It was the Great Train Robbery of French intellectual life: thousands of treasured documents that vanished from the Institut de France in the mid-1800s, stolen by an Italian mathematician. Among them were 72 letters by René Descartes, the founding genius of modern philosophy and analytic geometry. Read more…

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Anyone who has made it to grade four or five on the piano will, almost certainly, have encountered a piece by Chopin. Certainly, no compilation of “classics for beginners” is complete without his E minor Prelude. It’s got everything the fledgling pianist needs to feel good about their technique: it’s short, it’s in a gratifyingly slow speed and it has a superficially straightforward left-hand part, with a sad, singing melody line in the right. Read more…

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Imagine this: you drop onto the sofa on a Sunday afternoon, switch on the TV and see a dapper young man with a baton standing before an orchestra and demonstrating the patterns conductors use to lead music in different meters — two, three, four and five beats to the bar. He directs his players in a few examples, bits of Beethoven’s Ninth and Schubert’s Eighth Symphonies, Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” Waldteufel’s “Skater’s Waltz.” Then he ups the ante, showing how these simple gestures, with subtle modification, are used to coax a fluid, lyrical performance; a playful reading; or an urgently dramatic interpretation from an orchestra. Read more…

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In Sutton Courtenay churchyard about 10 miles south of Oxford, near the imposing tomb of H. H. Asquith, the prime minister 100 years ago, a much simpler gravestone reads “Eric Arthur Blair.” It was to that grave a friend and I recently made a pilgrimage for a sad anniversary. Blair died of tuberculosis on Jan. 21, 1950, at the age of 46, just when he had found fame and fortune under the name by which the world knows him, George Orwell. Read more…

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In 1907 Mark Twain, America’s best-loved living author, visited England in a blaze of glory. Among the fellow literary lights he met there were Rudyard Kipling, who described the camera shutters around Twain “click-clicking like gun locks,” and George Bernard Shaw. “He is in very much the same position as myself,” Shaw said of Twain. “He has to put matters in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang him believe he is joking.” Read more…

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Posted via email from Simply Charly’s posterous