Cremona

Bees and mammoth bones, a shipwreck, horse urine (preferably female), a 17th-century craftsman and a 20th-century genocide. Playing an extended narrative game of Only Connect in her latest book, the musicologist Kate Kennedy takes a bird’s-eye view of four lives and five centuries as she turns her own instrument, the cello, into a prism. Part history, biography and auto-biography, with digressions into anthropology, acoustics and aesthetics and an intriguing cast of characters, Cello sings richly. But you have to be willing to go on the journey. Has publishing reached peak personality-stakes? Whether the subject is swimming or stamp-collecting, non-fiction seems wearyingly determined to rebrand itself as memoir, our author, also

An extraordinary omission from Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects is the lyre, the instrument closest to Homer’s heart. Without it, the evolution of bowed stringed instruments — rebec, lira da braccio, violetta — would not have taken place. Ipso facto, there would be no violin, nor its larger siblings; no chamber music, no orchestra, no Hot Club de France. In such a parallel world, Helena Attlee would be much time-richer, given that she has spent more than four years researching the provenance of a single violin. At a Klezmer performance in a small Welsh town the author is moved by the joyous but wistful celebratory