... Remembrances On and Off the Record: A Memoir of Walter Legge, by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (Faber and Faber, £9.50) Walter Legge could be said to have invented the profession of record producer. His mentor, that great pioneer of the gramophone Fred Gaisberg, believed that the objective of a recorded performance was to reproduce the sound of the live event. Legge went further--he considered that ...

... Mae West, by Fergus Cashin (W.H. Allen, £6.95) mm: wnai was one oi inc ocai ex amples of the person who begins as a scandal and ends up as an institution. An unsuccessful vaudeville artist, in the business almost since infancy, she made her own brand of sex a highly saleable commodity by exploiting her limited talents and capitalising on her un doubted assets. In addition to her figure, these ...

... myriad of published tributes to Presley which have appeared since his death. Any author would be hard put to it to find out anything new about the King and most of the photographs have been nuhlihH ivfmv ...

... History of costume A History of English Costume writ ten and illustrated by Iris Brooke. Third paperback edition. Eyre Methuen. 1979. £3.50 This basis handbook of costume, basically that of the court and the portrait-commissioning classes, has been revised and updated to take in the first 70 years of the century; it has also sprouted a much-needed index. The line drawings, both full- length ...

... Musicals: the hits and misses The Book of Musicals, by Arthur Jackson (Mitchell Beazley, £7.95) The musical--what a slight, fragile thing it so often is. Looking through the comprehensive list of American and British musicals at the end of this handsome book, one shudders at the thought of how much time, money, energy and talent has been spent on them to so 1 1 lite tasting eneci. ii is iu ...

... Hitlers Tischgesprache im Fuhrerhauptquartier, by Dr Henry Picker (Seewald Verlag, Stuttgart; 548 pages; DM 48). There can be no doubt that Hitler was one of the most abominable monsters known to history; that he was also in some ways a fascinating personality is shown by the flood of books about him. One of the most interesting among recent publications is the one under review for two main ...

... ANN NUGENT assesses the turbulent career of the inimitable Lynn Seymour Lynn: The Autobiography of Lynn Seymour with Paul Gardner (Granada £10.95) Lynn Seymour was first a little mouse, a frump and a loser, and afterwards the enfant terrible of British ballet who had turned into our greatest dramatic ballerina. She was born in Canada and came to the Royal Ballet School in her teens, a shy, ...

... the oldest most famous lyrical theatres in the world; its building, designed by Charles Garnier and inaugurated in 1875, is probably the most sumptuous of them all. Inside that palatial edifice, however, its history has been almost continually one of intrigues, scandals and of an often deplorable lack of artistic achieve ments. It has had also, of course, its resounding triumphs, notably ...

... Quicksilver. An autobiography, by Marie Rambert (Macmillan £4.95) This is a new paperback issue of the 1972 hardback containing, additionally, a glowing tribute by Sir Frederick Ashton to the late Dame Marie Rambert, and even for those who care little about ballet it is a delight from start to finish. The title arises from a nickname given to Dame Marie by her nurse that is synonymous with the ...

... Private and public life Laurence Olivier: Confessions of An Actor, by Laurence Olivier. rWeidenfeld and Nlcolson. ...

... volumes in what may well become a cinematic equivalent of Grove are necessarily selective, for no attempt has been made towards a fully comprehensive study of the world's film makers. But it is a reasonable assump tion that nobody of lasting value has been omitted, for edition Christopher Lyon and his assistant Susan Doll nave hit on the idea of inviting an excep tionally distinguished panel ...

... that will fascinate all opera fans. It is an encyclopaedia comprising detailed biographies of no less than 3755 of the best singers of this century. The selection has been made deliberately, leaving out the legendary stars of the 18th and early 19th centuries, including only those whose vocal qualities can be verified by the records they made. Each entry has therefore, beside a description of ...