Portrait of a Guardian music critic

We critics seldom write our memoirs, perhaps because we skulk away our lives in dark corners, avoiding the public gaze, plying our shameful trade like streetwalkers or pushers of hard drugs. We might occasionally, in desperation, recycle our ephemera between hard covers. Edward Greenfield, the former record and music critic of the Guardian, has daringly come out, in a volume of reminiscences that carefully avoids the title memoir (about oneself) and instead labels itself as portraits (about other people). But a man is judged by the company he keeps, so we soon come back to the book’s subtitle and find ourselves reading a concealed ‘life’. Ted Greenfield has been unusual among music critics for a number of reasons. Where most of the broadsheet reviewers of his generation (he was born in 1928) came from tolerably cultivated backgrounds, with music there or thereabouts, Ted was the grandson of a railwayman, whose own son worked his way up from solicitor’s clerk to executive officer in the Ministry of Labour.