Lennox and Freda at the Cheltenham Literature Festival

24th August 2011

The controversial writer and publisher CARMEN CALLIL – founder of the feminist press Virago – will chair a panel discussion about Tony Scotland’s book Lennox & Freda, with Michael Berkeley and the author at the Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 16.

The book is more than a portrait of an unconventional marriage between the composer Lennox Berkeley and his secretary at the BBC, Freda Bernstein - and the music it inspired. It’s also about Lennox’s earlier relationships with Benjamin Britten and a young airman, Freda’s with a married art historian, the Oxford of the Brideshead generation, Cocteau’s Paris, and the BBC in wartime; it’s a record of a vanished way of life – and of the eternal peculiarities of the human heart.

If you have already read Lennox & Freda this discussion may answer some of the questions it raises; if you haven’t, you may want to. Michael Berkeley will reflect on it as a son and fellow composer, Carmen Callil as a friend of Michael and a famously outspoken critic, and Tony Scotland will reveal how and why he wrote the book.

SUNDAY OCTOBER 16, 2011, at 2pm

Venue: Imperial Square, Cheltenham GL50 1QA. Tickets: £7

Box Office: 30 Regent Arcade, High Street, Cheltenham GL50 1JZ.

Telephone: 01242 505 444.


For more about Lennox & Freda and the author, visit www.lennoxandfreda.com