“... and Marc Almond among them.Not since the Supremes and Diana Ross had a pop group produced a lead singer so clearly destined for solo success. ‘Careless Whisper’, though co-written with Ridgeley, had shown that Michael could thrive alone. He was out to Ridgeley privately and had his support, but Ridgeley’s inability to contribute equally to the music ...”

“... opened his mouth. The first time I saw him on TV was during a celebration of the ageing pop singer Alla Pugacheva; he reminded her that she’d once said she liked sleeping with her husband because he reminded her of Nemtsov. It was a strange performance for the future hope of Russian democracy. I spent a week with Nemtsov many years later, in ...”

“... is well known as a rock critic). Ian Curtis seems to have been the model for the band’s lead singer, Lucas Black, whose brain condition results in short-term memory loss, hence his copious written notes. The people around Black are either hopelessly attracted to his ‘endearing combination of, like, startling intellect and this weird childlike ...”

“... antagonists who resemble one another: the devout Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein/IRA and the devout Peter Robinson, a Loyalist leader who has gained in clout since the programme. There will be those who think that the new Robinson is partly due to the fact that, in the programme that was eventually transmitted, the public was allowed to listen to Robinson’s ...”

“... who emerges at the end of the poem to embody these feelings is an elderly, one-eyed woman, a singer of ballads, who resembles, in Patrick Creagh’s translation, an early version of Yeats’s Crazy Jane: Woman whose face is worn and green As pebbles in a mountain stream, Tears of love have cracked your skin! This woman rarely appears in Les Amours ...”

“... composer and one-time producer, Alexander Goehr remembers – and as a medium for listening to. Peter Maxwell Davies recalls how, as a boy on a council estate in Swinton, he would listen ‘every evening, more or less from the moment it started till the moment it shut down, while I was doing my homework. And it was the best education I could ever have ...”

“... lives, talk and attitudes of the vast majority of the population in past times belong to what Peter Laslett calls, hauntingly, the world we have lost. The Diary of Thomas Turner claims notice as a sustained insider’s account of how ordinary people lived from day to day in a pre-industrial English village. On Thursday 27 December 1756 two of Turner’s ...”

“... his raw experience unmediated by study or refinement. ‘The sight of this primitive blues singer gazing up at the lights of Times Square is not only banal, it is bizarre,’ Greil Marcus wrote in 1975. Gradually, the image morphed into something more modern: ‘Robert Johnson may be the first ever rock star,’ the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame said when ...”

“... he favoured. The latest biographical and interpretative analysis of Gould is by the psychiatrist Peter Ostwald, the author of interesting psycho-biographies of Nijinsky and Robert Schumann; a good amateur violinist, and a friend of the pianist, Ostwald died of cancer before his book was published, but was apparently able to finish his manuscript despite the ...”

“... idol, the great writer Bergotte, he gets a terrible shock: instead of the ‘white-haired, sweet Singer’ of his imagination, he sees ‘a young man, uncouth, short, thickset and myopic, with a red nose shaped like a snail-shell and a black goatee’. The fantasy Bergotte vanishes, but the caricature that replaces him is not intrinsically more ...”

“... our age a new voice, a new sound and a new vision’. In the same year, Brecht married the opera singer Marianne Zoff; their daughter, who became the actress Hanne Hiob, was born in 1923. Hired as a dramaturg at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater, Brecht moved permanently to Berlin in September 1924. His favourite restaurant there, Schlichter’s in ...”

“... my own childhood. I feel that they embrace my own story.In this glimpse of despair and the pop singer that pulls her back, Ernaux offers comfort: in a moment when you feel completely alone, there might still be people there with you, who understand you. And in the telling, she makes herself available for inclusion in the reader’s own invisible chain of ...”

“... his act may look dull and formulaic: he simply got uppity with a luckless straight man called Peter Brough and showered him with childish insults. But he was able to bring on a troop of co-stars – Max Bygraves (‘I’ve arrived … and to prove it, I’m here!’), Tony Hancock, Gilbert Harding, Harry Secombe, Beryl Reid, Bernard Miles and Hattie ...”

“... he spent four years working in Japan before coming home and marrying. Anna Muthesius was a singer and a beauty, with theories of her own about interior decoration and dress reform. With her dark hair piled up under a broad-brimmed hat, high-waisted silk dress and velvet cloak, she looks in a photograph as if she is sitting for Klimt. The couple came to ...”

“... The frontispiece of Olive Schreiner’s novella about the Matabeleland campaign, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), carried a photograph of three Black men hanging from a tree, with white men in hats arrayed in a semicircle around the bodies. The dead men are naked. Some of the living men are dressed in what look like cricket whites. One has ...”