Leading Article: Secret of Sinatra

AFTER John Humphrys announced the death of Frank Sinatra on BBC radio's Today programme (can you remember what you were doing when you heard the news?) his co-presenter, Anna Ford, remarked that she thought we would all be hearing an awful lot of My Way from now on. Ms Ford was right.

But Frank Sinatra deserves to be remembered for much more than this one song, even if it was his greatest hit. His long and colourful life (his recording career spanned seven decades) will provide a rich source for columnists and biographers. But, one suspects, that they will never be able definitively to answer why, as Cole Porter put it, and Sinatra sang so neatly:

You do something to me,

Something that simply mystifies me.

Tell me, why should it be,

You have the power to hypnotise me?