“... 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 ...”

“... jogs doggedly through every step in Callas’s career, an exhausting business in view of the singer’s shuttlecock existence: one can’t blame her for collapsing gratefully into beckoning clichés. But she does convey the frenzied tempo and something of the passion ‘driving her forever on’ – though sometimes it is difficult in the uniformly ...”

“... after Cambridge was become, along with his brother Alexander, an internationally famous folk singer. Having grown up listening to their older brother’s blues records, the McEwens made a pilgrimage to the US, visiting Lead Belly’s widow to see his 12-string guitar and finding themselves, with a characteristic combination of charm, talent and ...”

“... may dimly remember that it was the owner of this club, James Palumbo, who gave a car, a Rover, to Peter Mandelson MP, to help the cause. It is here, at the suitably messianic Ministry of Sound, that the Use Your Vote campaign is organised. Much of the music inside will come from Creation Records, the label which launched Oasis, whose founder, Alan McGee, gave ...”

“... Hits used to call ‘Wacky Thumbs Aloft’ into a humourless billionaire. Among the under 35s, the singer Adele has £165 million and was said to be earning £500,000 a night during her Las Vegas residency, a sum that would bring a tear to the eye of your average prime minister.Appearing at number one on the list for the fifth time in a row are the Hinduja ...”

“... Museum of Ireland’s permanent display in Dublin, in the pages of many books and articles. (Peter Adam’s Eileen Gray: Her Life and Work, revised in 2009, remains the best introduction.) But despite the photographs and exhibitions and the commercial as well as scholarly rediscovery of her work in recent decades, I cannot quite shake the suspicion that ...”

“... 1910 Clara took Agatha, who had given up her youthful hopes of becoming a concert pianist or opera singer, to Cairo for the season to look for a husband. Much to Ms Morgan’s disappointment – she is always eager to find adumbrations of the future in the early life – Agatha showed absolutely no interest in antiquity or archaeology, refusing point-blank to ...”

“... Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Marlene Dietrich (Carstairs’s lover in 1938-39), and the cabaret singer Mabel Mercer, along with the occasional reporter from Life or the Saturday Evening Post. But by the Sixties, Carstairs was all but forgotten – outside the Bahamas, she was known only to a handful of British and American lesbians, in whose doting ...”

“... as the underlying phrase ‘Because I say so.’ He’s not keeping bad company. It’s clear that Peter Greenaway makes films in the same sort of way, imposing sets of rules on himself before he constructs a narrative or creates character (if he ever gets round to that). Peter Reading has taken a similar tack in his ...”

“... Strong) to put enough of a dent in multinational budgets to command serious media attention was Peter Ackroyd, a meticulously re-invented Man of Letters. The others, until Ben Watson elbowed his way onto the scene, have had to settle for a succès d’estime, quasi-academic projects with spin (such as the provocative series edited by Denise Riley for ...”

“... they? Suppose the highwayman demands not your money but that you jump a ravine.AntoniaWhen the singer upstairs starts her scales Antonia goes out walking. There is new white snow over dark slush and mirroring blue-grey skies. To be kissed by something more than the raw sunset wind is what all the old men in Beckett long for too, she thinks, and we have the ...”

“... I’m a Celebrity … Get Me out of Here! will be on later, followed by a documentary about Peter Andre, a previous contestant on I’m a Celebrity who recently split up with the nation’s most frightening glamour girl, Jordan. ITV2 has been running a lot of ads for an album called Coming Home by The Soldiers. The singers are Sergeant Major Gary ...”

“... attention to his delight in female company, archly alluding to a brief liaison with the famous singer Henriette Sontag, and, mysteriously, to a nude painted by Titian which comes to life for his benefit (and which presumably cost him a great deal of money); he speaks of adoring the ‘soulful blue eyes’ and kissing the ‘velvet’ hand of Lady Garvagh ...”

“... own account, Irina was born a nonconformist – even sympathising with the Russian equivalent of Peter Rabbit. As soon as she was old enough to count the change, she went out with the other children to stand in the bread queues. At school they had sums to work out, showing how much the State spent on each of them: why was the State so stingy? It was a ...”