There’s a review of my new book in today’s Guardian. Here’s an excerpt: ‘Fascinating essays from the celebrated pianist … Susan Tomes has devoted her career largely to chamber music – a niche market within the niche market of classical music, and one in which she has achieved a singularly high reputation as an executive musician. […]

At New Year we played a game we hadn’t played for ages – Ex Libris. It’s a game where all the players have to write the opening or closing sentence of a book which already exists. Each player in turn selects a book from the shelves (obviously you have to have lots of books to hand […]

There’s a nice review of my new book, Sleeping in Temples, in the Jan/Feb issue of International Piano magazine. I know from my own attempts that it isn’t always easy to track down this interesting magazine, so I thought I’d take the chance to reproduce an excerpt here: ‘Unlike other pianists, whose blogs can too often […]

Readers who followed my enthusiastic recommendation of ‘The Real Charlotte’ may be interested in another recommendation from the same period. I’ve just finished reading ‘Maurice Guest’, published in 1908 by Henry Handel Richardson, the pseudonym of Ethel Richardson, an Australian novelist. It’s a book I’ve been trying to find for ages, because from time to time […]

Lots of people have written to me today about coughing. Why? Because of a BBC News report about violinist Kyung-Wha Chung’s comeback recital at the Festival Hall in London. She was disturbed by a child coughing in the audience, and remonstrated with the parents. Her response to the coughing divided the audience. Some were shocked or […]