Journalists get the best obits

The Telegraph pays tribute to Frank Johnson, reporter, columnist and foreign correspondent, noted for his parliamentary sketches.

Johnson, who grew up in London's East End, began as a messenger boy at the Sunday Express, and eventually became deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph and editor of The Spectator.

He had a great love of opera, and recalled having appeared, as a 14-year-old schoolboy, on the stage at Covent Garden alongside the diva Maria Callas:

Of the performance, Johnson went on: “I could not forget that when Callas bore down on us with the knife, her nostrils flared; that when, dropping the knife, she repentantly clasped us to her bosom, her perfume smelt like that of an aunt who was always kissing me; and that at the first performance on February 2 there penetrated, into my left eye, the tip of the diva’s right breast, which partnership remained throughout the subsequent duet with [Ebe] Stignani… there are few men who can truthfully say that their eye made contact with the right nipple of Maria Callas.”

The piece closes with this vignette:

Johnson endured cancer with exemplary courage for seven years. Last Sunday, just before he went into hospital for the final time, he attended the performance of Aida at La Scala in which the tenor Roberto Alagna (as Radames) walked off the stage in a fit of pique after being booed; Johnson immediately filed the story to The Daily Telegraph.