New York City, the movie star, is so familiar now even to those who have never visited that it’s difficult to imagine the impact on the LSO players of arriving there for the first time. As they stood on the deck of the Baltic, the Statue of Liberty must have been a welcome sight after 10 days at sea. First impressions of the city were not entirely favourable: before they could get to their hotel, the entire orchestra with its baggage, instruments, and music had to be checked through customs. The timpanist Charles Turner notes:Awake about 3 or 4 am. Still dark. The engines are stopping and it Read more ...

“He who sings frightens away his ills.” Cerys Matthews has spent a lifetime heeding the wise counsel of Don Quixote. Born at the tailend of the Sixties, she grew up in the Welsh tradition of musical surroundsound before veering right into the heart of Britpop as the wailing amber-topped siren of Catatonia. Four albums and many stadium triumphs later, the painful break-up more than a decade ago was fed through the distorting prism of the tabloids. Since then Matthews has worked on a remarkable reinvention that reaches a new crest in 2013.The life of post-Catatonia Cerys has been built around Read more ...

Which came first: the performance or the platform? Writers used to say that festivals were never part of the deal. They’ve long since stopped now that the publishing industry has changed and the public demand has grown for authors who don’t simply tell stories, but sell them too. Hence Cheltenham, hence Oxford, hence Ilkley, hence Dartington. Hence, above all, Hay, which last night completed its 26th year. The nowadays global brand among literary festivals has 11 other homes around the world, from some of which theartsdesk has reported (next stop Kells in Ireland). But Hay in Hay-on-Wye is Read more ...

Are Anglophiles born or made? Or cultured in a medium of suet and sentimentality, romanticism and Marmite? Inexplicably, this question has gone begging, at least in the States. Perhaps American scholars deem the subject too frivolous to merit academic scrutiny in the same way that camp, kitsch, and cuteness had to wait for freelance intellectuals like Susan Sontag, Celeste Olalquiaga, and Daniel Harris to legitimise their study. Of course, the whiff of Toryism or just garden-variety snobbery clinging to Anglophilia has left it in permanently bad odour with American cultural theorists, most of Read more ...

Lake Chapalá begins just south of Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco. In case there’s any doubt we’re in Mexico, a mariachi band are propositioning the families who stroll along the waterfront and doing good business in their silver tunics and red cummerbunds. A shoeshine boy with his box and brush is pointing hopefully at dusty footwear, and another boy is selling hammocks. Couples are sweetly holding hands on their Sunday-morning paseo. It’s a tranquil scene.Glittering dark birds skim the surface of the water and waterfowl wallow in the reeds. Swallows swoop and elegant white egrets perch Read more ...

Manu Chao isn’t exactly a household name in the UK. In much of Latin America and Europe, however, he’s an iconic figure who is probably the closest thing to Bob Marley there is, a symbol of hope for the dispossessed. He’s a somewhat elusive figure, a wandering artist who for years never had his own place, a mobile phone or a watch, forever on the move, addicted to travel. In the title song of his 1998 multi-million selling classic Clandestino he sings of how “to run is my destiny... lost in the grand Babylon.” The song is not just autobiographical, but is also about the hypocrisy of Western Read more ...

Alexander McCall Smith is Scottish, and writes fiction, but he doesn’t write “Scottish fiction” as most of us understand the term. In his world view there are no used needles and discarded condoms littering tenement stairwells, no spotty hedonists popping pills to a blue-streaked soundtrack of effing and cussing. It seems extraordinary that no other author has hit upon his extraordinarily successful formula for shifting units in bookshops all over the world.Low on dead bodies and high on softly pedalled humour and lightly sprinkled moralising, the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agengy series of Read more ...

“If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin and say, ‘When you’re ready.’” The words belong to Jason Taylor, the stammering 13-year-old poet protagonist of David Mitchell's novel Black Swan Green. But they will do for any artist presenting fresh work. Mitchell is going through an extracurricular phase of presenting fresh work to a different kind of audience. The most widely read of his four novels – Cloud Atlas – was released as a star-spangled film earlier this year. And this week brings the world premiere of his libretto for the Read more ...

A new edition of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, with an introduction by Dave Eggers, forms part of a series of classic reissues from Abacus. The publishing imprint this year reaches its 40th birthday, and to celebrate it is giving 18 books from its back catalogue a fresh lick of paint, each with a new jacket design and some with a new introduction. They include monolithic memoirs by Primo Levi and Nelson Mandela, seminal British fiction from the likes of Beryl Bainbridge and Iain Banks, and significant works of contemporary American literature such as Infinite Jest and Candace Bushnell Read more ...

The first time I admitted publicly to having been brought up in Chelsea I was 35 and at the launch party for my first novel, which was being held in a Tapas bar in Clapham. At that stage in my writing career I wasn’t aware that I was allowed guests of my own, so it was just myself, the sales team from my publishing house, a handful of book reps and some booksellers.After supper we pushed back the tables and danced. It was easily the most fun I’ve had at a literary event. For much of the evening I talked to a woman called Luthfa, who worked for one of the book chains. She was Bengali and had Read more ...

What makes a good rock biography? Sex, naturally. Drugs, frequently. Rock’n’roll, obviously. None of the above are in short supply in Rod Stewart’s account of a long life spent howling into microphones and knocking up blondes. He came, he snorted, he conquered across four decades, in a variety of outfits from tartan to spandex, from the Eel Pie Island to Vegas. And the way he delivers it, this tall tale of wine, women and song has the flavour of a splendid lock-in down the boozer.But there’s more to Rod: The Autobiography. The best books about stardom are able to explain how it feels to Read more ...

When I first mentioned to a colleague that I was embarking on a biography of the doctor/director Jonathan Miller, he instantly yelped, “My God, your work’s cut out! The man must have met half the famous names in the twentieth century!"My subsequent conversations with Miller provided a cornucopia of highly entertaining anecdotes. These included his brushes with Princess Margaret (who was very taken with his comic turns in the 1950s); Bobby Kennedy (who told him to shut up, shortly before being shot); Bridget Riley (who nearly sued); and Kevin Spacey (who got his big break by stalking Miller Read more ...