Bach and me

I’ve been learning Bach’s Goldberg Variations recently. I know that sounds absurd. It’s the piano music Glenn Gould dazzled the music world with in 1955 and it’s famous for its technical and interpretive challenges. If you didn’t have the chops or the months or maybe years to commit, you’d have to be nuts to even

The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray’s Anatomy (Book review)

I finished reading Oliver Sacks new book On The Move: A Life this week and towards the end he writes about his late-blossoming relationship with Bill Hayes, author of The Anatomist. It reminded me that I’d written a review of it for the CMAJ. You can see why they might be drawn to one another —

Ron Bolt, artist

For the past little while I’ve been co-chair of the Art Committee at the Arts and Letters Club here in Toronto. This month there’s a one-man show by Ron Bolt, a renowned landscape painter and print-maker. If you want to see the show, call me and we can do a walk through. At the opening

The Invention of Scotland by Hugh Trevor-Roper (Book Review)

by Alan King British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper seems to have had a lifelong fascination with fakes and fraudsters. The first book of his to reach beyond an academic readership was his 1976 exposé of Sir Edmund Backhouse, the turn-of-the-century sinologist who was regarded as an expert on the Chinese Empress Dowager and her court. Trevor-Roper

Breakfast With Lucien by Geordie Grieg (Book review)

by Alan King Whatever it was the author shared with famous British figurative artist Lucien Freud at the breakfast table it definitely wasn’t sunny side up. The meal served in this brief memoir is a dark, all-you-can-shag buffet. Much of it entails Freud bloviating unapologetically about his lengthy conga-line of bed partners — many of