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“... How I got into this. John Sturrock called from the LRB. He knows that I like opera a lot, and that I now and then get tired of writing papers about the mind/body problem for philosophy journals. ‘Would I like to report on the new pop version of Aida? (Elton John, Tim Rice and, rumour has it, a transparent swimming-pool ...”

“... Elton​ John was born Reg Dwight in 1947 in the north-west London suburb of Pinner. His mother was a nightmare, his father a bully. He was a boy who did not start thinking about sex until he was 21. While he shared an interest in football with his father – they both supported Watford – his father didn’t approve of his taste in music ...”

“... and maybe more than just as an editor. His narrative is entirely about being taken seriously by Elton John, Princess Diana, George Michael, Anthea Turner, Richard Branson, Paul McCartney, Patsy Kensit, Ian Botham, Jordan, Mohammed al Fayed, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. (If there are names in that list you haven’t ...”

“... to recalibrate libel damages at an acceptable level restarted the meter too high. A jury had given Elton John £350,000 damages against the Sunday Mirror for an untrue story which claimed he was chronically bulimic and was on a bizarre diet that involved chewing food and spitting it out. Of the damages, £75,000 was to compensate him for the harm to his ...”

“... all been a failure.’ Blair flashed with silent dismay. Hearing the truth was unpleasant. With Elton John, another guest, seated nearby, there was no opportunity for a proper discussion but Anderson’s views on the NHS were no secret. Blair’s reforms were grinding to a halt. Indeed: must be hard to have a serious policy discussion when ...”

“... from a London jury for a libel in a Greek paper whose London circulation was a few hundred copies. Elton John got a million pounds from the Sun, which had suggested he’d had a relationship with a rent boy. The wife of the Yorkshire Ripper was awarded £600,000 for an article, published six years before she issued her writ, which suggested that she had ...”

“... Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (2015), which was published with blurbs from Elton John, Noam Chomsky, Piers Morgan and Stephen Fry, not exactly a ready-made support group. It has a chapter on Anslinger and Holiday. Hari suggests that the kind of argument I have quoted from the file was an aside – though it sounds to me rather more ...”

“... Sir Geoffrey Elton’s latest reflections on the state and status of his subject illustrate the Coleridgean maxim that a man is more likely to be right in what he affirms than in what he denies. Arising from lectures delivered, one imagines, off the cuff to an audience at the University of Michigan, they consist for the most part of soundings-off against a rogues’ gallery of ideological and academical types and tendencies which he believes constitute a threat to the proper study and use of the past ...”

“... by a gust of testosterone and a few tumbleweeds of pubic hair: the Old Man, the Deep Male – Iron John. Iron John, a short work of psychological, literary and anthropological speculation by the poet Robert Bly, ‘dominated’ the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year, and has made, as we shall see, a heavy ...”

“... of lyrics, Goddard is the culmination of all his rock ’n’ roll predecessors – Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen – as well as what’s best in funk, soul, reggae – and, of course, the influence of such master saloon singers as Nat King Cole and Tony Bennett. In Goddard’s ...”

“... sack, and POMO lapsed into obscurity, until a strange thing, a kind of historical rhyme, occurred. Elton John bought Watford Football Club and appointed the energetic Graham Taylor as manager. Taylor, looking for a way of fulfilling his boss’s ambition of making Watford into a First Division team, came across a statistical survey which showed that the ...”

“... 18 November. By the time you read me, anything might be happening. Brian Clough or Bob Stokoe or Elton John could be the new England manager, nursing bruised dreams for the World Cup in 1986. On the other hand, Sir Ron Greenwood might even now be contentedly inspecting the hotels in Bilbao, hoping to find a likely venue for the lads next summer. Thanks ...”

“... people I have come across’. One of Hudson’s biggest all-time thrills was being spoken to by Elton John. How can a man who has been thus honoured take orders from a joyless frump like Dave Sexton? As Hudson remembers it, the brightest soccer talents of his day – Alan Hudson, Stan Bowles, Tony Currie, Charlie George – were systematically ...”

“... with West Side Story – ‘I like to be in America, everything free in America’ – move on to Elton John, and eventually mouth the English words to the tune the band is playing: ‘This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to New York island.’ ‘In Athens,’ Storace writes, ‘they are dancing at lavish weddings to American ...”

“... of, say, Vic Damone – or would it have been Andy Williams? Things have changed, I know, and Elton John is now a sort of minor Royal, but still . . . Something sufficiently Alf-like squats in Glenn, we’re led to feel. He likes to come across as icily on top of things but we can sense a crock of inner turmoil. And his relationship with spoken ...”