Josephine Baker adored him. Cher would have loved him. Liberace would have hired him. He was George Barbier, the creator of flamboyant, glittering, over-the-top costumes for flamboyant, glittering, over-the-top people. Barbier's designs were visual glories, often adorned with paste jewelry, flowing t

Art nouveau fashion, Decorative, Excessive, Fantastic, Glamour, Overflowing

'Moli're was not just a playwright,' wrote scholar Ethan Mordden. 'Moli're was a thespian, wholly of the theater, and his compositions breach the gulf between literature and performance, between language as its own art and language as a tool of art.' Like Shakespeare, who was an actor first, Moli're

Clever, Dystopic, Excessive, Funny, In-your-face, Ironic, Renaissance theater

In Sophocles' world, the gods have receded. They've already determined (more or less) the fate of human beings and are content to watch from a comfortable distance. Of course, it's unclear exactly what their motives are; it all seems basically arbitrary and cruel. Indeed, the morality of the gods is

Classical, Classical greek, Excessive, Pathos, Sublime, Tense, Tragic, Violent

It's rare that a biographer has a life more interesting than his own subjects, but Lytton Strachey was a biography waiting to happen. The eleventh child of an Indian civil engineer and the essayist Lady Jane Strachey, Lytton went from being a proper history student at Cambridge to living life as a de

Bloomsbury, Clever, Excessive, Glamour, Perverse, Profane