Egg and Dart

I’m not going to attempt a systematic review, as those can be found elsewhere and in any case I’m unfamiliar with some of the territory Ross covers in his survey of 20th-century classical music.

In the areas I do know about, I found Ross to be accurate and to emphasise more or less what I consider to be important. The index is very thorough in its coverage of persons, including (for example) references to composers’ relatives, though it is less complete when it comes to concepts.

Ross is not ashamed to relate music to composers’ biographies or even to their physical appearance, and the text is full of pertinent anecdotes. Nevertheless, there are detailed descriptions of notable works, more from the earlier part of the century. A website with audio extracts of works referred to in the text can be found here.

One controversial position is that the author is convinced that Sibelius’ 8th symphony was destroyed in a complete or near-complete state, though I believe the evidence for this is unclear.

Although he is English, Ross has worked in New York for some years, and the USA accordingly features prominently. This does not just mean that American composers are dealt with at length; Mahler’s stay in New York is described in detail and one is told a lot about the history of American public-service broadcasting but there is little reference to the BBC, or to British composers other than Benjamin Britten. I don’t necessarily think this bias is a bad thing, as I learnt much about (for example) the origins of American minimalism.

Ross focuses on innovators, at the expense of more conservative composers such as Puccini and Rachmaninov, who tend to get pushed to the sidelines of his narrative, although they’re certainly part of 20th-century classical music history. Perhaps similarly, he can make 20th-century music seem more different to what preceded that it actually is, for example in its degree of political commitment.

Maybe my next reading should be Mann’s Doctor Faustus, which provides a structuring undertext to the whole work.

• ISBN-10: 1841154768
• ISBN-13: 978-1841154763

These stories are typically a few pages long, and as befits a travel writer are set worldwide.

A problem with reading the stories in this form rather than in a magazine (where most originally appeared) is the need to check when they were originally published; in general they are set in ‘the present’, but just when is that? The dating is particularly critical in the case of the stories set in Russia, and one which seems prescient about the inter-tribal tensions in Rwanda.

The last two parts of the collection concern an American diplomat working in Malaysia and London. The Malaysian stories include examples of a ghost story and a detective story, the London ones are more focused on the world of the American Embassy. Although the stories are mostly independent, the last one contains a resolution which I found surprisingly conventional, especially after the ambiguous endings of many of the earlier stories in the collection.

• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (July 1, 1998)
• ISBN-10: 0140274944
• ISBN-13: 978-014027494

We took this on holiday with us to the SW Peloponnese and found it a useful guide to the region.

Ancient sites are covered in detail, and as a classicist by training myself I was on the lookout for inaccuracies.  However, the accounts of ancient mythology and history appeared to be not only accurate but to reflect recent scholarship (as for example in the coverage of Bronze Age society). I suspect there may have been a professional classical consultant, but one isn’t credited.

Remember that details of opening times may change.  Nestor’s Palace no longer opens in the afternoons and some exhibits such as the Antikythera Mechanism in the National Archæological Museum in Athens have been re-arranged. The guide includes the new Acropolis Museum; the authors have firm views on the removal of antiquities from their original locations.

We especially appreciated information on some lesser-known sites such as Messene. The authors are explicit about a matter on which other guidebooks can be coy and which postcards ignore completely: the fact that the temple of Apollo Epikourios at Bassae has been shrouded in a tent for nearly thirty years.

We didn’t make so much use of the more general information on beaches, restaurants etc. but it didn’t seem wide of the mark when we did. The black-and-white pages of our copy were robust, but some of the colour pages near the front quickly started to become detached.

• Publisher: Cadogan Guides; 2nd edition (June 17, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 1860113966
• ISBN-13: 978-1860113963

If you’ve read Ex Libris by the same author you’ll know that she would like to revive the now rather neglected genre of the short essay, in the tradition of Lamb, who is the subject of one of the essays in this volume.

The dozen pieces are mostly light in tone, though one strikes a more sombre note. Foodstuffs feature strongly, and the transatlantic cultural gap occasionally makes itself felt; I can’t imagine consuming a pint of ice cream (even a US pint) in one go, and is it really in doubt that the Italians are best at making it (p. 50)?

The longer essay ‘Procrustes and the Culture Wars’ doesn’t quite seem to belong, and betrays its origin as a series of lectures given to Phi Beta Kappa students. All the others can be dipped into and read in an odd half-hour, in any order.

The author’s father might have been spared some sleeplessness (in the anecdote related on p. 68) if he had thought of Zinfandel, or the biblical Zerubabbel.

• Publisher: Allen Lane (1 Nov 2007)
• ISBN-10: 1846140439
• ISBN-13: 978-1846140433

This Routledge course in Spanish was originally published in 1919 and revised in 1931 and 1963. Our copy is a 1991 reprint, purchased in the mid 1990’s. It’s now out of print, for reasons that this review should make clear.

The amazing thing about this book is that the publisher still thought it was worth selling it, in the same kind of cover as their other language courses, on the threshold of the third millennium.

The little stories and anecdotes provided as exercises are set in a world long gone, even in the conservative Spain of the Franco era. Vocabulary includes a long list of aristocratic ranks, and military terms (trench, gunpowder). The ‘conversational matter’ provided for memorisation by the learner is likely to be little use. ‘Whose is that horse? It is that soldier’s horse’.

It’s heavy on grammar, at least in the first half. My classical training makes me approve of this in general, but even so, I was startled to be bombarded with a multitude of verb-forms in lessons 3-6, with very little grammar in the remaining lessons 7-12. There are no exercises supplied in translating into Spanish, and in the other direction there are short passages with the English translation immediately following, (apart from the final one).

So if you’re determined you could learn some Spanish from this. The real problem is not so much the antiquated vocabulary (which could be supplemented from other sources) as the way grammar is introduced, and the lack of practical exercises.

• ASIN: B0017D02NY

The Archimedes Codex tells two stories: that of Archimedes himself and his contributions to mathematics, and that of the small battered parchment volume which is our only source for some of his discoveries. The book alternates between these two stories.

It turns out that it is a minor miracle that these texts by Archimedes survived at all, and one can feel sympathetic even to the monk who covered Archimedes’ text with prayers, and to whoever had the text further obliterated with forged paintings, when the probable history of the volume is reconstructed.

The mathematical chapters can be hard going if you haven’t done any geometry for a while. On the other hand, I found the somewhat joky style of the opening chapter irritating at first, but fortunately this slipped away a bit in subsequent chapters. A couple of minor players in this story are known to me personally and they are recognisably described, so I feel confident that the character sketches of others are accurate too.

• Publisher: Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd ) (March 20, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0753823721
• ISBN-13: 978-0753823729

(this review contains a minor plot spoiler)

I got a great deal of entertainment out of the mid-Sixties English suburbia period detail. I don’t remember that time directly, and it is now long enough ago for the setting to seem exotic, even alien. The assumptions society still made about the role of women and the relative rarity of divorced single parents. £5,000 making a huge difference to the price of a house. Elm trees. Barathea*.

This is one of Ruth Rendell’s earliest thrillers, and the plotting creaks in places. For example, the Devon yokel who spontaneously reveals a crucial piece of information to another character who has wandered into his shop. The degree of coincidence would have been acceptable in a Victorian novel, but the modern reader expects greater verisimilitude.

*Despite having read widely, I did not previously know this word, though some older and younger members of my family did!

• Publisher: Arrow Books Ltd; 1st edition (January 1, 1982)
• ISBN-10: 0099286602
• ISBN-13: 978-0099286608

Who hasn’t tried to write haiku? I last did it when contributions in this format were requested for our internal staff news, and I wrote one on the unlikely topic of a website launch.

This little book consists mostly of translations of haiku by the Japanese masters (Basho is my favourite of these), and arranged by theme such as the season. Not knowing Japanese, I can’t comment on the quality of the translations, so I’ll concentrate instead on the untranslated poems in English. These are of two kinds. ‘Traditional’ ones have been extracted from existing English poems in another form. This doesn’t really work; you can’t make a haiku by moving around the line breaks, however Japanese the sentiments of the verse (Loveliest of trees,/the cherry now is hung with bloom/along the bough). Some of the ‘Modern’ poems which consciously imitate haiku are more successful; I think that Kerouac does it best, perhaps because of his involvement with Buddhism.

• Publisher: Everyman’s Library (November 11, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400041287
• ISBN-13: 978-1400041282

I think this book must have sold in large numbers (the proceeds from sales went towards the Kathleen Ferrier memorial scholarships), because it is often to be found in second-hand shops. My copy was the 9th impression (published in July 1955), the first having appeared in September 1954.

It consists of memoirs of this great singer by Neville Cardus, Roy Henderson and Gerald Moore, with rather shorter contributions from Benjamin Britten, John Barbirolli and Bruno Walter, followed by an account of how she was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gold Medal at the end of her life, and a discography. The tone is very much one of personal reminiscence throughout, rather than systematic biography.

Kathleen Ferrier showed the same face to everyone – a good quality in itself, but one which makes the various accounts of her character somewhat repetitious. The most interesting contribution is that by Britten, because it sheds light also on his own working practices. If you have a bootleg recording of Kathleen Ferrier singing music by Britten, or the Angel in Gerontius, then various record companies would be interested in hearing from you.

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton (1954)
• ASIN: B000O8R5NI

I think you might do better to read E.M. Forster if you want to know about upper middle class London life in the years leading up to the First World War. I also felt that she didn’t really know quite how to end the book. I learnt one thing though; there was confusion in 1900, as in 2000, about when exactly the new century began.

• Publisher: Doubleday (Nov 1983)
• ISBN-10: 0385279566
• ISBN-13: 978-0385279567