Sometimes you have to take what you can get, savour what is around you. Sometimes you have to make do with a wall painting of a swarm of bees …

In 1943 John Steinbeck came to London as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. Some fifteen years later he rekindled his memories of those war days …

I haven’t done much. Not swum with dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, nor watched whales in the North Atlantic. This autumn though I found myself swimming with the fallen leaves in a London park …

Pierre-Laurent Aimard hardly waited for the applause to stop before attacking the grand piano with his long fingers. The opening trill in the upper registers was made up of a disorienting scuttle of notes …