My week in Sète, in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of Southern France, was quietly pleasure-filled. There was a lot to do and to see including the glorious city of Montpellier (the subject of a later blog) but there was also…
When I was a teenager I thought I had all the answers about classical music. It was all quite simple then. Palestrina, Victoria, Byrd, Purcell, Monteverdi, J.S.Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Rossini, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Bellini, Chopin, Berlioz, Verdi, Brahms, Debussy,…
On the stroke of midnight last night, fans of the BBC radio’s great music station BBC6, will have heard the sig tune for their weekly show 6 Music Recommends presented by Tom Ravenscroft, son of the legendary rock music presenter…
The Blessed Damozel (1875 – 1878) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti I have written before on this site about my enthusiasm for the so-called Pre-Raphaelite artists, my favourites being Edward Burne-Jones (1833 – 1898) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882) but…
Adam Bell It’s a problem having two talented sons if they just keep on putting on shows at the same time as each other. Over the last few of weeks, I’ve been travelling around the country here in…
At the end of these two weeks of blogs about Venice, it is time to add that it wasn’t just me who had a great time – my trusty Panama hat enjoyed itself too. …
During my holiday in Venice, I had hoped to go to the opera. I’d followed the fortunes of the La Fenice opera house since my teenage days when Italian opera was one of my ruling passions. Sadly, as usual,…
I wasn’t sure what to expect when the boat approached the little Venetian island of Burano during my recent two week break in Venice. When we got close, I was amazed by the psychedelic colours mixed together in the…
Dirk Bogart in the 1971 Visconti film Death In Venice I haven’t been well over the last few weeks and, without being exactly a hypochondriac, my mind does go back at these times to that great death scene in the…
I had a new poem published with week, Sicilian Vespas, which was written after I spent some time on the wonderful island of Sicily a couple of years ago. My thanks are due, yet again, to Every Day Poets for…