Sir Max Hastings: Accounts From Abroad

Tuesday 14 May, 6.00pm

Middleton Grange School Auditorium

Tickets $20: Dash Tickets

Sir Max Hastings is an author, journalist and broadcaster whose work has appeared in every British national newspaper. He now writes regularly for the Daily Mail and the Financial Times, of which he is a contributing editor, and reviews books for the Sunday Times and New York Review of Books. He has published 23 books, among the most recent of which are his Second World War history, All Hell Let Loose (2011), Did You Really Shoot the Television?: A Family Fable (2010) and Finest Years: Churchill As Warlord 1940–45 (2009).

He spent most of his early years as a foreign correspondent for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard, reporting on 11 conflicts, notably Vietnam and the 1982 South Atlantic war, which inspired Battle for the Falklands, the 1983 best-seller he wrote with Simon Jenkins. He was editor, then editor-in-chief, of the Daily Telegraph from 1986 to 1995, and of the Evening Standard from 1996 to 2002. He has described his journalistic career in two memoirs, Going to the Wars (2000) and Editor (2002). His new book, Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914, will be published in the autumn of 2013.
He has presented many TV documentaries. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of King’s College, London, he has also received honorary degrees from Leicester and Nottingham universities. He was knighted in 2002 for services to journalism.

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Sylvie Simmons: Stories from the

Life of Leonard Cohen

Tuesday 14 May, 8.00pm
Middleton Grange School
Tickets $20: Dash Tickets

Sylvie Simmons is a renowned music journalist and award-winning writer. A Londoner, she moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s where she began writing about rock music for Sounds, Creem and Kerrang!, then Rolling Stone, the Guardian and MOJO. She is the author of fiction and non-fiction books, including the acclaimed Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes, Neil Young: Reflections in Broken Glass, the short story collection, Too Weird for Ziggy, and her latest, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen.

The legend behind such songs as ‘Suzanne’, ‘Bird on a Wire’ and ‘Hallelujah’ and the poet and novelist behind such ground-breaking literary works as Beautiful Losers and Book of Mercy, Leonard Cohen is one of the most important and influential artists of our era, a man of powerful emotion and intelligence whose work has explored the definitive issues of human life—sex, religion, power, meaning, love. Cohen is also a man of complexities and seeming contradictions: both a devout Jew, who is also a sophisticate and a ladies’ man, and an ordained Buddhist monk, whose name, Jikan, means ‘ordinary silence’.

I’m Your Man is the definitive account of an extraordinary life. Sylvie Simmons has crafted a portrait of Cohen as nuanced as the man himself, drawing on a wealth of research that includes his personal archives and more than 100 exclusive interviews with those closest to Cohen—from his lovers, friends, monks, professors, rabbis and fellow musicians to his muses, including Rebecca De Mornay, Marianne Ihlen, Suzanne Elrod and Suzanne Verdal—and, most important, with Cohen himself, whose presence infuses the pages.

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Kate Mosse

Wednesday 29 May