"Novel and ambitious... Banks's knowledgeable and above all thoughtful explorations are wide ranging... Though his discussions are inevitably short (around 200 works are looked at), they are invariably to the point and well argued... and his views are stimulating"  (George Hall in the December 2022 edition of Opera).

I've been enjoying George Hall's writing for decades, in the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Stage and elsewhere. For many years Editor-in-Chief at the BBC Proms, he was previously - from the 1970s - Editor-in-Chief at Decca Records. It's splendid, if a little disconcerting, to read his review of my own first-time book!

Beginning the review with a few brief quotations from the Introduction, he very quickly gets to the heart of what I am trying to achieve with the book.

Following that, he singles out a wide range of individual chapters for comment. He notes all the works in Chapter 2: Handel's Israel in Egypt, Rossini's Moses and Pharaoh and Schoenberg's Moses and Aron.  He mentions all the operas in the 'Islam and Chivalry' chapter (by Handel, Schumann and Massenet) and quotes the chapter subtitle, 'Europe stops viewing itself as a Christian fortress defended by knights wearing chainmail'.  He comments on the works by Monteverdi, Handel and Verdi that I explore in my survey of changing views of the Crusades from the 17th to the 19th centuries.  He summarises Chapter 16, which traces the rise of militant nationalism between the fall of Napoleon and 1945. He investigates how, in seeking in Chapter 22 to demonstrate how the modern West turns 'against patriarchal sexism', I look at 4 different settings of the story of Francesca da Rimini. 

The result is that, even though the review isn't particularly long, it gives - in my view - a remarkably helpful and accurate overview of the book.