Few past presidents of the Kensington Kittens’ and Neuter Cats’ Club (Incorporated) have had an entire record devoted to their achievements as composer and conductor; but the range of Constant Lambert’s accomplishment did not restrict itself to composing and conducting or, for that matter, to cat-fancying (he was also a connoisseur of bats and fish). Lambert: speaker, talker, essayist, wit, a penetrating and original thinker not only about music—his book Music Ho! is a classic—but also in the realms of art and literature, both of which he knew and understood from the inside out. This is rare, if not unique. Lambert was a cosmopolitan in an age where much was provincial and complacent; he was an individualist and tended to be disliked by the Establishment with its habitual mistrust of anyone who claims to be a jack of more than one trade—and proves himself a master of them all. The painter Michael Ayrton said there was a ‘richness’ about Lambert which he had never encountered in anyone else—‘he was enormous in the variety and curiosity of his knowledge’—and this ‘richness’ was invaluable in relation to the causes and the people, older, younger or the same age, whose cause he espoused.