Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Histories of classical music of whatever epoch – medieval, baroque, twentieth-century – tend to be written by university professors writing for a university readership. That being the case, they are issued by academic textbook publishers and are unlikely to pop up in your local bookstore. Chances are they won’t appear on best-seller and ‘pick of the critics’ lists.

If our technology-infused world were a great beast, the engorged heart of it would be Silicon Valley. A region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Valley is the birthplace of the modern start-up, a mecca for tech pilgrims and venture capitalists. A typical start-up has simple ambitions: become a big, rich company – and do it fast. Think Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Uber, Tinder, Snapchat. Like moths to light, budding computer engineers and software programmers are drawn to the Valley, hoping to pioneer the next technological innovation, the next viral app. If they’re lucky, they become some of the wealthiest entrepreneurs of their generation.