Fiona Maddocks

In 1940, Sergei Rachmaninoff, living in exile in America, broke his creative silence and composed a swan song to his Russian homeland. What happened in those final haunted years, and how did he come to write his farewell masterpiece, the Symphonic Dances? Rachmaninoff left Petrograd in 1917 in the throes of the Russian Revolution. He was 44 years old, at...

Best known today as a fine composer, the twelfth-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen was also a religious leader and visionary, a poet, naturalist, and writer of medical treatises. Despite her cloistered life, she had strong, often controversial views on sex, love, and marriage too—an astonishing woman in her own age, whose book of apocalyptic visions, Scivias, would alone have...