Commando #4532: Mario's Express

Commando #4532

by Stephen Walsh, Ian Kennedy (Cover Art), Vila (Artist)

Colonel Mario Girotti was not really much of a soldier. He was more than happy to be stuck in the North African desert, in charge of a rarely-used railway station. He spent his days listening to classical music on his trusty gramophone or reading poetry. But the culture-loving Italian's peaceful war was rudely interrupted by the arrival of a group of his fellow countrymen, followed by some Nazis, all bent on escaping the oncoming British onslaught with some looted priceless treasure and, naturally enough, they wanted one of Mario's trains. Mario decided that maybe the time was right to fight after all!

66 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 13, 2012

About the author

Professor Walsh was educated at Kingston Grammar School, St Paul’s School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. From 1963, he worked as a music journalist in London, at first freelance, writing for The Times, Daily Telegraph, and Financial Times, then from 1966 as deputy music critic of The Observer. He has broadcast regularly on musical topics for the BBC; a major feature of BBC Radio 3 programming in 1995 was his six two-hour broadcasts 'Conversations with Craft', in which he talked to Stravinsky's close associate, Robert Craft. Professor Walsh joined Cardiff University as a Senior Lecturer in Music in 1976, and now holds a personal chair in the School. He still contributes music criticism to The Independent and has since published a series of books and long papers on Bartok, Stravinsky, Kurtág and Panufnik, among others. The first volume of his major biography of Stravinsky — Stravinsky: A Creative Spring (Knopf, 1999) — won the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for the best music book published in the UK in the year 2000. Volume Two — Stravinsky: The Second Exile (also Knopf) — was published in 2006.