Ok - everyone does know Vaughan Williams, yet,his persona never entered the canon of our cultural base, he is merely a label and not much else is known about him. This book remedies that. Mellers, himself a composer who comes from the Schoenberg school is particularily effective in giving insight through this artistic distance between the 'modern' composer, and the 'old'. Mellers shows us Vaughan Williams as a composer with a permanent look backwards at the musical past while walking forward in a steady pace. The text veers between biography and pure analysis, but is well balanced.