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“... like an evasion, a tricksy manoeuvre by Coetzee to sidestep saying what he ‘really’ believed. Peter Singer, one of Coetzee’s designated respondents, was particularly exasperated: ‘I prefer to keep truth and fiction clearly separate.’ Others saw it as an effective polemical gesture, concisely articulating the proposition that ideas are always an ...”

“... inside the grotty warehouse where the band rehearsed; most striking are those showing the band’s singer, Ian Curtis, pale and brooding, lit by dusty light. Cummins also photographed the band standing in the snow down by the cathedral, and on a bridge overlooking Hulme, a huge 1960s housing estate. The four band members looked like refugees. Morrissey of The ...”

“... Cambridge only woke up to the great achievements of Peter Stern when he died there aged 70 in 1991. Stern’s adoptive university, to which he found himself evacuated from the LSE after arriving from Prague as a refugee from Nazi anti-Semitism, became his home for half a century; but although he taught there for many years and remained devoted to his college, St John’s, Cambridge failed adequately to recognise his stature during his lifetime ...”

“... Racism gig took place at the Princess Alice pub in Forest Gate in October 1976, with the blues singer Carol Grimes. To advertise the concert, RAR supporters spraypainted an image onto a plain white sheet, photographed it, and then reduced the image to a flier. In their enthusiasm, they forgot to include the time of the gig. Security was put on by the Royal ...”

“... and a distinguished career as an accountant among the big names of the City (Barings, Ansbacher, Singer and Friedlander, Hill Samuel) had prepared him perfectly for his chairmanship of Astra, a burgeoning, middle-ranking arms and explosives company which he had built up since 1981 with the help of the directors of a Scottish fireworks ...”

“... being prone to clowning and lavatory humour. Think of the babyish and buffoonish Amadeus of Peter Shaffer’s play. Or the impetuous, tousle-haired and disconcertingly North American figure in the Milos Forman film, stalked through the Vienna night by Antonio Salieri to the sound of the Dies irae from the Requiem. Franz Niemetschek, Mozart’s ...”

“... of the ship, that’s the plot. There’s a minor one, more mysterious and improbable, about a singer who tries to jump overboard (but is dissuaded by Scurra) because her lover has broken his promise to join the ship at Queenstown. The reason is that he died of a heart attack in Manchester Square the night before the Titanic sailed. The person who saw him ...”

“... depicting nasty sacrifices. We see, with a sort of embarrassment, the caked make-up of an opera-singer and the line where her coarse wig meets her forehead; then we see her audience, less painted but equally theatrical and anxious to impress. What looks like a fast panning shot across this audience turns out to be a set of stills in rapid sequence, like a ...”

“... room, trying poses, making faces, approving of herself in the mirror. The music is all oldies – Peter and Gordon’s ‘A World without Love’, for example, from 1964 – and the record player makes an even larger gesture to the past than the music itself. Ellie is about to leave home (in Redruth, Cornwall), where she lives with her grandmother. She is ...”

“... to the Republic, high craft to folk culture, Catholic to Protestant everyday life. Heaney met the singer and filmmaker David Hammond in the ‘pre-Troubles, upbeat folk scene Belfast of the mid-1960s’; through him, and after the move to Dublin, he ‘got to know a lot of people, north and south, who were involved with traditional music’, among them Garech ...”

“... should do a bit of digging: Crosby is a fascinating character. As well as a subtly revolutionary singer he was a technophile obsessed with recording techniques, and with how best to refine and update them to suit the new, softer style of singing and playing. Crosby was the original ‘crooner’ when the world was full of vocalists who belted out songs to ...”

“... smart to take proper note of his elders and betters. Commending a recent Prom performance of the Peter Grimes Sea Interludes, a Guardian music critic remarked that the ‘Moonlight’ interlude formed a link with Elgar, whose First Symphony was also played at the concert. At the same time he regretted that the Grimes Passacaglia wasn’t included. Earlier ...”

“... in a film. The same sense of deception and truth preying on each other governs the photography (by Peter Deming). We see pieces of a world or a person, corners of rooms, gardens full of ferns, characters appearing behind screens or glass. The evidence is everywhere, but do we know how to interpret it? The effects in the cabaret are all mechanical. The muted ...”

“... the fourth section Lisa has recovered under Freud’s analysis and resumed her career as an opera-singer, remarrying and going to live in Kiev with her Russian husband, also a singer, whose first wife Lisa had understudied. He disappears in the Stalinist purges, and in the fifth section Lisa and her stepson are murdered in ...”

“... the year that Little Richard – a Macon native who had made a small name for himself as a gospel singer before switching over to rhythm and blues – recorded ‘Tutti Frutti’. Redding fell in love with the song, and with Little Richard’s voice, which he found himself capable of imitating. In 1957, when Little Richard returned to the church and left his ...”