Alan Shelston, whose biography of Gaskell is published in November, said she would have been "honoured and amused" by the attention.
"I would have been honoured," says Keane who, back then, was a Blair supporter, thrilled by his 1997 election victory.
Having grown up a Beatles fanatic, Costello would have been honoured and presumably ecstatic when in 1987 the call came from Paul McCartney to write with him.
But Labour's commitment on schools was only until 2013, and since Labour provided no details of how its planned cuts were to be delivered, we have no assurance that even this would have been honoured in government.
And what, if they were still alive, would figures like Sid Vicious, think of punk being appropriated by an institution as established as the Met? "I think they would have been honoured," Andrew Bolton, the British-born curator of the Costume Institute, said.
But with his passion for literature, devotion to education and pride in the brief period spent teaching undergraduates at Oxford, Burton would have felt honoured to be published by Yale and to have had his book edited and annotated in a scholarly manner by Chris Williams, professor of Welsh history at Swansea University and former director of the Richard Burton Centre for the Study of Wales.
"I would have been honoured to have been part of this unique Team GB squad.
His name and work would not have survived if Max Brod had honoured Kafka's testament two notes requiring his friend to destroy all unpublished manuscripts and to refrain from republishing the works that had already appeared in print.
Lord Justice Ward said: "Where the promisee has honoured her bargain, the deceased would remain bound to honour his.
This would accept a write-off of 35% in the nominal value of the defaulted debt, but Argentina would have to honour overdue interest.
