Writing this book has been a labour of love. As a ten-year old boy, the first orchestral concert I ever attended was in March 1967, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult in Reading Town Hall. Simply put, that evening – and particularly the performance of Brahms’s Third Symphony at the end of it – ignited a lifelong passion for music. During my teenage years I had the pleasure of seeing and hearing Boult conduct on many occasions in London, and music by Vaughan Williams was often on the programme. I sat spellbound at the Vaughan Williams Centenary Concert in the Royal Festival Hall on 12 October 1972, and still have powerful memories of Boult’s performance of A London Symphony earlier the same year, as well as several Proms: the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Tallis Fantasia, and above all Job in August 1977, a memorable concert made all the more poignant in retrospect for being Sir Adrian’s last ever appearance at a Prom. As an enthusiastic schoolboy, I wrote to Boult about the early versions of A London Symphony in 1972 and received a wonderfully detailed reply by return of post. Later, during my student years at Manchester University, I corresponded with him regularly, and after his retirement he invited me to his flat in West Hampstead on several occasions. It was on those visits that I first encountered his music library, housed in an enormous breakfront bookcase, carefully organised, and with correspondence from composers tucked inside many of the scores. Boult was also assiduous in noting down when he had performed each work, and long lists of performances were to be found in many of his scores, including those of Vaughan Williams. With my university friend Simon Mundy, I compiled a book of tributes for Sir Adrian, published in 1980, but I always hoped to delve deeper into his extraordinary career, particularly his performances of Vaughan Williams. Little did I imagine that more than forty years later I would be able to write about Vaughan Williams and Boult, drawing on those same scores that I had found so engrossing in the 1970s, still kept in the same huge breakfront bookcase, now in the care of his step-grandson, the composer Anthony Powers.