Whitney Houston

It's as if Whitney, in her heyday (and bete-noire-for-the-pop-cultural-left day), more than MJ, hinted at some kind of post-racial America. Only Diana Ross had got so deep into Middle America's heart before her, and the fact that Whitney's break was amid a reversion to reactionary politics rather than the context of the Civil Rights Act meant that there seemed far less radicalism hidden beneath the gloss. But the Star Spangled Banner at Super Bowl '91, right in the middle of the Gulf War, was a genuine moment of emotional unity in America, and in its own way it might be a step on the road to Obama's eventual victory. It was also, in many ways, the beginning of the end for Houston herself. She'd gone so far, gone to so many places where once she could never have gone, touched so many lives that would once have had no room for her, that she was bound to be judged by impossible standards. And when that happens to someone who had come so far, it's the surest possible road to the other extreme. "My Love is Your Love" is as special as it is because it makes no attempt to hide what she'd been through, that the voice of the huge hits was fucked, and still holds out hope for redemption, rejuvenation. Failing to live up to Middle America's impossible dreams could still, at that moment, have been the start of a new beginning. Sadly, it wasn't. Sadly - and think of this with The Sun on the racks - the world that had made her what she was could only destroy her in the end.

Gilbert Adair

One of the things that stood out from the Guardian obituary of Gilbert Adair was how similar his clear desire to distance himself from his early life, his refusal to talk about any aspect of it, was to that of many British people of his generation who were in every other respect his antithesis, his nemesis. I have spoken often enough before about my great sadness that so many of Adair's generation aspired in the opposite direction to him both geographically and culturally, and the long-term damage this did to British society; there could not have been a more grimly appropriate night for such a man to leave the world, a night when the ruling elite decisively and perhaps forever refused and rejected his view of everything this country could potentially have been (at least if - as I think became a lot more likely at the end of last week - that country is England in constitutional realities rather than just off-duty romanticisation; it may be more apt than he'd have been able to believe for the vast majority of his life that Adair was born in Edinburgh).

And yet, of course, I was often as alienated from Adair himself as engaged by him; we came from wholly separate worlds, and no amount of guilt on my part could change that. I admired - sometimes almost loved - him precisely because he never even tried to inhabit my world; precisely because he did not compromise, stood out as a corrective force. Had he attempted to come to terms with the world I, however unwillingly, take for granted, he'd have been worse than useless, as hopelessly impotent as Cameron in Brussels. His presence justified itself; he did not need to play by anyone else's rules or criteria, least of all those of the new, post-Blair establishment, and precisely because of this he made many of us doubt everything we thought we knew (and, just as importantly, everything we thought we didn't know). As much as Jake Thackray or Tony Judt, he is a parallel public figure of the Britain that might, just, have emerged had one operation succeeded, and another not attempted in that form and in that way. He is as great a loss as could be imagined.

Harold Pinter

Whatever you thought of him - and you could think many things - you could not deny that this was a man with the courage of convinctions, and who unlike so many, knew what convictions were in the first place.

He'll be missed.