Authors Electric

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 ...

Does my bum look big on this? And do you really care? How much information do you really need - or want - about an author? When I was much younger, if I'd just finished a really good book, all I really wanted to know was whether the author had written any more, so a list of titles was all I wanted. Sometimes though, reluctant to put the book down, I'd read the bit of bumph about the author found at the front of the book in paperbacks, and on the dustjacket if it was a hardback still in possession of one. Occasionally it offered tantalising little snippets of information: my Narnia books informed me that the young Clive had lived in Belfast (where I was living at the time, instantly making me feel there was a special bond between us) and had decided to write the sort of books which he would have liked to read when he was young. I learned that Gillian Baxter, who wrote some brilliant pony stories, had written - and got published - her first novel when she was fifteen; there'...