Authors Electric

Anthologies are sickly things,’ wrote the historian Sir Francis Palgrave in 1851. ‘The splendid bouquet decays into unsavoury trash, and as trash is thrown away.’ The word ‘anthology’ is derived from Greek and means a collection of the flowers of verse. Ten years later his son, Francis Turner Palgrave, picked possibly the most famous bunch in the English language. Sir Francis died in the month that The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and  Lyrical Poems in the English Language was published. In his life, from difficult beginnings -- possibly attributable to prejudice against his Jewish ancestry -- he had achieved eminence as Deputy Keeper of the Public Record Office and had played a key role in ensuring that the national archives were properly catalogued and stored. His son’s success may be thought of as storing lyric poetry in individuals’ heads and establishing a distinctive poetic tradition as part of our cultural heritage. Sir Francis's oldest son, Francis Turner Palgrave was...

I sing from the back row of the altos in an Essex amateur choir. In 'normal' times we give three concerts a year ranging widely across the centuries,  though very often it's Something Sacred. When Kate, who is our concert organiser, asks me whether I’ll contribute the programme notes, my heart simultaneously sinks and bounds. It sinks because I’m so horribly ignorant about musical history that I know I’m going to have to spend disproportionate time researching basic facts and dates. It bounds because I know it’ll bring me closer to the music and I'll possibly manage to find words for inarticulate observations made during our weekly rehearsals which I've had no time to explore. Because Kate is an exhausted GP, and is giving up significant amounts of her time to ensure all goes Right on the Night, I don’t bother her with my interesting cardiac symptoms, I just say yes.  The central work in our forthcoming concert (November 27th Chelmsford Cathedral, please get your ...