Simon Callow

Simon Callow plunges headlong into Wagner's world to discover what it was like to be Wagner, and to be around one of music's most influential figures. The perfect introduction to the Master, a hundred and thirty-five years after his death, Richard Wagner's music dramas stand at the centre of the culture of classical music.

Two hundred years after his death, Dickens's work is more popular than ever. Theatre was central to his life, from his earliest years as a child entertainer in Portsmouth pubs, to his reluctant retirement from 'these garish lights' barely a year before his death. He wrote plays, he acted in them; he stage-managed them, all with fanatical perfectionism. Simon Callow explores this extraordinary theatrical core to Dickens in this short life of one of our greatest novelists.