I wrote this article drawing attention to the chronic gender gap in classical and jazz music for the Things Made From Letters website, which is managed by my publisher Allen & Unwin. They asked several of their authors to contribute to their campaign to mark IWD 2018, whose theme is#pressforprogress. Virginia Lloyd…
A bit of a thrill to see my GIRLS in this extract in the newspaper today, and so lavishly illustrated with a portrait of Jane Austen (herself a serious piano student throughout her adolescence and young adulthood), and one of Renoir's familiar Jeune Filles au Piano paintings from 1892. While…
I must be missing New York's cold January weather. How else to explain the two ice packs I've clutched to either end of me this past week in a hot and humid Australian climate? Visiting a dear friend in Brisbane, I fell over my own foot while hanging out some…
Poet Charles Simic wrote this loving paen to jazz piano bars in New York for the NYRB blog recently. His celebration song is closer to an elegy for the small piano bars that dotted the Greenwich Village of his youth. This was decades ago, when it was possible for a…