Making a Noise:

Getting it right, getting it wrong in life, the arts and broadcasting John Tusa

Weidenfeld & Nicolson ISBN: 978-147460708-7 392pp (hb) £25 rrp Globalisation has played a defining role in John Tusa’s life.

Had the Czech Bata shoe company not built a new factory town in Tilbury, managed by his father, the boy Tusa would never have left Zlin, Czechoslovakia in 1938. The suffering of his relatives who remained haunts him to this day. His father tried to rear his two sons into privileged Englishmen – Gresham’s School and Cambridge both feature – but it was only when Tusa took charge of the BBC World Service that he found his spiritual home, a global haven. An arts enthusiast, he traces his love of music from singing and piano as a child through to his discovery of opera in provincial Germany during military service.

He has already robustly defended serious culture in Art Matters and Pain in the Arts. Here we get an acute analysis of the BBC in crisis in the 1990s, his short but bad spell as a Cambridge college master, and jobs at the University of the Arts London and as a Clore mentor. Most impressive is his account of how, in 1995, he and Graham Sheffield created an artistic policy for the Barbican, one that has grown in strength and distinction ever since. Helen Wallace ★★★★