I’ve been reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Memories and Portraits, published in 1887. RLS, as he’s often referred to, is famous for Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped and a few others, though in my local library the collected edition of his works runs to 25 volumes. RLS grew up […]

On Saturday, I appeared at the Wigtown Book Festival in Dumfries and Galloway in the west of Scotland (see photo of me being interviewed by Stuart Kelly). Wigtown is Scotland’s ‘national book town’, boasting an astonishing number of bookshops for a small town which is difficult to get to. Yet as several people pointed out, […]

After managing to avoid Covid for two and a half years, I have now come down with it. It hasn’t been fun – suffice it to say I’m very glad I didn’t get the virus until I was fully vaccinated. While staying out of everyone’s way, I have had the chance to read. My favourite […]

Hearing of the death of renowned theatre director Peter Brook, I went back to my book Beyond the Notes in which I described going to Paris in 1982 to ask his advice about how to keep our chamber music group Domus alive and in good heart despite the many difficulties we were grappling with. His […]

I have just been reading an astonishing little book which a friend lent me  –  The Death of Franz Liszt, based on the unpublished diary of his pupil Lina Schmalhausen (Cornell University Press, 2002). The distinguished Liszt biographer Alan Walker came across Lina’s unpublished diary in a Weimar archive when researching the first volume of […]