It’s almost obscene how big a star Crosby once was, and how little he seems to mean now

It’s almost obscene how big a star Crosby once was, and how little he seems to mean now. His hugeness can be proven with science. During the war, his radio programmes attracted fifty million listeners in America. Of the five highest-grossing Hollywood movies in 1946, three of them – The Bells of St Mary’s, Blue Skies, Road to Utopia – starred Bing Crosby; he was the number one box office star for five years straight, from 1944 to 1948. He recorded nearly four hundred hit singles, an achievement no-one – not Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Beyonce or Kanye West – has come remotely close to matching, and probably no one ever will.

B. Stanley, Let's do it: the birth of pop (2022), 220

No one would have guessed back in 1912, when it first made its presence known on vaudeville stages, that the blues would become one of the defining sounds of the twentieth century

No one would have guessed back in 1912, when it first made its presence known on vaudeville stages, that the blues would become one of the defining sounds of the twentieth century. No one in the nascent music industry thought of it then as anything more than a fad, a subset of ragtime even, only with a bunch of guitar or banjo notes played together and a vocal style that hovered around a tune, occasionally hitting the note, but more commonly sounding like a moan.

B. Stanley, Let's do it: the birth of pop (2022), 139

This was a high water mark for musical theatre – for great American songwriting, even

In 1927, within a few blocks of Showboat you could have also seen George and Ira Gershwin’s Funny Face, Vincent Youman’s Hit the Deck or Rogers and Hart’s A Connecticut Yankee. This was a high water mark for musical theatre – for great American songwriting, even – but then two things come along to spoil the fun: the Wall Street Crash and talking pictures. In 1928 there were sixty-two shows along Broadway; this would decline to thirty-four in 1931. During the whole of the 1930s, the Great White Way would  host only sixty-eight new musical comedies.

With a very real lack of cash and opportunity for the New York songwriter, the lure of Hollywood – just about the only place in 1930s America where there seemed to be a silver lining – would prove irresistible.

B. Stanley, Let's do it: the birth of pop (2022), 110

No-one had previously been aware that red-hot mamas were endangered

No singer was more indicative of America’s new found effervescence than the insatiable Sophie Tucker, who emerged in 1912, aged twenty-six, as ‘The Last of the Red Hot Mamas’, though no-one had previously been aware that red-hot mamas were endangered.

B. Stanley, Let's do it: the birth of pop (2022), 40

The great epic tales stank, I think, more than the historians give them credit for

'But ... I'm totally unprepared! I have no luggage with me, no nothing.'

'None of us do. We none of us expected this. That is, in general, the nature of adventures. Adventurers tend to smell. The great epic tales stank, I think, more than the historians give them credit for.' 

K. Rundell, Impossible creatures (2023), 111-2

Some sentences have the power to change everything

Some sentences have the power to change everything. They are the usual suspects: I love you , I hate you , I'm pregnant, I'm dying, I regret to tell you that this country is at war. But the words with the greatest power to create both havoc and marvels are these:

'I need your help.'

K. Rundell, Impossible creatures (2023), 57

He was flagrantly lacking in public spirit

The fact is that every large school requires an advocatus diaboli - and at Castrevenford Mr Etherege occupied this important post. He was flagrantly lacking in public spirit. He never attended important matches. He was not interested in the spiritual welfare of his boys. He lacked respect for the school as an institution. In short, he was impenitently an individualist. And if, at first sight, these characteristics do not appear particularly commendable, you must remember the context. In a school like Castrevenford a good deal of emphasis is necessarily laid on public spirit, and the thing is liable to develop, if unregulated into a rather dreary fetish. Mr Etherege helped to keep this peril at bay. 

E. Crispin, Love lies bleeding (1948), 22