Scaling the musical Matterhorn

This book is an account by the music-loving editor of the Guardian of how he set himself the task of learning to play one of the most daunting virtuoso pieces in the piano repertoire, and to do so within the space of what turned out to be perhaps the most hectic year in the newspaper’s history.

Alan Rusbridger didn’t actually meet his self-imposed deadline. He had been overwhelmed by developments at his newspaper — the Wikileaks and phone-hacking exposures (both huge Guardian scoops), the Arab revolutions, the English urban riots, the near-collapse of the European financial system, not to mention the huge financial problems created for the paper by the digital revolution — and so could not put in the hours of practice he needed. ‘A job that was routinely 12 to 14 hours a day, Monday to Friday, regularly expanded beyond that and ate deeply into the sixth and seventh days,’ he writes.