Four days later La Scala responded that if the production was not staged in its original form it would not sanction the use of its name or Muti's appearance. A week passed with no assurances and La Scala withdrew.In issuing new details of the correspondence, giving what it claims to be an accurate rundown of events, La Scala has effectively accused Covent Garden of "biased statements". Documentation showed, it said, that Muti and de Ana "acted fairly and properly". La Scala added: "That date [6 September] left no margin for finding an alternative solution and forced La Scala to withdraw its name."Pappano cancelled a number of concerts in the US with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and postponed a planned recording to replace Muti, allowing the ROH performances to go ahead from 16 October.. His father was a multi-lingual (17 languages) and voracious scholar, a pedantic man who was frustrated by his inability to follow his uncle, Professor Joseph Klausner, into the higher reaches of academic life and had to make do with a job in the National Library in Jerusalem. Oz's mother was a beautiful woman who never adjusted to life in Israel, in the dank basement flat in Kevrem Avraham, a poor suburb of Jerusalem. She read all the time and dreamed of the forests and rivers and pastures of Europe which she wove into the stories she told her son: "Words like cottage, meadow and goose-girl excited and seduced me all through my childhood." Oz gives a rich account of his grand parents' early lives, the school in Rovno, the urgent need to escape anti-semitism and the flight to Palestine of these essentially bourgeois families.

It is one of the most gripping, intense and moving autobiographies I have ever read, seamlessly translated by Nicholas de Lange.Oz says he has never written about his mother's suicide, or discussed it until now. His mother and father emigrated to Israel in the 1930s from Rovno in Poland and Vilnius, then Russian. But it is also the story of the death of his mother when he was 12, the birth of Israel, the intensely complex relationship between the European immigrants, who were his family, and the promised land, the raging storm of intellectuality and spirituality that came with them from the forests of Poland and Russia and Lithuania It is, in other words, the story of the making of a writer. This is the story of Amos Oz's early years, from his birth until he ran away from Jerusalem to a kibbutz at the age of 15. The fact that I got that was invaluable."But working out a plot still came painfully - "over a number of years with many bouts of despair in between." Despair, it was becoming clear to me, seems to lie at the root of creativity. "I knew that I wanted to write a novel about magic and I had a main character. But I was finding the plotting very difficult."The tutors on her course, Colin Greenland and Geoff Ryman, are established writers in the fantasy genre "They asked us to bring a short story.

I wrote an out-take from my novel using the main character, Jonathan Strange. It was a kind of "what Jonathan did in his summer holidays" essay But Geoff and Colin took it very seriously. They focussed on what I was doing right and what I needed to look at In fact, I ignored their criticisms. What I needed was confirmation that I wasn't wasting my time. I have written a family memoir and am writing a biography of the novelist Jean Rhys, but, like every non-fiction writer, I yearn for fiction.