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“... 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 ...”

“... not be able to sleep at night because of the back trouble they had developed from stooping over Singer sewing machines both at work and at home. As a reward for these sacrifices they would be shunted into the back room whenever guests came to their home and be expected to emerge sporadically to proffer rounds of milky tea and Indian sweets for fat men in ...”

“... as the obvious turning point in the development of ‘music as thought’. The German composer Peter Cornelius (known to choristers everywhere as the composer of ‘The Three Kings’) asserted that everyone can feel the difference between Haydn and Mozart on the one hand, and Beethoven on the other. ‘Some call it depth, humour, subjectivity … We for ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy ...”

“... less the payola scandal involving radio DJs in the first flush of Savile’s fame. Janie Jones, a singer, appeared at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in 1973 on 26 charges, which included controlling prostitutes and offering them as bribes ‘to BBC men as inducement to play records’. The men in the case were often referred to as Mr Z or Mr Y, or ‘unnamed ...”

“... its way to the library of Cornell University; quotations from it appear in John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello’s 1997 biography of John Stanislaus. On 26 and 27 and 28 May, Charlie Joyce noted that his father was drunk, and again on 31 May and 1 and 2 and 13 and 14 and 15 June. And on Sunday 24 June: ‘Pappie home to dinner very drunk: shouting, swearing ...”