AFTER THE DEATH OF MY MOTHER DORA in early 1978, I discovered, amongst her effects, a number of chapters she had completed about various musicians and writers with whom she had come into contact between the wars. As the wife of my father, Hubert James Foss, the founder-manager in 1923 of the Music Department of the Oxford University Press, she rejoiced in entertaining a wide range of distinguished men and women at Nightingale Corner, their house in Rickmansworth, and later in the Hampstead Garden Suburb. When my father died in 1953, aged only fifty-four, my mother inherited the huge tomes which were familiarly known to us as the ‘Commonplace Books’; they were filled with correspondence, articles, letters, programmes, newspaper cuttings of reviews, etc., and there were also dozens of files containing hundreds of individual letters. During her twenty-five years of widowhood, my mother researched deeply into all these and, as a result, was able to compile the memoirs within this book, together with her many lively reminiscences, which add a vital personal touch to the chapters. A few of her memoirs are more sketchy, but the correspondence in them is extremely valuable. What is written here by my mother gives us a unique and witty picture of the renaissance of English music in the 1920s and 1930s.

Over the past decades – in fact forty years – in which I myself have grown old, I have tried to discover a way forward to publish these remarkable memoirs, together with a selection of the huge mass of letters to and from my father, ‘his’ composers and noted literary figures of the time. In the 1990s I had the pleasure of assisting Stephen Lloyd when he was writing his book on William Walton. He found our archive invaluable. More recently, I became, for Stephen's Constant Lambert book, virtually a copy-editor; and, of course, through these contacts, we became good friends. Later, I had a sudden thought that maybe he could be my editor for this volume, which I am so keen to publish before it is too late. What a relief I felt when he accepted my invitation! He is the perfect editor. He is experienced about publishing and knows the period of English music in the 1920s and 1930s extremely well.