'These Precious Days' by Ann Patchett

24 June 2026

I'm very grateful to fellow Ann Patchett fan Jess Plant for giving me a copy of 'These Precious Days' - Patchett's 2021 collection of non-fiction essays. I discovered Ann Patchett somewhat belatedly in 2023, reading her brilliant 2001 novel ‘Bel Canto’ (reviewed here in December 2023). Since then I have read and enjoyed her five subsequent novels (reviewed here, January 2024 - June 2025). 'These Precious Days' is an engaging and enjoyable collection of pieces on a variety of topics which gives you a rounded picture of the author, her personality, childhood, career, family and friends. Some of her pieces reminded me in their structure and tone of the comic essays of David Sedaris (reviewed here in June 2015). There are some very moving essays in 'These Precious Days' and Ann Patchett is particularly thought-provoking on the difficult topic of mortality. She is also very interesting on the business of being a writer and on her writing process. When I wrote here about her 2007 novel 'Run' (reviewed here in June 2024) I noted that Ann Patchett reminded me of the great contemporary American novelist Anne Tyler. So it was satisfying to discover, in the essay 'Cover Stories', that the publisher of Patchett's first novel hired the artist who had painted the cover illustration for Tyler's 'Breathing Lessons' in the hope of attracting Anne Tyler fans. Thirty years later Patchett says people still tell her that her novels remind them of Tyler's. Reading Ann Patchett's essays certainly makes you want to visit her book shop, Parnassus Books in Nashville. And I'm now really looking forward to reading her recently published tenth novel 'Whistler'.

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

23 June 2026

I've been a member of Northampton Symphony Orchestra for 26 years but last Saturday was the first time I can remember us dedicating a whole concert to a single piece of music. Any Gustav Mahler Symphony is a significant undertaking for an orchestra, but Mahler's 'Symphony No 3', which we played at St Matthew's in Northampton, brings some particular challenges. As well as being the longest of his symphonies, its six movements lasting around 95 to 110 minutes, it requires a massive orchestra, a mezzo-soprano soloist, a ladies choir and a children's choir. It was an amazing experience being one of 160 performers on Saturday (including an orchestra of more than 100 players).

NSO rehearsing Mahler 'Symphony No 3' in St Matthew's

I wasn't familiar with the 3rd symphony until we started to rehearse it and I found it quite difficult to appreciate at first. While there were clearly some beautiful, brilliant (and many seemingly impossible) passages, playing through one or two of the movements at a time they felt as if they came from completely different pieces. But as I got to know the symphony better I began to spot the use of common thematic material across the very different feeling movements and the work as a whole began to make more sense to me. Again I was reminded that there is no better way to understand and appreciate complex music than by playing it.

Flugelhorn solo from the balcony

Although there are plenty of tricky passages for the first horn player, Mahler 3 doesn't feature the substantial horn solos that terrified me when we played Mahler 6 in 2011 (reviewed here in November 2011). In the third symphony, while challenging solos throughout the orchestra were impressively conquered by NSO players, the limelight belongs to three instruments that have lengthy, exposed solos. John Whittall gave a fantastic performance of the commanding operatic trombone solo in the first movement. And Dan Newitt's beautiful Flugelhorn solo in the third movement, played from high up in the balcony at the back of the church, was stunning. But I would also like to praise the incredibly delicate, quiet bass drum solos that punctuate several sections of the symphony, played carefully and precisely by Henry Taylor.

Mezzo-soprano Rachel Roper was wonderful in the fourth and fifth movements. And the children's choir from the Malcolm Arnold Academy and ladies' chorus from the Northampton Bach Choir, directed by Simon Toyne, added a magical feel to the fifth movement.

NSO conductor John Gibbons deserves huge congratulations for pulling this enormous piece together and guiding us through a very impressive performance - and for conducting the whole symphony with one hand, with his left arm in a sling following a recent accident.

I suspect any performance of Mahler's 'Symphony No 3' feels like a significant event. It was amazing to be in the room to hear it live, let alone to play a part in the performance, and it was wonderful to be part of a brilliant horn section of nine players. I think our realisation of this massive undertaking was a triumph and I really enjoyed it.

NSO Horns

Afterwards, one member of our audience told us she was overwhelmed, saying "It's my absolute favourite piece of music and I never thought I would hear it live." This is an important reminder of the role amateur orchestras play in sharing lesser performed music with local audiences. While our performance of Mahler's 'Symphony No 3' definitely included a few minor mistakes (from me at least), it was much more exciting to hear it live than to listen to a recording.

'Ghost Writer' by David Tristram

15 June 2026

David Tristram is one of the UK's most popular and performed comedy playwrights. On average, one of his 29 published comedies is being performed somewhere in the world every single day. Like Alan Ayckbourn he writes plays that are well suited to amateur productions, usually requiring a single simple set. We first discovered David Tristram at one of our first visits to TADS, our local amateur theatre group in Toddington, in 2009 when we saw the gloriously silly murder mystery 'Inspector Drake and the Black Widow' (reviewed here in April 2009). On Saturday we were back at TADS for their latest David Tristram production, 'Ghost Writer' - a haunting comedy thriller. Like a contemporary version of Noel Coward's 'Blithe Spirit', playwright Edward (Rory White) is visited by the ghost of his dead wife Ruby (Jude Stacy) who tells him they need to find out which of the other actors in their company murdered her. Ruby persuades Edward to use Hamlet's 'play within the play' technique to try to reveal the guilty party. David Sachon's production brilliantly handles the required comic timing and crosstalk scenes (where only Edward can see or hear Ruby's ghost and everyone else assumes his comments to her are meant for them). The cast of six are all very impressive, with Andrew Naish's bright orange wig almost stealing the show. And the references to, and quotes from, 'Hamlet' are cleverly used. A very entertaining and enjoyable farce, excellently performed.

'Birnam Wood' by Eleanor Catton

15 June 2026

During my time as a charity chief executive, I remember a very interesting debate with my board of trustees when we were trying to establish formal guidelines for who the organisation would accept funding from. Charity trustees have a duty to focus on what is in the best interests of the charity, regardless of their own personal values and ethics. We concluded that decisions about the appropriateness of potential sponsors and donors should therefore be based only on the publicly stated purpose and values of the organisation and on whether acceptance of funding would be detrimental to the achievement of the organisation's purpose. I was reminded of this debate by Eleanor Catton's novel 'Birnam Wood', which tells the story of a small guerrilla gardening collective in New Zealand that is suddenly offered a huge donation by an American tech billionaire. The members of Birnam Wood are faced with the dilemma of weighing their distrust of the donor, his motives and what he stands for against the good they could do for their cause with his money. The novel starts as an intriguing moral and political argument but morphs into an increasingly tense thriller. The reference to 'Macbeth' in the title is clearly not accidental and, while Catton's novel doesn't mirror the plot of the play exactly, it definitely has the feel of a Shakespearean tragedy. Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize for her previous novel 'The Luminaries' (reviewed here in December 2013). 'Birnam Wood' is a very different book but equally impressive. The third person narrative voice switches perspectives between the main characters, showing us slightly different understandings of the same events. Cleverly, only we can see that all the protagonists have misunderstood at least one aspect of what is going on. 'Birnam Wood' is a brilliantly written, gripping, intricately-plotted tale, punctuated by three shocking moments that completely took me by surprise.

Switzerland

8 June 2026

We had a wonderful holiday in Switzerland to celebrate the start of my retirement. We started in Basel in the north of the country, next to the borders with France and Germany, where our first challenge was to leave the airport through the Switzerland exit rather than end up in the wrong country! Basel is a lovely small city, with a pretty old town on either side of the impressive Rhine river. We visited the Fondation Beyeler art gallery - a stunning Renzo Piano building set in a beautiful garden with views of the nearby hills - to see an exhibition of Paul Cezanne paintings. We also attended an orchestral concert at the Stadtcasino concert hall which featured four concertos played by students from the Basel Academy of Music, accompanied by the Basel Symphony Orchestra. After Basel we travelled by train to Wengen in the Jungfrau region - a car-free village halfway up a mountain, only accessible via a cogwheel train. Our self-catering chalet was just outside Wengen and the view from our balcony was beautiful, looking down the Lauterbrunnen valley and across the three mountains - Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger. As we sat on the balcony in the late afternoon we heard the increasing sound of cowbells and watched the cows being walked downhill for milking right past our cottage. We had a wonderful week in the mountains, catching the cable cars and mountain railways, walking, taking a cruise on Lake Brienz and soaking up the amazing views. From Wengen we moved on to Bern - the capital of Switzerland - which has a very pretty old city contained within a loop of the river Aare. It reminded us of Edinburgh's old town, with its cobbled streets and tall, thin, many storied buildings - but with added porticos (like we saw in Bologna). We visited the Einsteinhaus museum - in the apartment in which Einstein had once lived - and the Zentrum Paul Klee - another stunning modern building, by Renzo Piano, which holds 4,000 works by Paul Klee and displays a small selection on rotation. Finally we had a couple of days in Geneva where we travelled across the edge of Lake Geneva on the Mouette water buses, giving us beautiful views of the water and showing us how quickly you can get out of the city into lovely countryside. You can see a selection of my photos from Switzerland at: https://culturaloutlook.blogspot.com/search/label/Switzerland2026

'A Schooling in Murder' by Andrew Taylor

31 May 2026

Having enjoyed my first Andrew Taylor novel 'The Scent of Death' (reviewed here in May 2026) I moved on to 'A Schooling in Murder' - his 2025 novel set in 1945 at the end of the War (between VE Day and VJ Day) at a girls' boarding school in the countryside near Gloucester. This book has a very different feel to 'The Scent of Death': it is more of a cosy country house murder mystery, in the style of (and constantly referencing) Agatha Christie (with nods to Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham). It's also a ghost story (with the feel of Noel Coward's 'Blithe Spirit') as the tale is narrated by Annabel Warnock - a teacher at the school who is determined to find out who has just murdered her. There is more than one mystery here, with various suspicious goings-on involving pupils, teachers, servants and others. And there are many potential suspects for Annabel's murder. But this is quite a light-hearted murder story, which reminded me of Joanna Cannon's novels ‘The Trouble with Goats and Sheep’ (reviewed here in January 2022) and 'Three Things About Elsie (reviewed here in November 2023). A very enjoyable set of puzzles - being simultaneously investigated by the ghostly narrator, teachers and pupils - with a very clever denouement.

'This is What Happened' by Mick Herron

25 May 2026

Having read all the Slough House spy novels by Mick Herron (the latest 'Clown Town' reviewed here in October 2025), I was intrigued to read an earlier Mick Herron novel 'This is What Happened' (published 2018). This is a slight but clever puzzle of a novel. I really enjoyed trying to work out where it was going so I don't want to say too much about the plot. But be warned that this is a fairly creepy story about coercive control. The narrative structure shows us events through the eyes of each of the main protagonists, one after the other. So we gradually start to understand things the characters themselves don't. Mick Herron drops in perfectly placed clues, allowing the reader very satisfyingly to spot each of the twists just before they are revealed. 'This is What Happened' is a black comic thriller with a macabre feel.

'The Scent of Death' by Andrew Taylor

22 May 2026

Andrew Taylor is an incredibly prolific contemporary writer of historical fiction. I have really enjoyed reading my first Andrew Taylor novel, 'The Scent of Death' - a thriller (published in 2014) set in New York in 1778 during the American War of Independence. It was interesting to contrast this New York with the 1746 version described by Francis Spufford in his brilliant novel 'Golden Hill' (reviewed here in August 2017). By the 1770s New York is a stronghold of the British army, backed by American loyalists who are supporting the crown against the revolutionary army led by George Washington. The story follows Edward Savill, a civil servant in the American Department who has been sent from London to assess the situation in New York. He is quickly distracted from the wider political and military scene by a series of odd events involving the family with whom he is lodging, and finds himself investigating assault and murder. Andrew Taylor writes in the style and sensibilities of the period: while Savill is kinder and more considerate to the servants than some of his colleagues, his attitudes towards slaves feels upsettingly uncomfortable to the modern reader. The plot begins slowly but gathers pace, becoming genuinely thrilling and shockingly violent. It's well written and obviously carefully researched, giving a fascinating portrait of this transitional period in American history, without ever feeling like a history lesson. I chose this Andrew Taylor novel to start with because it wasn't labelled as part of a multi-novel series, but having finished it I was delighted to discover that Edward Savill appears in another Taylor novel, which I am now looking forward to reading.

'The Kellerby Code' by Jonny Sweet

12 May 2026

Jonny Sweet is a comedian and actor who I knew from Tom Basden's brilliant Radio 4 sitcom 'Party' - about a group of naïve students who have decided to start their own political party. His debut novel 'The Kellerby Code' (which I have just finished reading as an unabridged audio book, narrated by Jack Davenport) is a dark comic thriller which Sweet has described as 'Brideshead Revisited' meets 'The Talented Mr Ripley'. Edward Jevons is a lower-middle-class young man besotted with his upper-class university friends Robert and Stanza. His increasingly desperate attempts to ingratiate himself by being helpful seem to be casting him in the role of a servant rather than a friend. Through a series of small incremental steps Edward's journey becomes more macabre and his predicament more cringeworthy. While it might be unfair to expect a novel by a comedian to have to be funny, a novel by a comedian that specifically references 'The Code of the Woosters' by PG Wodehouse wasn't as funny as I was expecting. It's a thrilling ride but I didn't find Edward a sympathetic enough character. Jonny Sweet said he was aiming for a mixture of Wodehouse and the Coen Brothers. It's an interesting and very readable debut but the grand guignol needed a bit more light relief for me.