‘Each of us can supply evidence of late works which crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavour,’ Edward Said wrote in his own last piece for the LRB, published posthumously in 2004. ‘But what,’ he asked, ‘of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce serenity at all?’

Said’s ‘Thoughts on Late Style’ have inspired the second collaboration between the LRB and the City of London Sinfonia: a programme of readings and music based on the various case studies of lateness he examines, from Beethoven to Britten, Cavafy to Genet.