Last weekend I was at a dinner in Christ’s College, Cambridge to celebrate 40 years of women in the college (founded 1505). Women have only been allowed to study at the University of Cambridge since 1869, when Girton College was founded. Newnham followed in 1872, but even for decades after that, women were not considered […]

The season of Seville oranges has come to an end and with it the chance to make Seville marmalade, by general consensus the tastiest of all marmalades. We have tried making others with ‘ordinary’ oranges combined with lemon, grapefruit or lime, but nothing quite matches the tart, slightly sour aromatic tang of the Seville orange. […]

One of my Christmas presents was a memoir, ‘Divided Loyalties – a Scotswoman in occupied France’ by Janet Teissier du Cros. It was written by an Edinburgh-born woman who married a Frenchman and spent the years of the Second World War in the Cévennes region of France during the German occupation. In her Edinburgh years, […]

The last live music I heard in 2018, outside my home, was some excellent jazz in a city bar (pianist Brian Kellock and bassist Kenny Ellis). The bar was buzzing with people enjoying long lunches and toasting the end of the year. Crockery clattered and the coffee machine hissed. The music was merrily applauded, but […]

It’s a great moment in our household because my husband Robert Philip’s epic study of orchestral music is about to be published by Yale University Press. Pre-ordered copies have started to land on people’s doormats, probably with a thud. The Classical Music Lover’s Companion to Orchestral Music has been thirteen years in the writing. At […]