Listening regularly to the Burghersh chanters and their companion choristers, male and female, awakes admiration both for the quality of their musicianship and for the educational context in which they thrive. Alan Mould gives that admiration an historical context in terms both of the history of choristers from their origins in the schola cantorum of Pope Sylvester to 2005, and of an analysis of how long schools have functioned and their problems throughout that period from ecclesiastical and educational viewpoints. At times the story is gripping and engrossing: the sections on Maria Hackett, ‘the choirboys’ friend', and Sir Frederick Ouseley, founder of St Michael's College, Tenbury, are quite brilliant. But always the details of considerable research are presented with a strong sense of direction, each chapter's conclusion providing a reminder of the stage the story has reached. The annotations add interest and much useful source material. The history of choristers is surprising at many points, and not only where the concern to find singers with talent involved kidnaps, impressed recruitment, bribery and disguise ‘to hadde awey one of our best queresters’! The Elizabethan choristers' engagement with popular and royal theatrical events, leading up to Shakespeare's heyday, is an epic in itself. This is an important book. The long pilgrimage from the Georgian nadir to the modern high standards of singing, music and education, is thoughtfully chronicled with a mass of useful insights and lessons from the past. Only p. 252 n.13 gave me pause to wonder whether the choristers' world, and the future Church in England, will manage to coexist; if they cannot, we shall all, to judge by this book, be immeasurably the poorer.