The preface to On Music: Essays and Diversions by Robin Holloway, begins as follows.

This selection of my reviews, essays general and particular, occasional pieces, polemics, pensées, etc. is drawn from a much larger total body and represents around four decades of reacting to and writing about music. The earliest dates from my last year as an undergraduate (1963–4); the most recent could well, save for the exigencies of book-production, date from last week.

Their level is various, ranging from dense contributions to academic symposia for which, in some bits, technical terms are employed and scores needed, to epitomes, cameos, diversions (almost all taken from the music column in the Spectator that I’ve contributed monthly, with a few exceptions, since late 1988). The balance of tone and length has been deliberately con-sidered, for contrast, complement, relief.

It has been hard not to interfere with inconsistencies, changes of mind and the expression of opinions that strike me now as jejune, stupid or plain wrong. I’ve not bowdlerised such moments: nor in general changed things beyond stylistic retouching, correction of obvious mistakes and the omission of inevitable overlaps (except when the re-used idea, quotation, illustration is also being re-thought) and ephemeral paragraphs from some of the reviews. I have rewritten when I perceived a tangle or a smudge in the original (there will of course remain tangles and smudges I’ve not noticed); and many items have been provided with a headnote, usually just factual, now and again giving a more detailed context; some have gained a retrospective/corrective afterword too. But I felt that by and large the contents should stand or fall as they were and are, without the mitigations of hindsight.

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