At Westminster he impressed during an eight-year stint on the Home Affairs Select Committee, and in the run-up to the 2010 election was PPS to the Home Office immigration minister Phil Woolas.

Marsha Singh was born on October 11 1954. His family moved to Bradford, where he attended Belle Vue Boys' School, captaining the chess team. Winning a place at Loughborough University, he gained an honours degree in the Languages, Politics and Economics of Modern Europe.

Singh joined Lloyds Bank as a graduate trainee, but was keen to undertake community work in his adoptive home city and in 1979 went to work for Bradford Community Relations Council. A year later he joined the Bradford Law Centre, and in 1983 he moved to the city's Directorate of Education. From 1990 until his election as an MP, he was senior development manager at Bradford Community Health Trust.

With his long straggly hair, droopy moustache and garish stage costumes, Lord looked every inch the archetypal 1970s rock star. But his popular success, with hits such as Smoke On The Water, was built on a fusion of progressive rock with classical influences; he went on to compose some highly regarded classical works, such as Durham Concerto. On his first solo album, Gemini Suite, he worked with the London Symphony Orchestra.

As such he was a passionate advocate for rock music as a much underrated art form, and ruffled a few feathers in 1973 by claiming that Deep Purple's music was "as valid as anything by Beethoven".

Jonathan Douglas Lord was born in Leicester on June 9 1941 and studied classical piano from an early age. He was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School and subsequently became a solicitor's clerk.

She was best known in the West as the treacherous wife of a warlord in Throne of Blood (1957), Akira Kurosawa's adaptation of Macbeth, though in many ways she gave her most significant screen performances for Kenji Mizoguchi during the brief period of intellectual liberalisation in the 1930s that was snuffed out by Japan's descent into militarism.

Outsiders have long been baffled by the paradoxes of Japanese sexual politics: the apparent seemliness of the geisha culture contrasted with the violent and pornographic elements of "manga"; and the persistence, under the hyper-modern, Disneyfied surface, of the attitudes of a deeply patriarchal society.