I have been proofreading my book about Nocturnes, which has reached the stage of being typeset. This is the point at which it starts to look like a proper book. As the author, you dare to believe that it will one day really be published and start to live in heads...
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I've been reading Volume 2 of the Memoirs of a Highland Lady, the fascinating memoirs of Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus who kept this particular diary between 1814-30. In it there's a good example of the social attitude which made it so hard for young women to...
One of my blog readers recently asked me what stages I had to go through before my latest book was accepted by Yale University Press. He was surprised by how complex the process was, so I thought others might find it interesting too. I don't know how it is with other...
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...
The Times Literary Supplement of January 4 has a lovely review of my book 'Speaking the Piano'. Because of the subscriber paywall, only a snippet of the review is publicly accessible online, but here's a photo of the review as it appears in print. And here's an...
Australia's leading arts magazine, Limelight, carries a review of my book Speaking the Piano 'Tomes offers warm, thoughtful insights into the art of teaching' 'Speaking the Piano explores more than simply the nuts and bolts of mastering an instrument - it tries to...
Rave review of Bob's book today in The Scotsman. I can't find it online yet, so here it is: Stocking filler of musical scholarship is far more inspiring than a Google search ‘These days it’s as easy as pie, when listening to a random piece of music on the radio or...
This website continues to be a bulletin board for news about my husband Robert Philip's book, 'The Classical Music Lover's Companion to Orchestral Music'. [Yes, I know - the author could have his own website. But, having seen how much work it takes to feed a hungry...
I'm not sure my books have ever before made it into the display at the front of a major bookstore, so it was a thrill to find Speaking the Piano just inside the main door of Blackwell's Bookshop in Edinburgh (see photo) when we were there to do some Christmas...
Inspired by the idea of 'Books of the Year' (see blog post below this one), I have been making my own selection of the books I most enjoyed during the year. Short Stories: Anything is Possible, by Elizabeth Strout. The first book I read in 2018 and one of the finest....
Good news at the weekend about my book 'Speaking the Piano': it has been chosen as one of the Books of the Year by the Financial Times and by the Sunday Times. 'An all-embracing exploration of how to make music come alive' (Financial Times, 24 Nov 2018) 'Studded with...
As I'm the one with the website, I'm helping to do some publicity about my husband Robert Philip's epic study of orchestral music, The Classical Music Lover's Companion to Orchestral Music, just out from Yale University Press (see photo of the author with his book)....
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...
I've been reading the 'Childhood Memories' (published 1958) of Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa, the Sicilian aristocrat and author of 'The Leopard', an award-winning Italian novel published posthumously and later made into a film starring Burt Lancaster. Lampedusa's...
One never knows whether to fear or look forward to 'customer reviews' on Amazon. Ever since a couple of high-profile rows involving well-known authors hiding behind false names in order to rubbish their rivals' work on Amazon, we've all been alerted to the possibility...