Book excerpt: In few creative figures can such artistic brilliance, demonic drive, idiosyncracy and uncompromising ideology be so inextricably mixed as in the extraordinary life of Australia's Percy Grainger. One of the world's most popular pianists, he was also Australia's most innovative composer and instrument maker, a significant folk-song collector, an obsessive athlete and a teeming intellect. On the dark side his frank letters reveal his notorious masochistic sexuality, his lifelong absorption with his mother, his Nordic triumphalism and his curious Anglo-Saxon form of language. The 1990s has seen a reassessment of Grainger's contribution with major new recordings of his work and a feature film of his life.