This weekend my book Women and the Piano is reviewed by Diane Cole in the Wall Street Journal. I don't think my books have ever come to the attention of the WSJ before, so I am delighted to be included. Only subscribers can read the full review, but this link at least...
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The Edinburgh Book Festival has just announced its programme for this summer. I will be taking part on Sunday 11 August at 6.45pm, talking to Kate Molleson about my book Women and the Piano. I'm delighted to be included in this very popular festival. This year the...
A kind person in the US who subscribes to New Yorker magazine has alerted me to the fact that Women and the Piano is one of their selections in 'What We're Reading this Week - the best books out now, handpicked by our editors' (Subscriber newsletter, 8 May 2024) I...
An exciting moment this afternoon: a friend called to say that he'd just read a review – the first one, in fact - of my new book in the Times Literary Supplement. I couldn’t find it online, so I ran down the road to the newsagent’s to buy a hard copy. Here’s a snippet...
Yesterday a friend was visiting Oxford and sent me this photo of my new book on the 'welcome table' in Blackwell's bookshop. It's the one with the black cover in the centre of the picture. As I haven't yet seen any copies of the book in a store near me, I was...
If you would like to read the excerpts from 'Out of Silence' in today's Guardian, click here.
The Guardian is publishing excerpts from Out of Silence in the Review section on Saturday 20 March. I’ll post the link on Saturday when I know it. In the meantime, many thanks to everyone who silently toasted my book from several different countries and three...
Thursday's the day when Out of Silence is officially published. As I haven't managed to organise a book launch party, how about a virtual book launch that day? At 18:00 hours (UK time) on Thursday 18 March, I’m going to raise a glass to toast my readers, wherever they...
My new book, Out of Silence, comes out on March 18. I haven't even seen a copy yet, though I'm hoping to see one early next week. In the meantime, the publisher, Boydell Press, has posted another excerpt from the book on its website. You can read the new excerpt by...
Someone asked me today whether my new book, Out of Silence, is a collection of my blog posts. It isn’t; the book was written a year before I had the idea of starting a website or a blog. I suppose the experience of writing ‘a pianist’s yearbook’ may have given me an...
Today's Independent has my review of Eric Siblin's book, 'The Cello Suites'. Siblin, a former pop critic, describes how he fell in love unexpectedly with Bach's cello music and set himself to find out all he could about the composer, and about cellist Pablo Casals,...
A nice surprise today: Bob came back from a meeting with a magazine page brought along by a colleague. It was from the February issue of the leading French record magazine Diapason, one of whose editors had taken the new Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music as the...
My publisher, Boydell Press, has put a short extract from my new book Out of Silence on their blog. You can read it by clicking here. The blog also shows the book's cover image for the first time. I'm irrationally proud of this cover because I took the photograph! It...
A most unexpected and heartwarming New Year gift arrived today in the form of a comment made in a Times book review by the distinguished cellist Natalie Clein. Reviewing a new book on Bach’s cello suites, she muses on the difficulty of writing about music, and says,...
I spent most of yesterday correcting the page-proofs of my new book and twitching with frustration. My electronic copy of the page-proofs is ‘read only’. I cannot type on it or make any alterations. Any mistakes have to be listed separately and sent to the publisher....