Dr Love, who is a Reader in English at Monash University, Melbourne, has written this carefully researched yet eminently readable story of Lyster and his company whose successful reign only ended with Lyster’s death in 1880. The book is rich in anecdote and human interest. It gives, as well, an authentic picture of the urban social life of the period when grand opera could and did attract a wide, yet discriminating, audience rather than a sophisticated coterie.

Currency Press are to be congratulated for their part in publishing this major contribution to our theatrical and musical history which is illumined by more than sixty photographs, as is Dr Love, who has enlivened his narrative with innumerable stories like the one about John James McGregor Greer who attempted to murder by shooting his wife and her lover and then shot himself in the head at the end of the Act IV love duet in Les Huguenots.