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“... In March​ 1918, Ivor Gurney spoke to Beethoven. It was three years since the war had interrupted his studies at the Royal College of Music, and a few months since he had ended up in a casualty clearing station in France, his right arm wounded and his lungs gassed, correcting the proofs of his verse collection Severn and Somme. Back in Britain, he drifted from hospital to hospital, diagnosed with ‘soldier’s heart’, a complaint more common than shellshock ...”

“... distress. Birbeck has missed the big story and goes away with a picture and a few garbled notes.Oliver Soden doesn’t make simplistic deductions about Coward’s life and character from his work but, as he points out, the plays contain many direct statements on questions about which later commentators have claimed to be puzzled. So explicit is Design ...”

“... fifth symphony for orchestra in all but name) flew off the page with improvisational abandon.Oliver Soden​ was born in 1990, and his Life of Tippett is refreshingly free of old prejudices and stale arguments. (The previous standard text, Ian Kemp’s Tippett: The Composer and His Music, was sketchy on biographical detail and appeared in 1984, when ...”

“... Riding and probably not even in the country. No wonder Corbyn is ahead of the rest.1 September. Oliver Sacks dies, my first memory of whom was as an undergraduate in his digs in Keble Road in Oxford when I was with Eric Korn and possibly, over from Cambridge, Michael Frayn. Oliver said that he had fried and eaten a ...”