The list begins with number 20, the very popular in Britain, Katherine Jenkins BUT

"Well, what were you expecting? Neath's favourite blonde continues her stranglehold on the UK's classical charts, but Jenkins struggles even for name recognition around the rest of the world. She claims to idolise Callas, but her treacly mezzo (always miked) is a world away from the Greek diva's quintessentially operatic grandeur and immaculate colouring of the words. (Have you ever tried listening to Jenkins in Italian?) And though she gives good face, it's all in the service of Jenkins rather than any characters she might want to bring to life. She will, she says, sing opera when she's ready; our reaction is - don't hold your breath.

Voice: 2

Visuals: 6

Roles: 0

Back story: 5

Celeb factor: 5

18/50

Watch Katherine Jenkins sing Calon Lan with the Welsh National Symphony Orchestra

And the winner is:

1. Anna Netrebko

The Russian soprano continues her domination of the operatic globe - even though it’s less than a year since the birth of her first child. But why would that stop her? Even the new baby son (whose father is the hunky Uruguayan baritone Erwin Schrott) added to her star quotient. Netrebko sings a higher concentration of “Callas parts” than any other singer on our list. She cancels just enough performances to add the all-important notes of controversy (a recent no-show at Covent Garden was another smart move). And, most importantly, any vocal deficiences - some bumpiness in the bel-canto rep, diffident diction - are neatly overcome by her theatrical daring and film-star looks. Currently untouchable on all counts, and doesn’t her record label know it.

Voice: 8

Visuals: 10

Roles: 9

Back story: 9

Celeb factor: 9

45/50

Watch Anna Netrebko sing Puccini's O soave fanciulla with Mexican tenor Rolando Villazon".

The legacy of Dusty Springfield

Moving on to pop singing, The Times also has a feature on "The greatest girl singer of the Sixties would be 70 this month, but her legacy is evergreen. Few would question Dusty Springfield’s position as the best British female singer of the Sixties; many would claim that she is the best bar none..Dusty’s public traumas - plate-smashing and food fights backstage, thumping the paparazzi - always made her newsworthy. While Winehouse’s breakdowns and Lily Allen’s cheek are now deemed acceptable pop-star behaviour, this wasn't the case in the Sixties, when girl singers were meant to be sweet, obedient, at all times professional. Dusty wasn’t having that. On a trip to South Africa in 1964, she had it written into her contract that she would play only to unsegregated crowds."

More here.

Phil ip Larkin's first interview

The Times Literary Supplement reproduces a fascinating, long interview with poet Philip Larkin undertaken in the early 1950s.

"We really must cut the less discreet parts, about hating work and so on. . . . You have drawn a picture of a very feeble negative kind of creature, typical life-hating bookworm, which I am most loath to accept . . .": John Shakespeare reveals how Philip Larkin, "something of a control freak, in today's terms", rewrote Shakespeare's profile of him in order to "recast his image in the way he thought would appeal most to his as yet almost non-existent audience".

Larkin asked what other poets I was interviewing. When I told him, he diplomatically refrained from giving his opinion of Logue and Gunn, neither of whom he knew personally. He said he didn’t read much modern poetry and didn’t know much about modern poets except for John Wain and Kingsley Amis, his contemporaries at St John’s. “They are friends of long standing. But they concentrate more on their dislikes while I concentrate more on my likes.” At the head of his list of likes, he put “listening to jazz and drinking beer” followed by cricket, cycling, swimming and “finding out about writers”. He mentioned particularly Beatrix Potter: “She never went abroad in the whole of her life which is a point of sympathy between us”. He then gave me a list of his dislikes: “Work, cruelty to animals, literature based on other literature, poems about poems or poets, going bald, speaking in public, ‘filthy Mozart’, drama (though I once went to see The Boyfriend)”. I told him that John Betjeman, who was a friend of my father-in-law, the writer S. P. B. Mais, had made the speech at my wedding at Christ Church, Oxford, the previous year. I had clearly pushed the right button - not an easy feat with Larkin - and he glowed visibly. Betjeman, he said, was his favourite poet. “He is also the greatest living English poet together with T. S. Eliot. But Eliot is too obscure while Betjeman communicates directly with the general reader.”..

I asked him if that really was his only ambition. His answer was that, as he had spent most of his life in bedsitting rooms and was still in one (“the only life I have known”), he would also like to achieve his two private symbols of luxury, “my own lavatory and a daily copy of The Times”. Greatly daring, I asked him if he contemplated marriage (I knew nothing then of his tangled love life or of his difficulties with girls). He said he certainly intended to. “I’m not a confirmed bachelor but I rather enjoy the rattlesnake image."

China's fraternal failings

Frances Wood's review of Yu Hua's first novel in the Times Literary Supplement, provides a view of China not often seen. Yu Hua "frankly criticizes Chinese society, in both its current form and as it was during the Cultural Revolution; in China, in turn, critics have been critical of Yu Hua. Now readers in the West can read Brothers in translation, which is, as Frances Wood finds, "remarkably successful in depicting the horrible violence of the Cultural Revolution and its effect on families and the brashness of the more recent get-rich-quick China".

"Yu Hua is one of China’s bestselling writers; an earlier novel To Live (1992) was made into a film by Zhang Yimou which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1994. Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (1995), like To Live, focused on the recent horrors of contaminated blood in China. After a silence of ten years, the critical reception of Brothers in China has been mixed, partly because of the very different nature of the novel’s two parts. Older critics felt that Yu Hua’s detailed depiction of the vulgar lifestyle of the new entrepreneurs in China was exploitative, and that he himself was selling out. Younger critics, those unused to primitive toilets, criticized him for his bleak, black picture of the Cultural Revolution, a decade of which they know almost nothing.

Yu Hua sees this rush to the defence of China, particularly among the young, as an aspect of a depressing new nationalism; he believes that an uninformed, automatic rush to defend China is a threat to artistic expression. The young, easily roused to almost annual attacks on Japan for its failure to confront the past, are dismally ignorant of their country’s own more recent history. And, unaware of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, they have become to some extent overcompliant with government policies. At a conference on internet freedom held in Cambridge recently, young PhD candidates from China, many supported by government grants, happily announced that they had no trouble with sites being blocked, for they “self-censored” when using the internet. They are a long way from Mao’s dictum, “It is right to rebel."

The Guardian wins website of the year

The Guardian has just won four awards at the British Press Awards, including website of the year. It was the second successive year that guardian.co.uk was judged to be the best newspaper website. The paper also won awards for digital journalist, interviewer and columnist of the year. This was a well deserved success as The Guardian provides a superb website by topic linked to blogs and audio visual material.

On another note, an April 1st Guardian spoof is as follows:

"Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink Newspaper to be available only on messaging service. Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters Printing presses will fall silent in brave new Twitter-based future. Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.

The move, described as "epochal" by media commentators, will see all Guardian content tailored to fit the format of Twitter's brief text messages, known as "tweets", which are limited to 140 characters each. Boosted by the involvement of celebrity "twitterers", such as Madonna, Britney Spears and Stephen Fry, Twitter's profile has surged in recent months, attracting more than 5m users who send, read and reply to tweets via the web or their mobile phones. As a Twitter-only publication, the Guardian will be able to harness the unprecedented newsgathering power of the service, demonstrated recently when a passenger on a plane that crashed outside Denver was able to send real-time updates on the story as it developed, as did those witnessing an emergency landing on New York's Hudson River. It has also radically democratised news publishing, enabling anyone with an internet connection to tell the world when they are feeling sad, or thinking about having a cup of tea.

Eat That Book!

The Chicagoist reports "It’s always satisfying to finish a good book, but at the 10th Annual Edible Books Show and Tea we might want to pace ourselves. Voracious readers and eaters alike can take part in the culinary creations of skilled pastry artists. The rules are simple: “it can look like a book, it can act like a book, it can be a pun on a book” as long as it’s edible. The event is part of a global book-eating celebration honoring French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who was famous for writing about epicurean pleasures (he also has a cheese named in his honor).All proceeds benefit Columbia’s Book & Paper Art’s Equipment Fund and the event will be held at Columbia College Library, which is also featuring Fahrenheit 451 as part of its “Big Read” program. This begs the question: would Ray Bradbury be okay with burning books if they were crème brulee?"

Microsoft Encarta Dies After Long Battle With Wikipedia

"Microsoft delivered the coup de gráce Monday to its dying Encarta encyclopedia, acknowledging what everyone else realized long ago: it just couldnt compete with Wikipedia, a free, collaborative project that has become the leading encyclopedia on the Web". Full story in the New York Times.

British Library exhibition on Henry VIII

In celebration of the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII's accession to the throne, the historian and broadcaster Dr David Starkey guest-curates this major exhibition which gives an unrivalled reassessment of the life of one of this country's most memorable monarchs.Highlights of the exhibition include Henry's personal Prayer Book containing his handwritten notes, his marriage contract with Katherine of Aragon, a list of people executed in his reign-including wives, favourites and ministers, and a love letter to Anne Boleyn, concealed in the Vatican for almost five centuries. This previously un-exhibited letter gives a deeply personal insight into Henry's pursuit of his most infamous infatuation.

A series of events will accompany this exhibition, including Henry VIII's May Day Celebration and an insightful discussion with author Hilary Mantel about Wolf Hall, her new book set in the world of Henry VIII.

Kate Atkinson's take on La Traviata in the twenty first century

To Die For- What happens when the prince falls for a pill-popping Hollywood starlet and takes her to Sandringham? To mark Glyndebourne's 75th anniversary, Kate Atkinson brings the story of La Traviata into the 21st century, while Posy Simmonds celebrates the festival in a new set of drawings

Atkinson's story appears in Midsummer Nights Edited by Jeanette Winterson A collection of stories inspired by opera, Quercus, £17.99

Some fascinating AND SOME AWFUL book covers can be found below (thanks for the link to Andrew Schuller of Campbell

Awful

Australian

Library of Congress Poetry Resources are on-line

Guide to poetry resources at the Library of Congress, including webcasts, digital collections, exhibitions, learning materials, and other features. Also provides links to guides to finding a poem, locating poetry criticism, official state poems, poets laureate, and more. Compiled by Peter Armenti, Digital Reference Specialist at the Library of Congress.

Authors in the Dictionary of National Biography see how much money some authors leave in their will (as reported in the UK Guardian).

"The supplement of the Dictionary of National Biography for those who died between 2001 and 2004, published this month, is remarkably rich in writers. The post-millennial mortality rate among poets - Charles Causley, DJ Enright, David Gascoyne, Thom Gunn, Ian Hamilton, Elizabeth Jennings, Kathleen Raine, Peter Redgrove and CH Sisson all appear - is especially striking, but there are also novelists as diverse as Simon Raven and WG Sebald, the travel writers Norman Lewis and Wilfred Thesiger, and scholars and biographers including Elizabeth Anscombe, Ernst Gombrich, Christopher Hill, Roy Jenkins, Elizabeth Longford, Ben Pimlott, JH Plumb, Roy Porter, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Bernard Williams and Richard Wollheim.

In a volume including Raine, there can be little doubt which entry contains the most colourful anecdotes (her otter-slaying curse on her ex-inamorato Gavin Maxwell and high estimation of "the quality of my sexual love" are duly mentioned). But it's agreeable to learn that Mary Wesley carried a card reading "Under no circumstances do I wish to be visited in hospital by Margaret Thatcher"; that the atheist William Cooper had to be restrained from "heckling the bride's clerical uncle" at a wedding; that Peter Barnes always wrote "in a hamburger bar in central London, from nine until one with the hamburger cooling in front of him"; and that Arthur Hailey's wife described him fondly as "temperamental, ruthless, sensitive, impatient, emotional, unreasonable, demanding, self-centred ..."

Many entries provide information on "wealth at death", an arguably vulgar but fascinating service. Who would have guessed, for example, that Barnes (£2,366,142), Plumb (£1,374,755), Sebald (£823,124), John Peel (£1,752,633) and Auberon Waugh (£2,029,132) would all end up worth more than Douglas Adams (£431,348)?"

Quote of the Week

"The shelf life of a modern hardback writer is somewhere between milk and yoghurt". John Mortimer.

Odd Book Title

Play with your own marbles. By J J Wright. S W Partridge. 1865.

Debbie Campbell of the National Library reports no copy in Australia.

Pun of the Week

The first flea market started from scratch.