This introduces its (presumed) child reader to the instruments and habits of a classical orchestra, and takes a quick trot through the lives and work of composers (“The Men Who Wrote the Music” – and yes, all named are men) from before 1700 to those still living and working in 1950. Its tone is rather oddly jocular to this modern adult reader, but jolly enough. It is going to stay on my shelf as it includes a time-chart of composers and a glossary of musical terms which may come in handy.

Penniless, newly-wed and new father Will Shakespeare gets involved with elves in the Forest of Arden round Stratford, to his family’s mortal peril but eventual survival. The author clearly extremely knowledgeable about Shakespeare’s life and times (there is an afterword referencing the particular eight biographies she turns to repeatedly, and listing a number of other reference works). She clearly had enormous fun constructing characters, plot and dialogue from which Shakespeare could afterwards have constructed his plays. This reader, alas, had a lot less fun.

This is an odd book. Brian tells me that although most people don’t like it, the people who do like it like it a lot. I suspect if I had read it earlier in my life I might have liked it quite a lot, as its mix of literary tricksiness with high-flown language might have appealed. At this stage of my life, however, already half a literary critic, I found myself stopping at intervals to shout at the writer: the characters are cardboard; pacing is decidedly peculiar; extensive quotes from the plays are used to construct some truly odd and some absolutely ghastly passages of description and dialogue; and after much leisurely musing about emotions and not a lot of action, the book finally hurries from near-disaster to the happy-ever-after ending in about 2 pages flat.