Play It Again by Alan Rusbridger

Play It Again by Alan Rusbridger

As editor of the Guardian, one of the world's foremost newspapers, Alan Rusbridger abides by the relentless twenty-four-hour news cycle. But increasingly in midlife, he feels the gravitational pull of music--especially the piano. He sets himself a formidable challenge: to fluently learn Chopin's magnificent Ballade No. 1 in G minor, arguably one of the most difficult Romantic compositions in the repertory. With pyrotechnic passages that require feats of memory, dexterity, and power, the piece is one that causes alarm even in battle-hardened concert pianists. He gives himself a year.

Under ideal circumstances, this would have been a daunting task. But the particular year Rusbridger chooses turns out to be one of frenetic intensity. As he writes in his introduction, "Perhaps if I'd known then what else would soon be happening in my day job, I might have had second thoughts. For it would transpire that, at the same time, I would be steering the Guardian through one of the most dramatic years in its history." It was a year that began with WikiLeaks' massive dump of state secrets and ended with the Guardian's revelations about widespread phone hacking at News of the World. "In between, there were the Japanese tsunami, the Arab Spring, the English riots . . . and the death of Osama Bin Laden," writes Rusbridger. The test would be to "nibble out" twenty minutes per day to do something totally unrelated to the above.

Rusbridger's description of mastering the Ballade is hugely engaging, yet his subject is clearly larger than any one piece of classical music. Play It Again deals with focus, discipline, and desire but is, above all, about the sanctity of one's inner life in a world dominated by deadlines and distractions.



What will you do with your twenty minutes?

Rusbridger, Alan: - Alan Rusbridger was Editor-in-Chief of Guardian News & Media from 1995 to 2015. He launched the Guardian in the US and Australia as well as building a website which today attracts more than 100 million unique browsers a month. The paper's coverage of phone-hacking led to the Leveson Inquiry into press standards and ethics. Guardian US won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service for its leading global coverage of the Snowden revelations. He is the author of Play It Again and Breaking News. He lives in London and Oxford, where he is Principal of Lady Margaret Hall and chairs the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

@arusbridger arusbridger.com

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780374232917
ISBN 10	0374232911
Title	Play It Again
Author	Alan Rusbridger
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Year published	2013-09-17
Number of pages	416
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.