Valuable, not least, for his succinct summary of the history and value of the Rossall School Cadet Corps ( )

Among my distinguished contemporaries there is hardly one who cannot trace back the origin of his talent to an unbelievably early age; and although I knew well that such phenomenal accomplishment had never been mine, I must surely have shown some bent for, or anyway taken some interest in the art which was to be the main preoccupation of my life. But the trouble about gathering knowledge from other persons is the comparative unreliability of their testimony. This anyone will endorse who has observed the distracted efforts of half a dozen different witnesses in a law action to describe the same event; and certainly no magistrate of experience would dissent from the opinion of Pilate in the first, and Pirandello in the twentieth century, that final truth is beyond human discovery.

So begins this wonderful autobiography of Thomas Beecham, one of the greatest conductors of the last century and in its pages we meet many talented names and gain a vivid impression of the first half of the twentieth century.