The All-Round Man: Selected Letters of Percy Grainger, 1914-1961

Percy Grainger was one of the most colourful of this century's cultural figures. The All-Round Man depicts that scrambling diversity through seventy-six challenging letters from Grainger's "American" years, 1914-61. These letters are fascination to read: they are cultivated "rambles" (as Grainger actually called several of his compositions), not dissimilar to today's telephone conversations. Often written in Grainger's crunchy "Blue-eyed English", they explore uninhibitedly every corner of his public and private life. They reflect the magnificent attempts of a great but flawed mind to encompass the world.

Malcolm Gillies has written widely on twentieth-century music, including many books on Béla Bartók, including Bartók in Britain: A Guided Tour (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), Notation and Tonal Structure in Bartók's Later Works (New York: Garland, 1989), and Bartók Remembered (Faber and Faber, 1990, New York W.W. Norton's, 1991), and is editor of The Life and Music of Béla Bartók, by Halsey Stevens (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), and The Bartók Companion (Faber and Faber, January 1994). He lives in Queensland, Australia. David Pear, a theologian and educator, worked as as Senior Research Assistant on the Grainger Letters project between 1990 and 1992, and also lives in Queensland, Australia.