It was the late Dean Inge who said, ‘There are two kinds of fools: those who say, “This is old and therefore good”, and those who say, “This is new and therefore better” ’. Finzi's great misfortune was to have lived and worked in an age when much music criticism tends to fly to one or the other of these two extremes. The result is that Finzi's admirers have often written as much critical nonsense about him as the most unsympathetic of professional critics; I have yet to see a single piece of sustained writing in which the strong reactionary element in Finzi's work is not made either the central virtue or the central vice of his entire style.