2012
First Published
66
Number of Pages
Part of Series
As a 12-year-old living in Paris in the early days of the Second World War, Isaac Vidal hoped that freedom would soon come again to France. He had every confidence that it would for did not his favourite comic have a battling British hero who would thwart the Nazis at every turn? His optimism was not shared by all, for the Flaming Dagger was a character from fiction and everybody knows that fictitious heroes never win wars. Do they?
Author
Stephen Walsh
Author · 17 books
Professor Walsh was educated at Kingston Grammar School, St Paul’s School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. From 1963, he worked as a music journalist in London, at first freelance, writing for The Times, Daily Telegraph, and Financial Times, then from 1966 as deputy music critic of The Observer. He has broadcast regularly on musical topics for the BBC; a major feature of BBC Radio 3 programming in 1995 was his six two-hour broadcasts 'Conversations with Craft', in which he talked to Stravinsky's close associate, Robert Craft. Professor Walsh joined Cardiff University as a Senior Lecturer in Music in 1976, and now holds a personal chair in the School. He still contributes music criticism to The Independent and has since published a series of books and long papers on Bartok, Stravinsky, Kurtág and Panufnik, among others. The first volume of his major biography of Stravinsky—Stravinsky: A Creative Spring (Knopf, 1999) — won the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for the best music book published in the UK in the year 2000. Volume Two—Stravinsky: The Second Exile (also Knopf) — was published in 2006.
