R UPERT C HRISTIANSEN Recently I’ve had the good fortune to review
three works of magisterial scholarship in these pages — John Haffenden’s William Empson: Among the Mandarins (OUP, £30), Philip Gossett’s Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago University Press, £22.50) and Patrick Carnegy’s Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (Yale, £29.95). Because they run in total for over 1,500 pages, I haven’t had time for much else. But I hugely enjoyed John Bridcut’s sensitive study of boy-love, Britten’s Children (Faber, £18.99), and the narrative fluency and psychological acuity of Michael Arditti’s elegant novel A Sea Change (Maia, £8.99). Otherwise, I’ve been obsessively reading the poetry and prose of Elizabeth Bishop, including a revelatory new edition of her uncollected works, Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke Box (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $30).
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