In memoriam

Michel Legrand,  †26 January 2019 André Previn,  † 28 February 2019 Keith Flint,  †4 March 2019 Jacques Loussier,  † 5 March 2019 Heck, they're all going. In the realms of imagination and belief, things can be incoherent, contradictory. Like the divine trinity, things can be both one thing and three things. (Don't cite my theology, it's not my field.) In some celestial space, at the piano that is three pianos and yet one piano, André Previn, Jacques Loussier and Michel Legrand are having a heck of a session. I'm not sure what the chap from The Prodigy makes of it. He probably sees one piano as three every day. This might all be in his head.

Andrew Sachs, †23 November 2016 The drinks party of the deceased of 2016 has a waiter, albeit one who can understand nobody's order except Castro's.

Gary Rhodes, †27 November 2019 I met Gary Rhodes once. In St. Mark's in Venice, when Rhodes wasn't dead and Venice wasn't underwater. O tempora. You'll read better celebrity anecdotes than that, but none more accurate. My mother cooked a recipe by Gary Rhodes once. Let's say it was a seafood recipe, for the sake of the next line. O tempura. It wasn't a seafood recipe. It was a stuffed bird.

Jonathan Miller, †27 November 2019 I see Jonathan Miller's dead. There's always trouble for somebody. (With thanks to Alan Bennett [at 0:44] , the last of Beyond the Fringe .)

Clive James, †27 November 2019 Vivat Monty Jamesius J. K. Stephen was destined to bear unfavourable comparison long before the Potter author adopted his initials. Cousin to Virginia Woolf, tutor to Prince Albert Victor, friend to M. R. James. He wrote better poetry than his eccentric Latin, but the Latin, being eccentric, is memorable. Perhaps Clive James was like that. He suffered by unfortunate comparison with greater contemporaries. Of the Anglo-Australian set, Barry Humphries had greater wit and Germaine Greer greater intellectual heft, though James had a measure of both. His most memorable work, on television sneering at other television, was probably not his best. The swaggering intellect hid depths of self-awareness, which emerged here and there, in verse or in interviews. After framing an extended and somewhat indulgent metaphor, Sydney Harbour as the maternal womb: " You can't trust poets, you see. They go for the metaphor. The beautiful statement is al...