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“... I have no special love for the voice of Enrico Caruso, perhaps because it does not need me to rescue it; classic, impervious, it awaits eternity – it has already arrived at eternity – and demands no fan, no patient posthumous acolyte, to alchemise it. The Caruso voice, as his son describes it, in Enrico Caruso: My Father and My Family, a story as pathetic, plodding and perverse as any I have read, is a pure column of air; without flaw, it assails low and high notes alike with plump machismo, sometimes sobbing, sometimes finishing off the breath with a punctuating snarl ...”

“... to the late 19th century, but 1902 seems to have been a particularly busy year. It was then that Enrico Caruso made his first recordings (in a hotel room in Milan); the choir of St Andrew’s, Wells Street (then considered the best church choir in London) made the first gramophone record of choral music; and the only recording of a castrato was ...”

“... which are gone.’ But what we do undeniably lack are figures of the legendary status embodied by Caruso, Chaliapin, and Callas, to whose hagiography the books under review here make dubious contributions. All three have attracted, both in their lifetimes and posthumously, a worldwide fame that can only be compared to that of their Hollywood counterparts. In ...”

“... in which every room had been named after a supposed turn-of-the-century guest – Isadora Duncan, Enrico Caruso, Luisa Tetrazzini – and decorated in an appropriate style. She climbed laboriously up to a small ‘chamber’ – it was the Jack London room – in one of the mansion’s towers where, among a plethora of nautical bric-à-brac, she ...”

“... with watches. Her mother, Marguerite, a more vivacious personality, had intended to name her baby Enrico Caruso and bragged to visitors that Carson cried in tune. Marguerite, in the traditional mould of stage mothers in places where stages are hard to come by, believed that her daughter was extraordinary in some unspecified way. She was so set on her ...”