In the first years of the twentieth century, Ralph Vaughan Williams led an English musical renaissance. Hubert Parry and Edward Elgar, the fathers of English music in the 19th century, took their lead from the German masters. Vaughan Williams and his friend Gustav Holst took theirs, exceptionally, from the neglected sources of folk song - from the very soil of England. The result was a distinctive English voice that changed the culture of a nation. After a long struggle to develop his talents, Vaughan Williams established himself as a composer whose music, through his promotion of folk song and editorship of the English Hymnal, made him a household name and caused his work - most famously The Lark Ascending, Greensleeves, the Tallis Fantasia and nine outstanding symphonies - to be loved by generations in Britain and around the world. Simon Heffer leads us through Vaughan Williams' life - his education with Parry, Max Bruch and Maurice Ravel, his close association with Holst and George Butterworth, and his eventual assumption of the leadership of English musical life. Heffer shows how an audience that loved him for evoking their common cultural heritage came to admire him for articulating the emotions of the war torn world in which they lived.