I’ve been watching the Winter Olympics on TV and enjoying the interviews with leading athletes. Two American gold medallists, skier Lindsey Vonn and snowboarder Shaun White, have really stuck in my mind. They looked supremely relaxed and confident, and you could see they weren’t just pretending. They spoke of their joy in racing, their hunger for [...]

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 [...]

A moment during my weekend of masterclasses, which finished last night with a delightful concert by the participants. It was a most enjoyable experience to work so intensively with six young professional pianists, and two fine young string players, violinist Sulki Yu and cellist Sebastiaan van Halsema, who had volunteered to be my ‘resident artists’ [...]

More in the press today about how older women TV presenters are sidelined. It seems that not only women over sixty, but even women over forty start to become ‘invisible’, or at any rate unviewable. By this yardstick I must be well on my way to disappearing like the Cheshire Cat, leaving nothing behind but [...]

I’m starting to look forward to my piano masterclasses this weekend. Six young professional pianists are going to be my students. I’ve always hesitated to say ‘students’ ever since a friend came to listen to the masterclasses at Prussia Cove and commented afterwards that the discussion between ‘master’ and ‘student’ had seemed to him more [...]