Elias Canetti's Memoirs

They've been in print for some time now, but I've only just got around to reading the three volumes of Elias Canetti's memoirs. He's an amazing writer who published a modernist European masterpiece when he was only twenty-six (Auto-da-Fé) and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. He was also personally acquainted with just about every major German writer of the first half of the twentieth century - Berthold Brecht, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Karl Kraus - to name just a few. He even managed to get a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Vienna before he decided to be a writer. Oh - and he had an affair with Gustav Mahler's daughter.

Volume One — The Tongue Set Free

Volume Two — The Torch in My Ear

Volume Three — The Play of the Eyes

Modern Architecture: a review

This is a scholarly history of modern architecture which has gone through a number of editions and has been kept up to date with obvious enthusiasm from the author, who is an authority on the subject. Peter Frampton starts with three short chapters that give the historical background to the modern era. That is, the architectural thinking, urban planning, and the technological developments after 1750 that led to the twentieth century, when modernism began ... more >>

The Bloomsbury Group - audio book

These are archive recordings taken from long-unheard BBC broadcasts and recording from the Charleston Trust, many of them published here for the first time. They come in a two-CD boxed set, accompanied by a sixteen page explanatory booklet. Contributors to the Virginia Woolf Internet discussion group often comment on how astonishing it is to hear these voices from the past - and how remarkable their accents seem to us now. Remember that Woolf began writing over a hundred years ago, and her father married Thackeray's daughter - so these recordings carry with them direct links back as far as the Victorian era... Read more >>

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Igor Stravinsky - A Creative Spring: Russia and France 1882-1934

This is the currently definitive biography of Igor Stravinsky - master of European modernism whom many consider to be the greatest composer of the twentieth century. It's a consummate and magisterial piece of work - superbly referenced and annotated; and just about every claim made within it is backed up with evidence. The notes to the text itself run to 113 pages. Stephen Walsh begins by clearing the ground between himself and Robert Craft - the man who made himself Stravinsky's amanuensis, secretary, helpmate, and collaborator towards the end of his life. Craft wanted to control the Stravinsky estate (including the money) as well as his critical reputation, but Walsh is having none of that. He insists on factual accuracy, backed up with hard evidence... Read more >>

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