in Ceylon on January 13 1910. Her mother was a Yorkshire Protestant, but Jacqueline took more after her Italian father, Sir Aldo Castellani, a flamboyant Florentine bacteriologist turned Harley Street doctor who discovered the parasite that transmits sleeping sickness, pioneered various vaccinations and founded the International Society of Dermatology. Sir Aldo was a raconteur, monarchist and snob, and his roll-call of patients included Rudolph Valentino, Elsa Schiaparelli, Guglielmo Marconi and Umberto, the deposed king of Italy. At the time of Jacqueline’s birth her father was head of the British government clinic for tropical diseases in Ceylon. A great dancer and a great flirt, in due course she was presented at Court in London, and was one of the outstanding debutantes of her year. Her fragile, porcelain-doll beauty, her exotic and sophisticated background and her vivacity won her many followers.

Luther Blissett

Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and social activists all over Europe and South America since 1994. In Italy, between 1994 and 1999, the Luther Blissett Project (an organized network within the open community sharing the "Luther Blissett" identity) became an extremely popular phenomenon. An example: January 1995, Harry Kipper, a British conceptual artist, disappears at the Italo-Slovenian border while touring Europe on a mountain bike, allegedly with the purpose of tracing the word 'ART' on the map of the continent. The victim of the prank is a famous missing person's prime-time show on the Italian state television. They send out a crew and spend taxpayers' money to look for a person that never existed. They go as far as London, where novelist Stewart Home and Richard Essex of the London Psychogeographical Association pose as close friends of Kipper's. The hoax goes on until "Luther Blissett" claims responsibility for it.