Peter Burke

After the death of Frank Sinatra, when the singer's FBI files were opened, a New York hack was asked if he thought it true that Sinatra's friends had included Mafiosi. Well, he drawled, these guys ain't exactly the Professor of Cultural History at Oxford or Cambridge. I didn't ask Peter Burke about Sinatra, but wouldn't have been surprised if he had views, perhaps relating the language and silences of Sinatra lyrics to similar patterns in Leopardi or Lampedusa, or linking the appeal of 'My Way' to that of parallel products in Java and Japan, Bulgaria and Brazil.