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“... officially attributed to ‘Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe’ (see also Lady Sings the Blues by ‘Billie Holiday with William Duffy’). Depending on mood, ethnicity, ideology, drug of choice, an oral biography can strike the reader as an authentic reproduction of voice, in all its self-contradictory rhythm and curl – or borderline racist, like some ...”

“... be even more bizarre. But there is a large preponderance of American names, ranging from Poe to Billie Holiday and Lenny Bruce. The starry cast of international oddments runs to the likes of Rimbaud, Nijinsky and Modigliani, and as far back as Thomas Chatterton, the Romantic stereotype. As an aid to the study of an important public theme, the list is ...”

“... Holman: ‘Am I Blue?’ delivered in a velvet contralto, without a trace of the vulnerability Billie Holiday brought to the number. That’s appropriate. The man in the song would have been the one to wake up alone, rather than Libby, and if he followed the example of her other lovers he would then dash off and crash his car/take an overdose/shoot ...”

“... and imaginary, in the Indiana woods: ‘Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Cather and Hypatia and Patsy Cline.’ An old chemistry textbook now features a liturgical calendar, its red-letter days including ‘the Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and ...”

“... He was rumoured to be working on a magnum opus (he started the rumour), a book of essays on Billie Holiday and the blues. This was a real investment, the abyss of the uncommissioned. A publisher who had expressed some interest was confounded by the extracts that arrived. Penman became a spectral tourist in his own autobiography. Sometimes it took ...”

“... Crane and the last words we would have in our mouths at that moment of surrender.’ His idol was Billie Holiday, who gives the name to one of his best short poems. The speaker is looking for his girl, who has been taken away by a figure ‘as a god’. It ends:If you find anyoneanswering their descriptionplease let me know. I need themto carry the ...”

“... of women and the aestheticising of their pain. Once you get to Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe or Billie Holiday or Lena Zavaroni, the thrill has become a fetish, and you can see how self-change and death-throes have become in a rather naked way the bigger part of their performance. Michael Jackson has all of that by rote, and is distinguished among such ...”

“... act of speaking encodes its own muted sense of triumph and resilience. As he put it in ‘Song for Billie Holiday’,What can purge my heart         Of the song         And the sadness?What can purge my heart         But the song         Of the sadness?Hughes considered jazz, like the blues, a form of resistance to conformity and ...”

“... Emancipation Park (formerly known as Lee Park). This ‘pastoral scene of the gallant South’, as Billie Holiday might have described it, was open to anyone who hated black people and Jews, from members of the Ku Klux Klan to neo-Nazis. Emboldened by having an ally in the highest office in the land, they came with Confederate ...”

“... tantalising vignettes we have of the young Elizabeth Bishop on Key West, for example, in bed with Billie Holiday; or Natalie Barney, who took her last lover at the age of 80; or Vita Sackville-West, one of whose lovers cherished the marks on her inner thighs left by Vita’s earrings. Carstairs would undoubtedly figure nobly in such a history – that ...”

“... in which alikeness rather than difference could be explored.’ Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about Billie Holiday, ‘Songs for a Coloured Singer’, is called out for appropriation in 1983:This is a white woman’s attempt – respectful, I believe – to speak through a Black woman’s voice. A risky undertaking, and it betrays the failures and ...”

“... Roman Catholic!’ In her own telling, or the lady’s, her evenings sound desperately lonely: Billie Holiday on a loop, all that rain, all those cats. It’s difficult to imagine this being the same woman who, working on a corridor nicknamed Sleepy Hollow, pegged the door open, brought in potted plants, and painted her office ceiling Wedgwood ...”

“... as a surprise. We find it hard fully to take in the reality of the ‘strange fruit’ of the Billie Holiday song. One can read a huge amount about the Holocaust and yet, when confronted with the face of a woman looking up at her killers from a pit full of naked bodies, still be taken aback. One feels the same seeing children in a lynching postcard ...”

“... through a plate-glass window. I also wanted to get perfect grades. No: the major dissipations this holiday were candy and coffee and buying things online with just one click. Before I left, Blakey had given me some chocolate cigarettes, and at night, lying on my back under the covers with the laptop on my stomach – my mother had put me in the little upstairs ...”

“... meant the Hollywood films of the Weimar émigré Douglas Sirk; for Penman, it was Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday and disco. ‘Fassbinder,’ he writes, ‘as someone who was both hedonistic and thoughtful, radical and radically in love with popular forms, seemed like some kind of post-punk ideal.’Penman aimed, he says, to ‘retain traces of the book ...”