Neville Cardus

Sir Neville Cardus (2 April 1889 – 28 February 1975) was a celebrated British journalist. He was a music and cricket writer for the Manchester Guardian.

Sourced

• For the game is everlasting only insofar as we keep returning to it for delights put into it by countless boys of all ages.
  • Cricket (1930)

• Dear, lovely game of cricket that can stir us so profoundly, that can lift up our hearts and break them.
  • Good Days (1934)

• Often in this our life do we begin by cursing men and end by loving them. A sense of the common fallibility of all flesh makes us kin. No man is lovable who is invincible.
  • Good Days (1934)

• A cultured aromatist.
  • Of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov; Manchester Guardian (1935)

• If a German or an Austrian, a Greek or a Bashibazouk, had composed Gerontius, the whole world would have by now admitted its qualities.
  • Manchester Guardian (1939)

• Even an ordinary broken chord is made to disclose rare beauties; we are reminded of the fairies' hazelnuts in which diamonds were concealed but you could break the shell only if your hands were blessed.
  • Of Rachmaninoff's playing; Manchester Guardian (1939)

• A great composition to me is.. an incarnation of a genius, of all that was ever in him of the slightest consequence.
  • Preface to Ten Composers, August 1944.

• Sibelius justified the austerity of his old age by saying that while other composers were engaged in manufacturing cocktails, he offered the public pure cold water.
  • Manchester Guardian (1958)

• It is the only one in existence that might conceivably have been composed by God.
  • Of Mozart's "The Magic Flute"; Manchester Guardian (1961)