"Scruton does not disappoint. To be sure, niggling doubts about his purely musical analysis surface now and then. While he obviously believes his own insistence that Tristan is thoroughly tonal, it also allows him the convenience of sidestepping a number of complex musico-dramatic issues. He also resorts on occasion, for example on page 98, to the kind of descriptive jargon in which dear old Imogen Holst indulged in her hagiographical writing on Ben Britten. But there are here many quite wonderful turns of phrase that say much, beautifully, in little space. Thus, for example: "Wagner was an intemperate thinker, whose theories were thrown out from his prodigious sensibility like spray from a ship in full sail". I wish I'd written that. Scruton's almost frightening erudition is paired with an ability to explain in lucid, comprehensible prose what are in fact complex philological and philosophical issues. Whether he is elucidating the Upanishads, Schopenhauer, Kant or mediaeval epics, he never browbeats the reader, but draws him in to arguments that seem to possess a remarkable inevitability. Scruton offers a succinct tour of Wagner's sources for Tristan that is the most lucid that the present writer has yet encountered"