Mozart, by Annette Kolb (Prion, £10 in UK)

Annette Kolb was probably Germany's leading woman writer in the years between the world wars, a versatile woman of letters, a formidable social figure and a personal friend of Thomas Mann and other notables. Her life of Mozart is now more than sixty years old and is typical of the well-written biography of the time, the age of Maurois, Ludwig, Strachey, etc. That is to say, it is primarily a literary production rather than a work of scholarship, and the product of a cultured mind very different in approach from the specialised methods of our own era. It still reads well, but detailed modern knowledge and research must surely have supplanted much of it. Kolb also wrote lives of Schubert and Wagner, which might also be worth republication and exploration. B.F.