The 1970s NME critic got bored with pop and discovered that the most radical music of all was classical. This is a personal and entertainingly idiosyncratic history of music.
Published by Yale, this is a fascinating and original exploration of the influence of the newly popular guitar on the Romantics and on culture in the early C19th.
A massive work tracing Wagner's immense influence, not only through his adoption by the Nazis but through a gallery of others, from Baudelaire and Woolf to Philip K Dick and 'Apocalypse Now'... read more
A companion volume to his Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (pbk £25), tracing Bach's evolution as a composer and looking deeply into his creative process.
It's only six years since his magisterial biography of Beethoven, which seemed a lifetime's work. To do the same so quickly for Mozart seems nothing short of miraculous. NB due for publicati... read more