Blog
I’ve been writing this blog since 2009, but there still seem to be plenty of interesting topics to mull over. You can subscribe (it’s free) to follow the blog by email – each new post will pop into your inbox.
Scotsman magazine article about Women and the Piano
Today's Scotsman magazine (20 April 2024) has an article by music critic David Kettle about my book Women and the Piano. As the online version is behind a paywall on the The Scotsman website, I thought I'd quote it here: 'The irony is inescapable. I’m a middle-aged,...
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Signing books at Waterstones
Yesterday I signed a few books at the big Waterstones in Princes Street. For anyone outside the UK, Waterstones is a popular bookstore with branches nationwide and (in this case) a popular coffee shop on the top floor, with great views of Edinburgh Castle. Several...
World Piano Day and a little video
Today is 'World Piano Day' (as if every day wasn't piano day!) and Yale University Press has been tweeting a little clip of me talking about the French pianist-composer Hélène de Montgeroult. De Montgeroult is one of the pianist-composers featured in my new book Women...
Olympian calm
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...
‘The Cello Suites’
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,...
Diapason magazine
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...
Looking into the sun
The winter sun was striking low over the lake as I raised my tiny idiot-proof camera to take a picture of a terrier plunging into the icy water. (I mean that my camera is tiny and idiot-proof, not that it’s proof against tiny idiots, though of course that would be a...
Study of ancient writing
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...
Snowdrops in the snow
British winters have been so mild in recent years that I had almost forgotten why snowdrops are so called. But here they are in our garden, living up to their name. Our poor snowdrops are doubly challenged at the moment because if it's not snow knocking them down,...
New book extract
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...
Masterclass weekend
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...
Voice of experience
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...
A discussion between equals?
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...
Bob’s preserve(s)
Bob has just made his fourth batch of marmalade this month, using Seville oranges which are only available in January. Batch 1 had to be thrown away when he got engrossed in some editing work and left the boiling marmalade to caramelise. Batch 2 was an unusual recipe...
Phalacrocorax aristotelis
The parade of unusual bird visitors continues. The other day, in our local park, we saw half a dozen large cormorants, or perhaps shags, sitting on a wooden platform in the middle of the lake. Surely cormorants are seabirds, found on rocky cliffs? But there they were...