Winton Dean Author & Editor

Winton Dean (1916-2013), renowned as a musical scholar and a trenchant and witty critic, had the temperament of a creative artist, which in youth he hoped he might become. If in the end his critical-intellectual side won the day, it was not a bloodless victory. He felt that the better half had lost. Instead, he became the leading Handel scholar of his era - fired by a stage production of Saul at Cambridge before the war. The finest scholars and critics, he believed, harbour a failed or potential artist within; it is the understanding derived from this that exalts them above the common run.

Winton began his Memoirs at the age of 72 but never finished them, breaking off at the beginning of 1946, when his career as scholar and critic had barely begun. His early life and young manhood were what mattered to him. In the later chapters his son Stephen takes up the story.