Category Culture

Like making barrels or thatching roofs, writing about the royal family is one of the traditional craft skills of this country. It involves raking over yellowing newspaper cuttings and polishing old chestnuts about “majesty” and “radiance”. But books about the…

Like so many composers born in the 1880s, Thomas de Hartmann found the course of his career was largely shaped by world events. Born in Ukraine in 1884, he studied in St Petersburg with Arensky, Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov, and had…