Professional arts reviewers like me may now find their thoughts straying to the Washington Post, whose classical music writer Anne Midgette is making history. The Croatian pianist Dejan Lazić has informed Midgette he is taking steps under the EU’s “right to be forgotten” legislation to expunge a bad review she wrote about him back in 2010. Lazić says this review – which he considers unfair and defamatory – comes up prominently in any Google search of his name. Midgette and the Post are dismayed, as well they might be. EU legislation applies to the search engine responsible for prioritising and emphasis, but Lazić appears to want the Post itself to delete the review, to self-impose an EU-approved oblivion. He denies advocating censorship, and has discussed his actions in detail on his website. The Post has noted what it considers to be the chief bemusing irony: the review itself, it claims, wasn’t all that bad. It was about his performance of Chopin and Schubert, and Midgette praised his extraordinarily accomplished style: “Again and again … he showed what a range of colours he could get out of the instrument.” The problem, in her view, was that “the human side fell short”. Well, that doesn’t sound too bad – does it?

Is the pianist overreacting? I wonder. Midgette included some lively comments about Lazić’s theatrical style on stage: “Every nuance of the music was underlined visibly with a host of concert-pianist playacting gestures: head flung back at the end of a phrase; left hand conducting the right hand.” My guess is that Lazić will have flung back his head in displeasure at the end of that sentence. But what might have enraged him most was precisely those aspects of the review the Washington Post thinks should have mollified him. It was all that sorrowingly generous stuff about how much potential he has (“he’s too good not to do better, to move beyond the music’s challenges and into the realm of its soul”) that he may well have found intolerable and presumptuous – a condescending pat on the head.

There is a lesson here for all critics, who don’t realise that sugaring the pill only makes it taste worse. Well, we have to hope Lazić comes to take a more sensible view. Meanwhile I’ve downloaded his recording of Brahms’s “third piano concerto”, and it is positively replete with humanity [see footnote]. He comes to the UK on 11 December to play a programme at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall including Bach and Benjamin Britten’s Holiday Diary Suite. That should be a hot ticket.

Remember Growvember

In a cheeky bid for the lazy vote the environment secretary, Liz Truss, has told the nation not to mow their lawns because long straggly grass helps our worryingly small bee population. I myself am not dusting, to protect my biodiverse indoor spider habitat. Truss should issue each householder with a copy of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem Inversnaid: “What would the world be, once bereft / Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, / O let them be left, wildness and wet;/Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”

The next-gen humblebrag

You’ve heard of the humblebrag (“OMG I made such a fool of myself last week when I used the wrong spoon at a private lunch given by the Duchess of Cambridge”). Now journalists are pioneering what you might call the sensitivebrag. Out of the blue, someone will tweet: “Thanks to everyone for all the lovely comments about my article.” Er, what article? Well, the one that received such a huge amount of praise. It’s like someone storming into your house and throwing armfuls of flowers around, shouting: “I didn’t want to say anything but I’m just so incredibly moved by all these bouquets I’m receiving for that amazing thing I did!”

@PeterBradshaw1

• This footnote was appended on 6 November 2014: Brahms’s “third piano concerto” is in fact Dejan Lazić’s own arrangement of Brahms’s Violin Concerto.