Written For The New Statesman May 2020 I The Man For a moment, the world is as it used to be – unconfined, uncurtailed, alive with human teeming: coronavirus-free. The early light of a mid-April morning is already at the window. Sun-shot images flit through his mind: he’s playing somewhere in a rock pool…
I am at the House of Commons. Karl lives less than three miles down the road. So I leave it late and I’m crossing the river on a bus when I get the message: “A very close friend of mine was stabbed severely in the chest yesterday and passed away an hour ago. I’m…
Written for The Guardian: In the weeks before our lives changed for ever, my grandfather disappeared and my grandmother became seriously ill. We drove the length of the country through snow and ice to fetch her. Already much reduced by arthritis, she could walk only with great difficulty. She would be staying in…
Interview with the Ukrainian Conductor, Natalia Ponomarchuk. Natalia Ponomarchuk was in Odesa when the war began. She was with the National Odesa Philharmonic Orchestra rehearsing the Dvořák Violin Concerto, Vaughan Williams’s “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis”, and Stravinsky’s “Song of the Nightingale”. The concert was scheduled for the evening of 25 February…
For The Sunday Times: All childhoods are normal to the children who live them. Back in the 1980s, my siblings and I would arrive at places en masse and not understand the bemused expressions of onlookers as we continued to get out of a trusty old wagon for several minutes longer than seemed reasonable. Of…
Sasha Grynyuk and Yuri Zhislin are two of the best musicians I’ve ever seen perform live. I’ve been getting to know them – partly because they play piano trios, with which I’m obsessed; and partly because Grynyuk is originally from Ukraine and Zhislin is originally from Russia and, just before the war began, they happened…
For the Guardian: Countless books have the Bard’s dramas at their core. From Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk to Withnail and I, here are some of the best: Some years ago, I went to see a production of King Lear and read a theory in the programme that he married twice. Regan and Goneril were the…