These notes are devoted to various considerations on a family of sharp interpolation inequalities on the sphere, which in dimension two and higher interpolate between Poincaré, logarithmic Sobolev and critical Sobolev (Onofri in dimension two) inequalities. We emphasize the connexion between optimal constants and spectral properties of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on the sphere. We shall address a series of related observations and give proofs based on symmetrization and the ultraspherical setting.