The job of radio critic for the Tablet offers several perquisites. One of them is access to the BBC previews website, and it was by this means, quite some time before its recent broadcast, that I was able to listen to Adrian Chiles’s Radio 4 documentary Finding Elgar . As a veteran of countless BBC radio documentaries and mindful of their sensitivity to the cultural issues of the day, I knew exactly what I would find, and there it was. Elgar, Chiles insisted, was an ‘outsider’ – lower middle class, a Catholic to boot, and marginalised and patronised by ‘the establishment’ until such time as his musical genius began to declare itself.

All this was relayed with Chiles’s usual enthusiasm, with contributions by people made uncomfortable by Elgar’s patriotic anthems (on which the composer

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