This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Books Podcast with Sam Leith.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week I'm very pleased to be joined by the very distinguished war correspondent and a senior correspondent for the

observer, Ed Volumi, whose new book is a sort of part memoir, part meditation, I guess, called

When Words Fail, a Life with Music, War and Peace. Ed, welcome. Now, your title points to a kind

of conundrum in this. You know, you're a man of words, you're a

reporter, you're a writer, and here you're talking about something that's very important to you

that kind of goes slightly beyond words. How do you, how do you kind of start writing that sort

of book? Thank you, Sam, and it's an honour to be here. It comes from Samuel Beckett and his play Happy Days. Words fail, says Winnie in the play. What shall we do

when even words fail? And it's a damn good question for any of us, and especially anyone who

tries to write. And what indeed? It's a primal question, I think. And one of the things we do

is we turn to music. We always have done.

That really is from the beginning of humankind.

And whether it was imitating birdsong or banging the drums of war is debatable, probably both.

And that in a way, that consideration propels the book, because it is a book about the beauty of music, but also about music during war, in war, against war, for peace. And so it's a memoir in that regard. You know, I think memoir can be

a vanity, you know, those books that one has with sort of 16 pages of photographs, all with the

author in them in various guises and poses and company. It's not that.

It recalls, I suppose, a life that isn't special, but it's been a bit too interesting sometimes,

wherein war has been too much my work, far more than I want it to have been, and music has always been my great love. So it's an

attempt to entwine those two things really with, as you point out in your question, the automatically

per se self-defeating ingredient, and that it has to be done in words which by definition

fail to express what music can express. And that's what it's about, really. I think

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