A nice surprise today: Bob came back from a meeting with a magazine page brought along by a colleague. It was from the February issue of the leading French record magazine Diapason, one of whose editors had taken the new Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music as the subject of his editorial. The Cambridge Companion, an [...]

The winter sun was striking low over the lake as I raised my tiny idiot-proof camera to take a picture of a terrier plunging into the icy water. (I mean that my camera is tiny and idiot-proof, not that it’s proof against tiny idiots, though of course that would be a useful specialist feature.)
A deep [...]

A one-line letter of mine is in today’s Guardian (click here to read it; it’s the third one down). I sent it last week, straight after reading that the  UK’s last-remaining professorship of palaeography was to be axed, and then  forgot about it until it popped up today. Actually, I think it’s short-sighted and deplorable to get rid of palaeographers, whose specialist [...]

British winters have been so mild in recent years that I had almost forgotten why snowdrops are so called.  But here they are in our garden, living up to their name.  Our poor snowdrops are doubly challenged at the moment because if it’s not snow knocking them down, it’s the local foxes, who trample on them in the [...]

My publisher, Boydell Press, has put a short extract from my new book Out of Silence on their blog.  You can read it by clicking here. The blog also shows the book’s cover image for the first time. I’m irrationally proud of this cover because I took the photograph! It aims to give the impression of someone coming [...]