In a characteristically bold assertion, the philosopher and composer Roger Scruton once claimed that ‘the lingering backward glance towards that which can never be recovered (and which is falsified in the very yearning for it) has been the greatest vice of English music in our century. Like every form of sentimentality, it involves a “turning away” from the present reality, a desire to lock emotions into a narrow and predetermined world of fantasy, a world which you yourself control’.