Michael Fjeldsøe, Katarina Smitt Engberg, Bjarke Moe Aarhus University Press 978-87-7597-332-3 794pp (hb) £39 Academic studies of composers notoriously combine convoluted, abstract thinking with an in

On the morning of 9 January 1905 (22 January on the New Style calendar Soviet Russia later adopted), a crowd of striking workers marched peacefully through Saint Petersburg towards the Winter Palace,

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Music is a serious business. Whether it’s love, death, heartbreak, loneliness, power, conflict, destruction, sin, faith, hope, despair… you name it, every weighty subject and state of mind has been ta

“And there are other things even worthier of conservation.” Having devoured At Home (1958), the autobiography of the novelist William Plomer, E. M. Forster wrote to his friend Plomer to tell him the e