“... he’s given to such formulations as ‘my capital literary agent’ and ‘the amiable singer Cliff Richard’. Repetitive, prolix, not always persuasive in his reasoning and given to occasional dark murmurs about conspiracies, Tolstoy sometimes seems like a character out of Pale Fire. But his biography wrestles honestly with his stepfather’s ...”

“... Simon and Garfunkel, Otis Redding and Janis Joplin, who he said reminded him of an old-school jazz singer like Bessie Smith, but was saddened by Hendrix and The Who, with their sacrilegious destruction of instruments. ‘I am immediately repulsed by anything ugly that sends out bad vibrations,’ he wrote in 1968.In the context of 1960s hippie ...”

“... his novel set in 18th-century Naples. In Les Trois Femmes de ma vie the young Dominique listens to Peter Pears singing Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo in a booth at the HMV shop on Oxford Street, with a thrilled sense of eavesdropping on two levels of erotic complicity, not only between Michelangelo and his beloved but also between ...”

“... of struggling would-be stardom in Beckenham. He’d been in half a dozen bands as a saxophonist, a singer and a mime artist; he’d styled himself as a Mod, a hippy and a Buddhist; he’d called himself Davie Jones, David Jay and David Bowie (after Richard Widmark’s portrayal of Jim Bowie in The Alamo, though he pronounces it the southern English way, the ...”

“... postwar renaissance. Thomas Bernhard was the acknowledged leader of the dissident pack, with Peter Handke and the Forum Stadtpark group from Graz representing the next wave of an obligatory avant-garde. Jelinek was at the young end of this group, but gained instant recognition within it. It was her natural mode to épater les bourgeois, starting with her ...”

“... truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of love and delight that survived the longest. When ...”

“... was born Barbara Joan Streisand in 1942 in Brooklyn. Her mother, Diana Rosen, was a gifted singer; Streisand never shook the feeling that her mother was jealous of her. When she was fifteen months old her father, Emanuel, died of a seizure at a summer camp in the Catskills, and Streisand, her mother and nine-year-old brother moved first to her maternal ...”

“... Alusuisse, a company of which Max Huber was chairman, used 1200 slave labourers at its factory at Singer in Germany to produce aluminium and arms for the war effort. Huber donated his salary from Alusuisse to the ICRC and there is nothing to prove that he knew about the slave workers, but the questions raised by this episode are disturbing, and disturbingly ...”

“... than it will break its contemporary code of stylistic practice. Nor, in a classical symphony, is a singer going to pop up after three instrumental movements to sing a song for the finale. (Moreover, when the expected conventions are broken – as in the first ever irruption of vocal into abstract in Beethoven’s Choral Symphony – such an event, if ...”

“... in solo playlets which are astonishing for their stagecraft. As a combination of writer, actor, singer and self-producer he is more plausibly compared with Noel Coward than with any of the cabaret stars. But Humphries, along with the right to shock, claims the right to bore. The originals of his satirised characters bore him, and he takes his revenge by ...”

“... older to maintain even the semblance of sexual restraint, he ended his days in confinement, where Peter Gay reminds us he once tried to molest his visiting daughter. Gordon’s Austin ought to have anticipated the problems of his marriage. Sue Dickinson had such a terror of childbearing (her sister having died of puerperal fever) that before their marriage he ...”

“... nine-to-five wage-slave grind found its most vivid street-level expression in avid consumerism. As Peter Gay put it, paraphrasing Walter Gropius: ‘The cure for the ills of modernity is more, and the right kind, of modernity.’ This could be Mod speaking. Gay’s reflection is from his 1968 book Weimar Culture, and its subtitle is also applicable here: The ...”

“... and flat, Vulcan-like affect, usually tops the list. Last year, the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel told an audience that in the current economy people ‘who do not suffer from Asperger’s are at some massive disadvantage’ because they’re more likely to fall prey to caution, complacency and the conventional wisdom of the crowd. It​ isn’t ...”

“... if they were also critical of it. The remarkable story of the GDR’s expulsion in 1976 of the singer, poet and committed Communist Wolf Biermann because of his advocacy of reform, and what that symbolised, goes unnoticed, which is a bit like writing about the United States during this period and not mentioning Bob Dylan or Joan Baez, only worse. More ...”

“... four of us went to a bar called Mona’s. Most of the people there were lesbian couples … the singer was a very tall and beautiful blonde in a strapless evening gown … H – smilingly – had to tell me she was a man.’ The drag chanteuse matched ‘a man of medium height – dark Italian face – who, at this point, a little more observant, I know to ...”