Still a critic, dash-it, even at my advanced age ~~ google emls [Early Modern Literary Studies], for which I still do a column for each issue on renaissance drama [Shax &c] in Cambridge. But denouncing critics as a race rather beneath even your usual standard of invective, surely? Esp quoting so notoriously touchy an authority as old Ludwig Van.

Of course I really knew you had read Austen & Mann, Owen. I detest what Julian Fellowes described in one of his fine novels as "The kind of person who insults you and then says, Can't you take a joke", but don't push that particular bit of backdoor evasion too far. Doesn't do for you to be too touchy, you know, or you will knock all the sweetness out of the joke, my duckling. After all, you are not Beethoven, nor were meant to be...

~M~