Winter words

At the TLS, Ian Bostridge has a very interesting piece on the latest volume of Benjamin Britten's letters. Random funny detail:

Gloriana was one of the “great disasters of operatic history”, as George Harewood described it in his memoirs. With a libretto by Plomer (in one of cultural history’s more unexpected cross-currents, Plomer was the dedicatee of Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger, with an enthusiasm for things Japanese reflected as much in Britten’s later Noh play-influenced Curlew River, for which he wrote the libretto, as in the Bond thriller about a Japanese suicide garden, You Only Live Twice, which he edited), it was a deft interweaving of the public and private lives of Elizabeth I.