Gerald Abraham's reputation as an authority on Russian music has tended to obscure his deep interest in the music of Poland and Czechoslovakia and in the music of the nineteenth-century generally. From a lifetime's devoted scholarship in these fields the author has now selected his best work to make up a volume of exceptional breadth and fascination. The subjects range from the relationship of Slavonic music to the western world to detailed essays on figures such as Chopin, Dvorak, Rubinstein and Mussorgsky. There are two new unpulished essays. A study of realism in Janacek's operas contains a particularly fine analysis of 'From the House of the Dead' and there is an account of the fantastic 'erotic diary' for piano in which Fibich, one of the best, recorded the secrets of his love affair with Anezka Schulzova. This book is welcomed as much by specialists in the field as by the general reader.