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“... The name Donald Francis Tovey (always rather pompously in full) used to typify, before career musicology swept all before it, the broadly cultured rather than narrowly scholarly writer on music, sometimes browbeating and always unashamedly didactic, avid to improve his readers’ minds, popularising without condescension or dumbing down. He had begun as a pianist of outstanding gifts in an alternative late 19th-century tradition of high seriousness as opposed to bravura; and remained all his life an aspiring composer, keeping up mainstream Teutonic forms, procedures and idioms with Quixotic ardour, in a world eroded (as he saw it) by feckless and meretricious experimentation ...”

“... In his heyday, from the late Forties to around the start of William Glock’s regime at the Third Programme (afterwards Radio Three), Hans Keller’s vehement presence was a force for the good in English musical life. He represented at a high level old-style modern values – not exactly cosmopolitan (an important reservation to which I shall return) but emphatically not insular ...”

“... was reminded of this by a passage in Music’s Odyssey where, describing the music of Palestrina, Robin Holloway writes: ‘The limits are, so to speak, so audible – what it does not do, or does not care to.’ I was struck by the way ‘does not care to’ seemed to rhyme with ‘avoided concerning himself’, as though both writers wished us to ...”

“... terms with them. The story of that accommodation was the story of his career as a composer, as Robin Holloway grippingly demonstrated in his early book Debussy and Wagner. Holloway’s explication of Jeux, Debussy’s 17-minute ballet, as a molecular refashioning of Wagner’s four-hour opera, is a tour de force of ...”

“... he actually wrote. Eight are by musicologists, the last two by composers. With the exception of Robin Holloway’s remarkable concluding piece about the various possible ways of listening to Haydn, the contributions are uncompromisingly academic. It is considerably less successful as a musicologist’s bedside book than the earlier American volume of ...”

“... outdone among Schoenberg’s works only by the massive orchestral version of Gurrelieder. Robin Holloway has criticised the ‘potential tackiness’ of Verklärte Nacht, and music historians tend to place greater emphasis on Schoenberg’s subsequent works despite their being performed less regularly. For Sachs, this ‘thorny character who ...”

“... for Keller as a thinker about music. The project suffered a blow in 1995, when, in an LRB review, Robin Holloway declared Keller’s essays to be frustratingly thin. Holloway had known and revered Keller as a teacher and mentor, and his critique had an edge of disenchantment to it. It’s hard not to share ...”

“... mimics Schumann’s), and Hiekel the equally blatant one (at least to Anglo-Saxon ears) of Robin Holloway, whose orchestral Scenes from Schumann and Fantasy-Pieces for ensemble are detailed ‘re-compositions’ of passages from Schumann. Kapp sees a line of descent from Schumann to Mahler, Debussy and Berg, and Hiekel finds Schumann connections ...”

“... mother, Isabel, scaling Nelson’s Column during a suffragist protest, an act that landed her in Holloway Prison for two weeks. Shortly after her release Tippett made his first appearance in print, in the suffragist newspaper the Vote, asking why women did not enjoy the same privileges as men: ‘Some women are even bigger than the men – like my mother ...”

“... two keyboard figurations, as though the music were being left to run itself (this is perhaps what Robin Holloway was thinking of when he wrote of Schubert ‘sleepwalking’). You can often tell something quite fundamental about his music by looking at its patterning on the page. Take the song ‘Die Stadt’, a particularly striking example from his ...”

“... when he opened Rawlinson Poet MS 160. The fact that the poem is bad may be an embarrassment. Robin Robbins’s attack on arguments for its authorship based on parallels may be – is – convincing. But no one has positively disproved Shakespeare’s involvement, and given the conventional nature of the lyric it’s hard to see how they could. If ...”