THE idea for this book presented itself in the early 1990s. I was a postgraduate student at Monash University writing a dissertation on Berlioz, which inevitably led me to Newman's essays on the composer. Shortly thereafter— on a visit to the Grub Street Bookstore in Brunswick, an inner suburb of Melbourne—I chanced upon Newman's 1895 biography of Gluck. I read the introduction while standing in one of the bookshop's narrow passages, and was transfixed: his introductory essay on the necessity for historical method in musical criticism intrigued me. I wondered why a British writer on music was taking up the cause for this kind of history so late in the century and why no one had made much of it in the literature I had read on the history of musicology. I knew then that I wanted to find out more about Newman and what made him tick. And so I set to work.

For access to archives relating to Ernest Newman I would like to thank staff at the following libraries and archives: Bodleian Library, Oxford; British Library, London; Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham; National Library of Scotland; Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; Houghton Library and Isham Memorial Library, Harvard University; Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University; Juilliard School Library, New York; King's College Library, Cambridge; Rauner Special Collections, Dartmouth College; and Special Collections at the universities of Glasgow, Liverpool and Cambridge.

Thanks are due to Odin Dekkers at Radboud Universiteit in Nijmegen who provided access to the personal research papers of various scholars in the Department of English Literature and Culture relating to the Dobell collection at the University of Oxford. Nigel Scaife kindly loaned his personal notes relating to the research he undertook on Newman for his 1994 doctoral dissertation.

Thanks to the University of Melbourne for permission to reproduce a part of the following article in chapter 8, ‘Ernest Newman's The Man Liszt of 1934: reading its freethought agenda’, Context: A Journal of Music Research 31 (2006): 193–205.’

I am grateful to the universities of Glasgow, Oxford and Texas at Austin, and the National Library of Scotland, for permission to reproduce copyright material in their collections. I am deeply indebted to Mary Parkin, Vera Newman's neice and the executor of the Newman Estate, who has given permission to reproduce all copyright material in this book.