“... not. Many of Rossetti’s dead use their coldness to control the overconfidence of the living: the singer in ‘Song’ urges her lover not to grieve, because, when dead, ‘Haply I may remember,/And haply may forget,’ a casualness which implies that he is not nearly as important as he might think. ‘Remember me,’ another dying lover pleads, before ...”

“... judges her crisply. In what she wrote about other professional women – Madame de Staël and the singer Giuseppina Grassini, for example – one senses not so much intimacy as an understanding based on shared experience. The need to please and be pleased, to combine skill as a painter with deference, to demand much of yourself but be easy as well – all ...”

“... write books than I accept, I am not available to ghost the memoirs of this or that actor or opera singer, and I would never agree to work in advertising. On the other hand, I am perfectly prepared to do a full-time job which does not utilise my skills as a writer, and to get on with my writing in my spare time. I have a gift for organising my time ...”

“... three girls behind him were 14 years old. The same question could be raised in relation to another singer, Bryan Ferry, or the actress Minnie Driver, or the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby. How exactly did Epstein come to have ten numbers for Peter Mandelson? We are all, to some extent, defined by the company we keep, and if ...”

“... in rock bands. He wrote and played experimental modern classical music. He was an open-hearted singer-songwriter. He made music for every possible mood: something to play during the snoozy afternoon, a 12-inch to light up the dancefloor later on, and some sonic mist for your early morning chill-out. He even recorded two versions of some songs, one for the ...”

“... Ifirst​ knew Malcolm McLaren as a singer. His was the oily voice on ‘You Need Hands’, which appeared on The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, a sort of soundtrack album released early in 1979. The film itself, which came out fourteen months later, was a fable charting McLaren’s orchestration of the rise and fall of the band he managed, the Sex Pistols ...”

“... rests mainly with Frieda’s daughter Cathy, a rather miserably aspiring Country and Western singer, and her sleazeball husband Howie, who sports a pencil-thin moustache and ‘a secret rash which stopped in a clean line at his collar and the cuffs of his shirt’. Cathy’s brother Mort is a more sporadic presence, while the other brother, Jack, has ...”

“... that British Intelligence had rumbled him. He knew that this was why Alasdair Milne and Aubrey Singer were overruled by an MI5 vetting officer when they tried to appoint him editor of the Listener in 1981. He would certainly have known what the political fall-out of his exposure might be. But he did nothing to prepare any friend or comrade, on or off the ...”

“... for a surrogate mother in every relationship,’ says Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be looked after, sometimes dominated, by a series ...”

“... their passion and solace from charges of idiocy, rather than from the musicologically qualified: Peter Conrad’s A Song of Love and Death is a distinguished and often fascinating example of this phenomenon. Attempts to transform (or, in Conrad’s case, deconstruct) La Sonnambula or Les Pêcheurs de Perles into matter worthy of learned discourse also ...”

“... spirits, dancing the twist to Michael Jackson songs performed with a Russian accent by a local singer. The men had taken their jackets off and their shirts were tight. ‘You know what Russians mean when they say they oppose the state?’ Bella asked. ‘It means they can screw it over.’ As a bookkeeper she saw first hand Little Russia’s illicit ...”

“... Book and the Savoy, publicity fliers, journalistic ephemera and large-scale posters advertising Singer Sewing machines as well as avant-garde theatre productions. Beardsley was the first innovative artist whose success was based on photogravure – a technique that enabled him to work directly from ink drawings which were photographically reproduced and ...”

“... said to an interviewer in 1913, when the Armory show was scandalising the US). He was a joker and singer of rude songs, a Northerner who found many of his friends from the North also. He had a small allowance from his father, but he was poor and had to live from hand to mouth. He was not celibate. For five years he lived with Camille Job-laud, a young woman ...”

“... been sent from Sirius to found a secret brotherhood on earth, is certainly one of the strangest. Peter Sellers should be living at this hour to play P.B., a cross between the retarded sage of Being There and the monk of Terry Southern’s Candy. Born Raphael Hurst, a Jewish Londoner, in 1898, P.B. transformed himself by means of cosmetic surgery, extensive ...”

“... was so thorough that he took the Al Jolson role of cantor’s son in a 1952 remake of The Jazz Singer. On the show, it fell to Uncle Tannous to expose the Lebanese heart beating within the American persona of Thomas’s character. With his Ottoman moustache, three-piece suit and bundles of goat’s cheese and stuffed vine leaves, Uncle Tannous incarnated ...”