To mark the 100th anniversary of Maria Callas’s birth – much celebrated elsewhere in this issue – let’s talk about a word that, in her day, was still used as an accolade for women performers, especially opera singers, at the very top of their profession. Whereas today it has become an all-purpose term of abuse applied to just about anybody who exhibits haughty behaviour.
The word is ‘diva’. It means goddess in Latin. And until our own era
