Originally posted by eighthobstruction
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What are you reading now?
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amateur51
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amateur51
Originally posted by eighthobstruction View PostJust finished William Dalyrymples : Return of a King, about the disasterous first Afghan War....what a arrogant nation we were/are .... the egos and machiavellian thrusting of the British elite in 1840's
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Beef Oven
The Downing Street Years - first volume of her memoires. Fascinating read (re-read in my case). I'm a bit of a glutton for politician's memoires.
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Originally posted by amateur51 View PostI've not read Closely Observed Trains but I love the film, currently available for very little money
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Closely-Obse.../dp/B0001DI4YU
The film doesn't sound quite the same as the book.It isn't given us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world.
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Originally posted by amateur51 View PostNot yet, but I have handled it 'live' and it weighs a fair bit
Tempted but like you Throppers I'd like to hear from someone who's read it"The sound is the handwriting of the conductor" - Bernard Haitink
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amateur51
Originally posted by Petrushka View PostCurrently wending my leisurely way through the final volume of Henri-Louis de la Grange's Mahler biography with Mitchell still to go! Weighty tomes all. Couldn't manage another one just now.
Has it been worthwhile?
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Richard Tarleton
Just finished Vol 3 of Alan Walker's magnificent biography of Liszt. The fourth biography of him I've read - a composer who has always fascinated and puzzled me, both as man and musician.
I read Ernest Newman's disgraceful and wholly misleading character assassination "The Man Liszt" many years ago, and more recently inherited an old copy of Sacheverell Sitwell's affectionate but similarly inaccurate one. Earlier this year I read Eleanor Perenyi's, picked up in a second hand bookshop, again loads of inaccuracies, no good on the music, and it stops dead at the end of the Weimar years in 1861, with a large chunk of Liszt's life and work still to come. I'm grateful to ostuni, up-thread, for alerting me to the Walker which somehow I'd missed. At last Liszt leaps into focus, over three fine volumes, the seeming mysteries and inconsistencies in his life making sense at last. The scholarship is immense, many topics which would slow down the narrative are continued in absorbing footnotes. A central, pivotal figure in 19th century musical history - the importance of his relationships with Berlioz and Wagner cannot be exaggerated.
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