A Practical Guide to Counselling (eBook)

Help Others Make Sense of Life

Alistair Ross

Talk, listen, support and understand better. 

Develop a hands-on understanding of how counselling works and how it can help people, viewing the subject from both a client’s and a trainee counsellor’s perspective.

Learn how to listen more attentively and be a better communicator, be more empathetic with a heightened perception of others, and improve your relationships with both those around you and yourself.

Providing expert insights, real-life case studies and useful skills, this Practical Guide offers an invaluable guide to anyone interested in learning more about counselling.

Dr Alistair Ross is a BACP accredited counsellor and supervisor, Chair of the BACP’s Professional Ethics and Quality Standards Committee, and a director of studies in Psychodynamic Studies and Psychology at the University of Oxford. Since 2002 he has also led the MA in Psychodynamic Counselling at the University of Birmingham.

The Elements of Eloquence (eBook)

How To Turn the Perfect English Phrase

Mark Forsyth

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER THE ETYMOLOGICON.

'An informative but highly entertaining journey through the figures of rhetoric … Mark Forsyth wears his considerable knowledge lightly. He also writes beautifully.' David Marsh, Guardian.

Mark Forsyth presents the secret of writing unforgettable phrases, uncovering the techniques that have made immortal such lines as 'To be or not to be' and 'Bond. James Bond.'

In his inimitably entertaining and witty style, he takes apart famous quotations and shows how you too can write like Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde or John Lennon.

Crammed with tricks to make the most humdrum sentiments seem poetic or wise, The Elements of Eloquence reveals how writers through the ages have turned humble words into literary gold – and how you can do the same.

Mark Forsyth is a blogger and author who was given a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary as a christening present and has never looked back. In 2009, he started the Inky Fool blog in order to share his heaps of useless information with a verbose world. His books have made him one of the UK’s best-known commentators on words. Follow Mark on Twitter @inkyfool.

Best Served Cold (eBook)

The Rise, Fall and Rise Again of Malcolm Walker - CEO of Iceland Foods

Malcolm Walker

This is the dramatic story of the ups and downs of a born entrepreneur.

Malcolm Walker was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1946. With fellow Woolworth’s trainee manager Peter Hinchcliffe, Walker opened a small frozen food shop called Iceland in the Shropshire town of Oswestry in 1970. Iceland became a public company 14 years later, through one of Britain’s most successful stock exchange flotations of all time, and by 1999 it had grown into a £2 billion turnover business with 760 stores.

In August 2000, Iceland merged with the Booker cash and carry business and Walker announced that he would step down as CEO in March 2001. In preparation for his retirement, he sold half his shares in the company and left for the holiday of a lifetime in the Maldives. However, while he was away the new management of the company slashed profit expectations, plunging Iceland into a £26m loss rather than the £130m profit the City had been expecting. Walker was fired and spent three years under investigation by the authorities before being cleared of any wrongdoing.

In Walker’s absence, Iceland’s sales collapsed as customers deserted the company – and, almost exactly four years after he had left the business, he returned as its boss. His amazing revival of Iceland has seen like-for-like sales grow by more than 50% and the business winning the accolade of Best Big Company To Work For In the UK. In March 2012 Walker led a £1.5bn management buyout of the company and is now personally worth over £200m.

The incredible story of Walker’s life – which he tells here for the first time – is as dramatic as any you will find in business, and it serves as a model for how, through hard work and intelligent risk-taking, it is possible from a relatively modest upbringing to build a national enterprise and a household name known to millions.

Malcolm Walker co-founded Iceland in 1970 and was its Chairman and Chief Executive through 30 years of continuous sales growth. He left Iceland under a cloud early in 2001, but returned four years later to lead a transformation in its performance. Iceland today has sales of £2.6 billion, 800 stores and 25,000 employees, and is recognised as one of the Best Companies to Work For in the UK.

How to be a Productivity Ninja – FREE SAMPLER (eBook)

Worry Less, Achieve More and Love What You Do

Graham Allcott

THIS IS A FREE EBOOK SAMPLER. IT INCLUDES THE FIRST 42 PAGES OF THE FULL BOOK. If you would like to purchase Graham Allcott's How to be a Productivity Ninja in full, you can do so with all good ebook retailers.

In the age of information overload, traditional time management techniques simply don’t cut it when it comes to overflowing inboxes, ever-expanding to-do lists and endless, pointless meetings. Thankfully there is a better way: The Way of the Productivity Ninja.
Using techniques including Ruthlessness, Mindfulness, Zen-like Calm and Stealth & Camouflage you will get your inbox down to zero, make the most of your attention, beat procrastination and learn to work smarter, not harder.
Written by one of the UK’s foremost productivity experts, How to be a Productivity Ninja is a fun, accessible and practical guide to staying cool, calm and collected, getting more done, and learning to love your work again.
If you enjoy this free sampler why not check out the complete book and learn the ways of the Productivity Ninja!

Graham Allcott is a productivity trainer, social entrepreneur and founder of Think Productive. Think Productive run public workshops throughout the UK and also run in-house workshops for staff at a diverse range of organizations, including the Cabinet Office (UK government), The National Trust, eBay, Heineken, BT, GlaxoSmithKline and the University of Bristol.

Prior to founding Think Productive, Graham’s career has been primarily focused on social action. He ran community volunteering projects for the University of Birmingham before becoming Chief Executive of the charity Student Volunteering England, and has since worked on a number of social enterprise and charity projects.

Graham lives in Brighton, UK.

You Are the Music (eBook)

How Music Reveals What it Means to be Human

Victoria Williamson

'You are the music / While the music lasts' T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

Do babies remember music from the womb? Can classical music increase your child’s IQ? Is music good for productivity? Can it aid recovery from illness and injury? And what is going on in your brain when Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht or Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Bonkers’ transports you back to teenage years?

In a brilliant new work that will delight music lovers of every persuasion, music psychologist Victoria Williamson examines our relationship with music across the whole of a lifetime.
Along the way she reveals the amazing ways in which music can physically reshape our brains, explores how ‘smart music listening’ can improve cognitive performance, and considers the perennial puzzle of what causes ‘earworms’.

Requiring no specialist musical or scientific knowledge, this upbeat, eye-opening book reveals as never before the extent of the universal language of music that lives deep inside us all.

Victoria Williamson is a lecturer and researcher in music psychology who holds academic posts in the UK and Switzerland. She has spoken at TED, the Latitude Festival, the British Science Festival and her writing has appeared in NME. Her academic research has been presented across national and international media including BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky (UK), CNN and MSNBC (USA), CBC (Canada), Radio New Zealand National, and 2SER and the Big Issue (Australia). Victoria also hosts the popular blog musicpsychology.co.uk

30-Second Brain (eBook)

The 50 most mind-blowing ideas in neuroscience, each explained in half a minute

Anil Seth

Are we all at the mercy of our brain chemistry? Do you think that the amygdala and the hippocampus are fantastical sea monsters? What can an MRI scan tell us? Could you explain to dinner-party guests why we don’t giggle when we tickle ourselves?

30-Second Brain is here to fill your mind with the science of exactly what’s happening inside your head. Using no more than two pages, 300 words and an illustration, this is the quickest way to understand the wiring and function of the most complex and intricate mechanism in the human body. Discover how the networks of 90 billion nerve cells work together to produce perception, action, cognition and emotion. Explore how your brain defines your personality, and what it gets up to while you are asleep.

Illustrated with mind-bending graphics and supported by biographies of pioneers in the field of neuroscience, it’s the book to get your grey matter thinking about your grey matter.

Dr Anil Seth is a Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at University of Sussex, where he leads multidisciplinary research across neuroscience, psychology, and computer science, with a focus on understanding the biological basis of conscious experience – a key challenge for 21st century science He is also Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He has published more than 100 scientific papers and book chapters, has lectured and written widely on neuroscience for a general audience, and his research has been covered in a wide range of media, including the Guardian and New Scientist.

A London Country Diary (eBook)

Mundane Happenings from the Secret Streets of the Capital

Tim Bradford

Stewart Lee

For fifteen years, Tim Bradford has meandered round the quiet streets of his North London home, seeking out
the ordinary and the extraordinary, the sublime and the ridiculous. A London Country Diary documents his wanderings – he attempts to rescue a deer in Clissold Park, talks to a magical old man in Holloway, breaks up a fight in Stoke Newington and has issues with foxes in Highbury. And that’s just the beginning.

All of life is in these pages. Well, some. OK, just a little bit. But with its idiosyncratic wit and charming illustrations, this book is a timely reminder that you can find beauty, humour and life, wherever you call home.

Tim Bradford is an illustrator, artist and writer. He is the author of The Groundwater Diaries (4th Estate, 2004) and Small Town England (Ebury, 2010), described as a 'warm, kaleidoscopic romp of a reminiscence' by Stuart Maconie. He frequently publishes illustrations in When Saturday Comes and the Guardian, and is otherwise to be found tramping the streets of London looking for musical instruments, old bookshops or lost rivers.

He lives in Stoke Newington and Co. Clare, Ireland. See more at timbradford.com.

Imagine That – Literature (eBook)

The History of Literature Rewritten

Michael Sells

How would society and communication have altered if the Gutenberg press had never been invented? Did George Eliot and the Bronte sisters do more harm than good for female writers? Are translators to blame for almost every war in modern history?

Literature has not simply been the favoured method of logging history; it has also been one of the greatest instigators and as such the world we live in could be wholly different without some of literature’s best-known names.

Michael Sells is a historian educated at the University of Chester. Captivated by history from a young age, he is especially interested in Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation and 1960s and 70s football. Outside of history, his passions include dystopian novels, animal sanctuaries and lower-league football. Born in the South East of England, he now lives in Cambridge and the Imagine That titles are his first books.

Lucky Planet (eBook)

Why Earth is Exceptional – and What that Means for Life in the Universe

David Waltham

Science tells us that life elsewhere in the Universe is increasingly likely to be discovered. But in fact the Earth may be a very unusual planet – perhaps the only one like it in the entire visible Universe. In Lucky Planet David Waltham asks why, and comes up with some surprising and unconventional answers.

Recent geological, biological, and astronomical discoveries are bringing us closer to understanding whether we might be alone in the Universe, and this book uses these to question the conventional wisdom and suggest, instead, that the Earth may have had ‘four billion years of good weather’ purely by chance.

If Earth-like worlds don’t have natural stabilising mechanisms, then intelligent observers such as ourselves will only ever look out onto those rare planets where, like the Earth, all the bad things that could have happened to the climate have fortunately cancelled each other out.

So before you prepare to meet the aliens, consider that we are probably alone …

David Waltham obtained a first-class degree and a PhD in Physics before moving into the oil industry in the early 1980s. This industrial experience led to his appointment, in 1986, as a lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he became Head of Earth Sciences from 2008–2012.

The Kitchen Magpie (eBook)

A delicious melange of culinary curiosities, fascinating facts, amazing anecdotes and expert tips for the food-lover

James Steen

Join award-winning writer James Steen for a feast of food and drink facts and culinary curiosities.

Delving into forgotten corners of gastronomic history, Steen reveals what Parmesan has to do with broken bones and why John Wayne kept a cow in a hotel. Laying bare the secrets of the kitchen, he concocts the ultimate hangover cure and explains how to cook perfect rib of beef with the oven off.

With much-loved cooks including Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood sharing passion and know-how, this mouth-watering miscellany will sate the appetite of every kitchen dweller, from the masterful expert to the earnest apprentice.

James Steen is an award-winning journalist, food writer, author and ghostwriter. He has a deep fascination for both the cook and cooking, and collaborates with great chefs. He ghosted the autobiographies of Marco Pierre White (The Devil in the Kitchen), Raymond Blanc (A Taste of My Life) and Keith Floyd (Stirred But Not Shaken). His other books include Marco Made Easy and Kitchen Secrets. He is a consultant to small-but-pioneering food companies, and contributes to a wide variety of publications. James lives in London with his wife Louise and their children, Charlie, Billy and Daisy.

The Solar Revolution (eBook)

One World. One Solution. Providing the Energy and Food for 10 Billion People.

Steve McKevitt

Tony Ryan

It’s an astonishing fact that capturing all the energy in just one hour’s worth of sunlight would enable us to meet the planet’s food and energy needs for an entire year.

The Solar Revolution tells the story of how scientists are working to reconnect us to the ‘solar economy’, harnessing the power of the sun to provide sustainable food and energy for a global population of 10 billion people: an achievement that would end our dependence on ‘fossilised sunshine’ in the form of coal, oil and gas and remake our connection with the soil that grows our food.

Steve McKevitt and Tony Ryan describe the human race’s complex relationship with the sun and take us back through history to see how our world became the place it is today – chemically, geologically, ecologically, climatically and economically – before moving on to the cutting-edge science and technology that will enable us to live happily in a sustainable future.

Steve McKevitt is an expert in communications and consumerism. Over a 25-year career his clients have included Nike, Coca-Cola, Deutsche Bank, Sony PlayStation, Harvey Nichols, Motorola, Universal, Virgin, BT and Atari. Steve is chairman of Golden, an ideas agency with clients in the UK, Europe and the USA, and also works as an advisor to national and regional UK government on employment, skills, business innovation and international trade.

Professor Tony Ryan OBE is a polymer chemist at the University of Sheffield. He delivered the 2002 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and regularly appears on Radio 4's Infinite Monkey Cage with Brian Cox and Robin Ince, and has been on In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg.

30-Second Quantum Theory (eBook)

The 50 most thought-provoking quantum concepts, each explained in half a minute

Brian Clegg

Frank Close Leon Clifford

The bestselling 30-Second… series takes a revolutionary approach to learning about those subjects you feel you should really understand.

Each title selects a popular topic and dissects it into the 50 most significant ideas at its heart. Each idea, no matter how complex, is explained in 300 words and one picture, all digestible in 30 seconds.

30-Second Quantum Theory tackles a mindbendingly mysterious area of physics, introducing the 50 most significant quantum quandaries and ideas. In a world where the quantum physics of electronics is an everyday essential and new quantum developments make headline news, you will visit Parallel Worlds, ride Wave Theory, and learn just enough to talk with certainty about Uncertainty Theory and to untangle the mysteries of quantum entanglement.

Brian Clegg is a science journalist and author whose numerous books include Inflight Science, The Universe Inside You, Introducing Infinity: A Graphic Guide, Dice World and The Quantum Age, all published by Icon. He also runs popularscience.co.uk

Wagner (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

No other composer is at once so revered or so reviled as Richard Wagner. Yet his contribution to opera is immense. His reputation rests on ten epic operas which are constantly performed worldwide, without speaking of the annual festival of his music at Bayreuth, the opera house which he designed and built to stage his works. Four of these operas, Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Gotterdammerung, make up the monumental 15-hour Ring cycle, based on old Norse-Germanic sagas. Many of the others hark back to medieval and Arthurian legends, often dramatising the conflict between the sacred and profane, the sensual and spiritual. Using leitmotifs – themes which symbolise characters and elements in his opera – Wagner introduced a new musical vocabulary.

Endless affairs, twice married, constantly on the run for either political or financial reasons, a prolific writer, an indefatigable composer, Wagner was also, as Michael Steen's narrative shows, a monster of egoism. A revolutionary in his youth, Wagner escaped to Zurich, only to be forced to move on when the businessman bankrolling him was about to uncover Wagner's affair with his wife. He was then lavishly supported in Munich by the ‘Mad King’ Ludwig II of Bavaria, until the king's ministers objected. Once in Switzerland, Wagner was joined by Cosima von Bülow, Liszt's daughter and the wife of a conductor, who became his second wife and helped him realise his dream at Bayreuth.

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

Verdi (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

With Verdi, Italian opera reached its zenith, where music and drama are fused into an indissoluble whole. Although he wrote 28 operas, less than half remain regularly performed. Yet those which are remain a gold standard of characterisation, stagecraft and musical vocabulary. Rigoletto, La Traviata, Un Ballo in Maschera, Aïda – the roll call is long, but it is especially with his final two operas, Otello and Falstaff, that he becomes the unassailable master.

But it was not just the excellence of Verdi's artistry which propelled him to fame. Verdi was writing just as Italy was becoming increasingly resentful of Austria's domination, and there was a growing movement to unite the patchwork of territories of which Italy was composed at the time into a unified country. He became identified with the ambitions of reunification, and many of his operas, with their political subtexts, became rallying calls for the nationalists. Michael Steen unpicks how this most unsociable of men, a reluctant politician but a brilliant composer, became the figurehead for the birth of a nation.

Born into a modest background, Verdi, with his sound business sense, grew rich and famous; rich enough to ignore the scandalised disapproval of his neighbours at his living openly with his mistress for many years before marrying her. At his death 200,000 people lined the streets to bid farewell to their hero.

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

Tchaikovsky (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

Unlike many of the composers in this series, Tchaikovsky showed no indication of genius as a child and he spent several years as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice before entering the St Petersburg Conservatoire. His composing career only really took off in his mid-30s. Late starter he may have been but, in the nearly twenty years left to him (he died at 53), he created some of the undisputed masterpieces of the repertoire: the operas, Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, and in ballet, Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. The Fourth Symphony, with its fate motif, and the Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, along with his First Piano Concerto, make constant appearances on the concert platform.

Behind these achievements, as Michael Steen's gripping narrative shows, lay a life of anguish and sexual crisis as Tchaikovsky tried alternatively to accommodate and repress his homosexuality (then punishable by death in Russia). It led him to make a disastrous marriage at 37, which caused him much distress, and after only a few months, they arranged to live apart. In many ways his most successful relationship with a woman as an adult was with his patroness Nadezhda von Meck, which lasted fourteen years, during which time they never spoke to each other in person. Even today, the true cause of his death remains open to question, with competing theories jostling for acceptance.

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

Schubert (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

In his short life of not quite 32 years – the briefest span of any first-rank composer – Schubert composed over 600 songs, showing a talent for word-setting which for many has never been equalled. However, while his songs gained gradual fame while he was alive, many of the works for which he is renowned were never performed in his lifetime, not even his Eighth Symphony, the Unfinished, or the Ninth Symphony, The Great C Major, which are so ubiquitous now. He was not lionised for the String Quintet in C, whose second movement Adagio remains one of the most requested pieces on Desert Island Discs. Nor did his exquisite quartets and piano music receive much recognition at the time.

Michael Steen evokes Schubert's youth as the son of an impoverished schoolteacher and his life among a boisterous, arty set of friends living it up in the dazzling gaiety of early 19th-century Vienna. Their evening gatherings for an intoxicating mix of politics, conversation and music became known as Schubertiads. At 25 Schubert contracted syphilis and was to suffer ill health for the rest of his life, falling into the depression that is so heart-rendingly expressed in some of his works. Schubert died only a year and a half after Beethoven, having been a torch-bearer at his funeral. Even so, he remained prodigiously productive and those last years bequeathed some of his finest works.

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

Puccini (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

Puccini and Verdi are unquestionably the two giants of 19th-century Italian grand opera. Like Verdi, Puccini knew what his audience wanted, and supplied it – in Puccini's case, a highly coloured world of sweeping emotion, melodrama shot through with a kind of sadism. His three greatest operas, La Bohème – the most popular opera ever written – Tosca and Madama Butterfly are invariably staged every year, while Turandot, La fanciulla del West, Manon Lescaut, and Gianni Schicchi appear only scarcely less often.

Ever the hard-drinking, chain-smoking sportsman, Puccini had much of the raffish playboy about him. He bought himself fast cars, yachts named after the works whose proceeds financed them, and built a magnificent house at Torre del Largo where he continued his womanising under the jealous eye of his wife, Elvira. Michael Steen's narrative follows the progress of the small boy stealing the organ pipes of his village church on the rocky road to fame to become this larger-than-life figure.

Supported for several years by his publisher Ricordi, Puccini's first real hit was Manon Lescaut, heavily influenced by Massenet. Subsequent success saw him joining the jet set, and travelling to England and America, his star only eclipsed by the First World War. But his appeal remains clear and direct, as the director Jonathan Miller says: ‘I'm made to cry by Puccini and I never am by Verdi.’

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.