This study was still unfinished at the time of Said’s death. It is possible to suspect – as his friend Michael Wood hints in his introduction to this collection – that this was a work that the author himself may have wished, in some part of his mind, not to complete. Once you have put the last touches to a definitive account of late style, you may seem ominously near to the end of your own intellectual journey; better always, therefore, to postpone, if one can, any final synthesis until another day. The book that Wood, with the help of Richard Poirier and others, has now skilfully put together from a variety of sources does not offer a fully developed or wholly coherent aesthetic of lateness. Instead, it makes a series of raids – at times tantalisingly brief, at times brilliantly suggestive – on a large topic that Said never managed wholly to encircle, but had begun to explore in Musical Elaborations (his 1989 Wellek Lectures at Irvine, published in 1991), and continued to chart through the Lord Northcliffe Lectures delivered in London in 1993, and other writings over the following decade.

Said’s interest in the nature of late style was itself the concluding phase of an altogether more ambitious enquiry concerning periodisation and what he called ‘timeliness’ that absorbed him through much of his working life. In Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), he looked at the human impulse to search for points of cultural origin, to identify particular events, ideas and historical moments as crucially determining of subsequent movements, periods or cultural forms – industrialisation and romanticism, for example, or the rise of the novel. ‘In Western literature,’ as Said summarily puts it in the present volume, ‘the form of the novel is coincidental with the emergence of bourgeoisie in the late seventeenth century, and this is why, for its first century, the novel is all about birth, possible orphanhood, the discovery of roots, and the creation of a new world, a career, and society. Robinson Crusoe. Tom Jones. Tristram Shandy.’ The second great phase of cultural development following ‘beginnings’ Said termed exfoliation, in which cultural forms matured, burgeoned and diversified; for this period of secondary growth, the Bildungsroman served as the perfect exemplar. As for the final phase of cultural life – well, here (Said began to think), more interesting and idiosyncratic events were likely to occur, when artists, conscious of their own mortality, begin to discard conventional restraints and experiment with new expressive forms.

Late period works that conveyed the qualities which Romantic critics liked to detect in the final plays of Shakespeare – serenity, composure, harmony, reconciliation – held only a limited interest for Said. He was taken, rather, by works that expressed quite contrary feelings, of intransigence, difficulty, unresolved contradiction; by the ‘angry and disturbed’ last plays of Ibsen, for example, and (in particular) by the late compositions of Beethoven: the last five piano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis, the last six string quartets, the seventeen bagatelles for piano; works whose frequent waywardness, awkwardness and stylistic eccentricity seem at obvious variance with the more logical and formally resolved compositions of Beethoven’s earlier periods. ‘The maturity of the late works,’ Theodor Adorno argued in his 1937 essay on Beethoven’s late style, which Said quotes here, ‘does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are ... not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation.’ For Adorno, these late works conveyed a sense of tragedy, as if the composer’s awareness of approaching death were caught in some indirect way within the works themselves. Said is at once intrigued and dissatisfied by Adorno’s analysis, and by his adoption of the figure of the late Beethoven – deaf, isolated, defiant – as emblematic in some more general sense of the condition of the supreme artist, alienated from the society over which he also towers. In a characteristically agile move, shifting abruptly from musical to sociological analysis – as perhaps only he, amongst modern critics, could do with such gymnastic grace – Said finds in Adorno’s social circumstances an explanation for his long fixation with the figure of late Beethoven:

Adorno, like Proust, lived and worked his entire life next to, and even as a part of, the great underlying continuities of Western society: families, intellectual associations, musical and concert life, and philosophical traditions, as well as any number of academic institutions. But he was always to one side, never fully a part of any. He was a musician who never had a career as one, a philosopher whose main subject was music. And unlike many of his academic or intellectual counterparts, Adorno never pretended to an apolitical neutrality. His work is like a contrapuntal voice intertwined with fascism, bourgeois mass society, and communism, inexplicable without them, always critical and ironic about them.

Wishing always to maintain an ironic distance from the society that had sustained him, Adorno (Said suspects) may have spotted a tempting model for himself in the late Beethoven, with his more profound sense of social alienation. Whatever the case, both men in their different ways experienced what Said, in a telling figure, describes as a sense of exile.

The fact of exile has always mattered greatly to Edward Said, who significantly entitled his 1999 memoir Out of Place – ‘a record of an essentially lost or forgotten world’, as its opening sentence declares. His concept of ‘lateness’ in the present book combines this sense of exile, of being out of place, with what he calls ‘untimeliness’, the experience of being, more profoundly, out of time. To be ‘out of time’ may be to feel under pressure, like a speaker who has overrun his allocated span of minutes (‘Sorry, I’m out of time, I’ll simply summarise now’). It may also suggest a dislocation from the present, as an artist recalls a now-vanished era, or inventively anticipates a mode or idiom at variance with the times in which he lives.

These various, loosely connected ideas of lateness provide the larger framework within which Said reads particular texts and compositions in the present book. He looks by turns at the politics of nostalgia in Lampedusa’s and Visconti’s versions of The Leopard; at Richard Strauss’s idea of history; at Cosi fan tutte and Mozart’s visions of death; at Glenn Gould’s revelation of ‘systematic thought’ in the music of Bach; at Genet’s reflections on Palestine and French colonialism; and in briefer but no less penetrating glances at moments in the work of Euripides, Cavafy, Thomas Mann and Benjamin Britten. An incomplete study, a loose gathering of essays, perhaps; but the sheer suppleness and versatility of Said’s intelligence are always in evidence, and often quite dazzling in their suggestive power.

Said’s own late style, curiously enough, was not in itself especially distinctive or discontinuous with what had gone before. Unlike some of the artists he discusses here, he never acquired a final quirkiness, tetchiness or high stylistic sheen. Working ‘against the grain’, as the subtitle of the present book has it, had been Said’s habitual mode of enquiry, his constant focus of attention, throughout his writing life. What is striking about this final collection is instead a remarkable continuity with what had gone before; a salutary reminder that writers of formidable power may sometimes continue, even in the most trying physical circumstances, to remain mercifully to the end entirely themselves.