‘Art is the whisper of history’: Julian Barnes’s latest re-imagines the life of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich

The Noise of Time By Julian Barnes Random House Canada 224 pp; $29.95 Dmitri Shostakovich, the subject of Julian Barnes’s new novel, lived in a time and a place where all music was intensely politicized. In some ways, it’s not that different here and now: Nicki Minaj is viewed as a feminist heroine – except when…