Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (the birth certificate's ‘Leon Dudley Sorabji’ did not satisfy him) was extraordinary. Extra extraordinary. Patrick Shannon (Chisholm's partner in musical crime) advertised him as the ‘greatest musical enigma of all time’, an ‘astonishing phenomenon’ and declared that ‘The Greatest Virtuosi in the world are helpless as babes in handling his music – music which he himself executes without turning a hair.’2 This was to advertise an open meeting of the Faculty of Arts in the National Academy of Music on Tuesday 25 March 1930, at which Sorabji played his recently composed Pianoforte Sonata No. IV.

The critic A. M. Henderson protested at the vulgarity of this flyer: ‘Such publicity may well do more harm than good to the cause, and it cheapens both the promoters and the artists concerned.’ Chisholm agreed,

but the tone of his letter, which was pious and condescending, infuriated me. It is a weakness of mine that I do not take kindly to personal criticism, neither then nor now. So by return of post Mr. Henderson received a nitro-glycerine letter from me which, I was told later, knocked the kindly well-meaning old gentleman out for six. So Mr. Henderson's name was added to the growing list of my enemies.

As for Sorabji, Diana was prejudiced against him before they even met. She resented his view that Erik should quit Glasgow for London (a view he must subsequently have totally reversed) and that in any case no ambitious composer should saddle himself with a wife, and also she was jealous of his jet-black naturally wavy hair.4 All these prejudices she was soon to drop, but there may have been some instinctive awareness in her that Sorabji's interest in her husband- to-be was not entirely focused on music. The evidence for this cannot have escaped her even when Sorabji was not in Glasgow, for he commenced a correspondence in 1930, initially sending lengthy letters at a rate of more than one a week, though it would seem that Chisholm only rarely replied – alas, his side of the correspondence does not survive. Chisholm undoubtedly admired Sorabji and published an essay about him (illus. 7).

The relationship between Chisholm and Sorabji – or perhaps better stated as between Sorabji and Chisholm – is not easily understood. That it was effusive to the point of passion on Sorabji's side cannot be doubted