I went to a lunchtime concert in the City of London, the district where many bank headquarters are. It’s an area I don’t often visit. As I was early, I walked around the streets for a while. They were thronged with incredibly affluent-looking suntanned bankers in beautiful suits, wave upon wave of them, strolling to lunch in [...]

Our much-used copy of Claudia Roden’s ‘Book of Middle Eastern Food’ has finally fallen apart, and we’ve bought a new, updated copy. In its honour, Bob made some lovely pastries filled with spinach, aubergine and onion with various cheeses, and a tabouli bursting with home-grown parsley.
We talked about how our favourite cookery books combine cultural [...]

The other night, Lindsay Davenport and John McEnroe were discussing on BBC TV the poor results of British tennis players in the opening round of this year’s Wimbledon Championships. They agreed that it’s tough at the moment, and not only in Britain, to develop a cohort of good young players. Many outreach schemes have been [...]

My new book is mentioned in this week’s New Yorker magazine by the leading writer on music, Alex Ross. Alex’s column in the magazine this week is about ballet and its sometimes vexed relationship with the musical score.
Read the article in the New Yorker.
Order ‘Out of Silence’ from Amazon.
To order by phone from Boydell and Brewer’s US outlet in [...]

I finally managed to sign up for the digital music service Spotify. The first thing I did was to listen to some recordings of pieces I’m currently learning, to see what other artists had made of them. I regarded my mind as being still open on the subject, was genuinely curious, and I didn’t feel [...]