⁷ For more on this, see Scruton, Roger, ‘Know your place’, The Spectator (27 Nov. 2004): 22–3.Google Scholar For example: ‘young people tend to enter university without the skills required for real study. The likelihood that an incoming undergraduate can read a book or write an essay diminishes from year to year’.

⁸ For example, the following facts are a result of scanning the shelves of the music library of the university whose facilities were used in the preparation of this review in autumn 2004: of those in French the book taken out of the library most recently was volume I of the Correspondance Générale and that was in 2002; one of Boschot's volumes was last taken out in 1997; neither has any other (bar one in 1995) of the correspondence volumes nor any of the four volumes of the Critique Musicale ever been taken out; and so the list goes on, even though no doubt these books are used by students when working in the library. Cairns's translation of the Memoirs and his biography of Berlioz have been taken out this term.