Six degrees of separation from Muse frontman Matthew Bellamy

The Polish composer left his home country in 1830, aged 20, shortly before the November Uprising broke out in Warsaw, never to return. Despite his self-imposed exile in Paris, after his death, at the age of 39, Chopin’s sister took his heart, pickled in cognac, home to Warsaw, where it is entombed in a pillar at the Holy Cross Church. The composer’s music still has worldwide influence: his Raindrop prelude features in a commercial for video game Halo 3 and an adaptation of his Nocturne No 20 in C-sharp minor can be heard in the opening of As I Am, by Alicia Keys …

After her Jamaican flight attendant father abandoned the family when she was two years old, Alicia Augello Cook (as she is called on her birth certificate) was raised in the Hell’s Kitchen area of Manhattan, New York, by her mother: a paralegal and part-time actress. Now a Grammy-winning artist who’s sold more than 12 million records, Keys’ first brush with fame came when she was four years old, and appeared on The Cosby Show. In May, she attended the “China: Through the Looking Glass” gala at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art accompanied by Jean Paul Gaultier …

Born in Paris, Gaultier was an only child who nearly died when he contracted typhoid fever aged three. Having submitted his drawings to 27 fashion houses, his big break came on his 18th birthday, when he was hired by Pierre Cardin. A popular celebrity costume designer, Gaultier has worked with, among many others, the late Hong Kong singer-actor Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing. Twenty-five years ago, the Frenchman invented the iconic cone bra for Madonna …

The Queen of Pop, who last month turned 57 and will appear in Hong Kong in February, recently said women are “still the most marginalised group” in society, in an interview with Out magazine. The Like a Virgin singer still has a “seemingly compulsive need to shock and titillate”, according to The New York Times, and, in May, she unexpectedly kissed rapper Drake, 28, on stage, sending the Twitterverse into convulsions. A book, published last year by bestselling author Christopher Andersen, claims Madonna had a steamy affair in the 1980s with John F. Kennedy Jnr, a son of America’s 35th president …

The first Catholic president of the US and the fourth to be assassinated while in office, John F. Kennedy fought in the second world war as a navy officer and wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on history before entering the White House. He was assassinated on November 22, 1963, by one bullet to the head and another to the neck. Two years earlier, JFK had given a speech to the American Newspaper Publishers Association in New York. An excerpt from the talk features on the seventh track of Drones, the latest album by Muse, the band founded 21 years ago by Matthew Bellamy.