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, ‘The most successful writers are often musicians themselves – Robert Schumann in the 19th century, for example, and Susan Tomes in the 21st.’

She could not have known that my new book was inspired by Robert Schumann’s habit of keeping diaries, so this pairing of Schumann’s name with mine, though utterly surprising, also felt like a wonderful omen.