“A Honegger-type cinemascope epic in idiom, derived in part from Boulanger-period Stravinsky,” he dismissed the work to his amanuensis Robert Craft, featuring “patterns rather than inventions… an absence of true counterpoint” and “a bounteous presence of literalisms (‘the drums of Time’ sings the baritone and ‘boom, boom, boom’ go the obedient timpani)”. Stravinsky conceded that the casting of the choir in Latin and the male soloists in English was “a very effective dramatic idea”, but concluded that “the composer-laureate’s certified masterpiece has turned out, for this well-disposed listener, at least, to be rather a soft bomb”

Just how well disposed he really was might be doubted. There had been tension between the two composers ever since Britten had let it be known in 1951 that he liked everything about Stravinsky’s new opera The Rake’s Progress – “everything but the music”.

And more recently, Stravinsky had shown signs of jealousy over Britten’s greater popular success. Certainly, when his comments on the War Requiem appeared in Themes and Episodes – the fifth American volume of his so-called “conversation books” with Craft (published in 1966) – they caused quite a stir. Except in Britain, where they remained unprinted until 1972, the year after Stravinsky’s death, when they appeared in the final conversation book, Themes and Conclusions – substantially rewritten and with all his strictures on the work itself removed. In his new monograph on the War Requiem in the Cambridge Music Handbooks series, Mervyn Cooke can still be found sustaining the fiction that Stravinsky’s criticisms were solely of the hype surrounding the work – despite the evidence of the American edition and Craft’s recent affirmation, in a Radio 3 conversation with Stephen Walsh, that Stravinsky really “did say those things about the War Requiem, which he absolutely hated!”
But Stravinsky also did something more positive: he composed a response And not for the first time. You go into hospital to get better, not to get ill.”In a speech to the Scottish Labour Party conference in Inverness yesterday, Tony Blair said: “This is a government in a state of decay, utterly incapable of providing leadership or competence in the administration of the country’s affairs.”Citing the example of the suppression of a report on abattoir safety, Mr Blair said: “The food industry is there to serve the consumer, not the other way around.”Labour plans to set up a consumer-oriented Food Standards Agency, reporting directly both to the Department of Health and what remains of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

John Horam, Health minister, said in a Commons reply that the total number of cases of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was not “collected centrally”, and the ministry had no idea of the number of cases in which the bug “contributed to or caused death”.
He told Andrew MacKinlay, Labour MP for Thurrock, that 177 English hospitals had “voluntarily” reported 19,385 patients affected by MRSA last year – up from 2,286 patients in 1992.But Chris Smith, Labour’s health spokesman, told The Independent last night: “The fact that the Government has no idea how many cases of this occur nationally is another example of their disregard for public health. Two of Confucius’s 85th lineal male descendants today live in Taiwan.. They lived too late to see a woolly mammoth, and too soon to see the earliest farming.”The link between Cheddar Man and Adrian Targett easily outstrips the existing record for distant ancestors.The oldest previously recorded relative was the great- great-great-great grandfather of Confucius who lived in the eighth century BC. “You could put a suit on him and he wouldn’t look out of place in an office.