This page documents Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji’s literary tastes, which cover all sorts of subjects, mainly in the humanities, but also musical ones, mostly reflected in the books he reviewed as part of his activities as a music critic. It lists the books he discussed, or at least mentioned, in nine usually extensive sources (see the bulleted list below). It does not constitute a complete database of all the authors, both musical and non-musical, that he knew. This is hardly possible on the basis of the surviving archival sources. Sorabji read voraciously, and the number of authors and books he knew is impressive.

The sources used, which cover the years 1930 to 1953, are listed below, and the dates following the titles correspond to the entire period that they cover, not just the years found in the references. They include his two books of essays (AM, MCF), two important unpublished collections of letters to close friends (EC, FH, PH), his articles, reviews, and open letters published in the two newspapers for which he worked as a music critic (NA, NEW) and in the Musical Times (MT), and two unpublished manuscripts (FM, MS).

• AM: Around Music (1932)
• CMG: Letters to Christopher Murray Grieve (1931-77)
• EC: Letters to Erik Chisholm (1926-32, 1933-39, 1948-65)
• FH: Letters to Frank Holliday (1939-78) {partial examination}
• FM: “Fruits of Misanthropy” (1925-ca. 1940)
• MCF: Mi contra fa (1947)
• MS: “Addition to the Chapter ‘Music and Sex’” (ca. 1953)
• MT: The Musical Times (1916-65)
• NA: The New Age (1915-34)
• NEW: The New English Weekly (1932-49)
• OL: Open letter to a newspaper or periodical
• PH: Letters to Philip Heseltine (1913-17, 1920-22)
• PL: Private letter
• RS: Letters to Ronald Stevenson (1958-86)
• VAP: “The Validity of the Aristocratic Principle”, in Art and Thought: Issued in Honour of Dr. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday, ed. K. Bharatha Iyer (London: Luzac, 1947), 214-17.

The extensive correspondence with Frank Holliday has not been included here because there is currently no way of reading it in its entirety and satisfactorily extracting the relevant information. However, my recollections of working on this collection on three occasions in the mid-1990s, and the handwritten notes I made at the time, suggest that literature and essays were not a frequent theme in this particular source.

A list of the writers whose texts Sorabji set to music, and of whom he probably had a good knowledge, can be found elsewhere on this site.

Contents of columns (other than “Author”, “Birth”, and “Death”)

• Title
  • Titles followed by a bullet (•) are not specifically mentioned in the text, but it is highly likely that this is the actual title Sorabji meant.
  • An initial definite article is placed at the end of the entry, with the word appearing at the beginning capitalized to allow correct sorting.
  • Titles beginning with an accented letter are given without the accent, again to allow correct sorting, and the correct form follows in brackets.
  • The first word of an inverted title is capitalized although it could normally be lowercase, given the sentence-style capitalization of titles used on this site; this is necessary for correct sorting.
• Publ.: The year of publication may be an approximation in the case of older works, especially those that went through several forms before reaching the version known to a twentieth-century reader like Sorabji.
• Subject: Each book has been assigned a very general subject category that makes it easy to cover Sorabji’s reading interests. In some cases, the choice of subject is a best guess, as library catalogue data is in sufficient to make a fully informed choice.
• Source: The two- or three-letter abbreviations are listed above.
• Reference: The abbreviation for the source is followed by the page number or, in the case of letters (with a leading zero to allow correct sorting), the date in year-month-day format (to be completed with the abbreviation given under Source).