I have to return to the topic of the gramophone […] On the shelves there are still five hundred or more of the old 78s I collected so laboriously and lovingly: I still play them, too, to the despair of my hi-fi friends, partly for sentimental reasons but mainly because the best of them preserve greatness of a kind unmatched today.  I deliberately say unmatched and not unequalled, for styles change and comparisons are invidious; though none I have heard has equalled Casals’s playing of the opening of the slow movement of Schubert’s B flat Trio, or come near to matching his tenderness or length of phrase; the Schnabel Beethoven Sonatas are worth their weight in gold; and those old pre-war Toscaninis were never surpassed, not even by himself.