Zamoyski has revisited his 1979 biography of Chopin and entirely rewritten it in the light of new research. Chopin has been much mythologised, and Zamoyski’s aim is to cut through the ‘sugary blur of sentimentality and melodrama’ to reveal the true Chopin: a not always likeable man, maudlin, occasionally pompous, irritatingly fastidious, but unquestionably a genius, and one of only three composers (the other two are Bach and Debussy) ‘who never wrote a bad piece of music’.