It’s about balance and it puts the pleasure back into eating

“It’s about balance and it puts the pleasure back into eating. Calorie-controlled diets simply don’t work, and dietary change should be about life changes, not yo-yoing from fad to fad.”Anthony Leeds advises some caution. “I think some versions of the GI approach are keen to ensure that, for people who love food, allowances are made. You have to be very careful not to have high fat levels, for example. But, overall, there are simple ways of changing eating patterns that take GI into account It’s simply not true that it’s all too complicated. If someone is having chocolate pops for breakfast, what’s hard about trying porridge? How difficult is it to suggest that a white-bread sandwich isn’t the best idea?” Not difficult at all – but I still yearn for my cheese-and-onion crisp sarnies with extra insulin for dessert.’Eat Yourself Slim… and Stay Slim!’ by Michel Montignac (Montignac, £12); ‘The New Glucose Revolution’ by Anthony Leeds et al (Hodder, £7.99); ‘My Life With Diabetes’ by Jan de Vries, (Mainstream, £5.99); .ukDiabetics should not change their diet without first consulting their doctor.

On 12 March 1910, a musical controversy of extraordinary vehemence broke out in the letters pages of The Nation. The disputants were London’s leading music critic and Wagnerian scholar, Ernest Newman, and the city’s most famous former music critic, and author of The Perfect Wagnerite, George Bernard Shaw. The issue on which they slugged it out over the next month was not, however, Wagner but the latest opera of a composer universally regarded at the time as either the most exciting progressive in modern music, or its most dangerously decadent iconoclast – Richard Strauss. It was only later, under the influence of Wagnerian mentors including Cosima Wagner herself, that the young man took to Romanticism, bursting on to the international scene with the insolent brilliance of his tone poem Don Juan in 1889, at the age of 25. That was already enough to reignite that endless 19th-century aesthetic argument over the relative merits of “absolute” and “programme” music. But it was the scandalous triumph in 1905 of his third opera, Salome, based on Oscar Wilde’s deliciously debauched drama, that carried his fame worldwide.

The one thing that even the contending Newman and Shaw agreed on was that Strauss was quite obviously “the greatest living musician”.With Salome rapidly taken up by half the opera houses in Europe, the canny Strauss knew that he was going to have to choose his next operatic project with care if he was ever to trump its success. Although excited at a Max Reinhardt production of a new version of Sophocles’ Elektra, by the young lyric poet-turned-dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in Berlin in 1904, Strauss was at first worried that a second demented protagonist abandoning herself to a climactic dance might be too much. Ultimately, Hofmannsthal’s urgings won him over – inaugurating a collaboration with Strauss that was to yield nine stage works and one of the most fascinating composer-librettist correspondences in operatic history.All the same, for a professional who more usually prided himself on his ability to “give music as a cow gives milk”, Strauss proceeded with exceptional deliberation. Carefully cutting the play-text and prescribing exactly what new material he required from Hofmannsthal, he proceed to annotate it with an array of symbolic key centres and character motifs, before embarking upon the 105-minute score itself, which cost him two years of effort.