Philip Spires commonplace book

I have kept a commonplace book for many years. It's a place where scraps of impressions are filed for future reflection. It's not a diary, it's just a mental scrapbook, concentrating on book reviews, concert reviews, visual arts and some occasional pieces on travel. It is also a place where I occasionally reflect on what I write. Details of my books can be found at http://www.philipspires.co.uk

Monday, January 3, 2022

Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers by Paul Rosenfeld

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  Tastes change. Fashions change. Presumptions, through whose refracting pris ms each new age interprets its aesthetics, also change, but u...
Monday, December 20, 2021

Light of Evening by Edna O’Brien

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  The Light of Evening by Edna O ’ Brien is a deceptively complex book. It deals with relationships between two women, Dilly and Eleanora, w...
Thursday, December 16, 2021

Swann’s Way – In Search of Lost Time Volume 1 Marcel Proust

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  Imagine a collage, an assemblage of the entire output of august artists, especially those of fin-de-siecle France, those one-time upstarts...

It’s all in the detail – Madama Butterfly in Valencia

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Puccini’s Madame Butterfly is a very well-known, much loved, and indeed popular opera. The genre is replete with femmes fatales , Butterfly,...
Friday, December 10, 2021

The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho

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  The Witch of Portobello is a novel by Paulo Coelho. Perhaps already there is already a divide. There are readers, many of them, for whom t...
Tuesday, December 7, 2021

La Ciudad de las Bestias (The City of Beasts) by Isabel Allende

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  La Ciudad de las Bestias (The City of Beasts) is a novel by Isabel Allende. I read it in Spanish, without consulting reviews or doing any ...
Monday, December 6, 2021

Quichotte by Salman Rushdie

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  I heard an author interviewed on the radio. He described a character he had invented, a fellow called Quichotte (that’s key-shot, by the w...
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About Me

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philipspires
I was born in Wakefield and was brought up in Sharslton, a mining Village. I went to London University and then became a maths teacher, working initially as a volunteer teacher in Kenya. I spent sixteen years in London, in Balham and Islington. In 1992, I left Britain for Brunei and then Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. I currently live in La Nucia, near Benidorm in Spain. I am interested in the relationship between nature and nurture, birthright and experience. Themes of culture and identity and their relation to economic and social roles underpin my writing. What we are born into relates to what we become, but we are rarely in control. What others do, our interests and intellects and the way we choose to earn a living, all of these shape us into what we become. It may be that culture is the sum of all assumptions that others make on our behalf, whereas identity represents our reactions to them. I did a PhD on the effects of education in economic development in the Philippines. I was President of Alfas del Pi Music Society for twelve years.
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