Love and Music: The Glorious History of the Dublin Grand Opera Society 1941-1998, by Gus Smith (Atlantic Publishers, £10.95)

It was founded as the result of a 1941 newspaper advertisement; it now stands on the threshold of a brave and, with the demise of Opera Northern Ireland, possibly terrifying new world. In between, the Dublin Grand Opera Society - better know nowadays, under the aegis of its ambitious young artistic director Dieter Kaegi, as Opera Ireland - has been purveying popular opera to Irish audiences for better, and sometimes, as Gus Smith reveals in this affectionate and emotional memoir, for worse. And the photographs are priceless: a Romanian mezzo signing autographs in Armagh in the 1960s, Giuseppe di Stefano posing with his elbow on someone's mantelpiece, a cigarette dangling carelessly from his fingers, a dazed-looking, blood-spattered Pavarotti shoulder-to-shoulder with a beaming Carmel McHale of the DGOS Ladies' Committee. Music drama, indeed.