The View from Castle Rock, Revolution Symphony and The Bawdy Bard

The term 'lifetime's work' is bandied about with irritating regularity. If we read every book whose blurb uses this old ruse, there would be little time for anything else. This makes the discovery of a work that can truly justify this boast a singular event.

Alice Munro is a highly respected Canadian author whose 12 collections of short stories have won her an international following. While others happily ransack their hoard of memories for fiction material, Munro has always felt reluctant to draw on her own past in her writing.

Munro's latest collection, The View from Castle Rock, sees her break this 50-year rule. After reflecting upon her immediate family, Munro took years tracing her relatives back to their earliest origins. The stories in The View from Castle Rock present the saga of the Munro family as they journey from the Uplands of Scotland to the shores of Ontario in 1818 and on into the 20th century and Munro's own life. A powerful reimagining of an entire family history, The View from Castle Rock looks set to be one of 2006's landmark publications.

Revolution Symphony

The lives of two of the most significant figures of the 18th Century are chronicled in paperbacks out this week. That most heavenly of composers, Mozart, is the subject of the first. Penguin has published Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Life in Letters, a selection of the maestro's correspondences. These follow Mozart's whirlwind life from the performance of his first symphony when he was 12, backwards and forwards across the Imperial Courts of Europe, in and out of debt and finally to his deathbed at the age of 35. Few have never heard a Mozart composition, but reading these personal letters should give a fascinating insight into the mind that created the music.

Voltaire was also fond of writing letters and 12,000 of these were analysed by Roger Pearson for his impressive new biography Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom. So concerned was Voltaire with the value of liberty that he spent years in the Bastille and as an outcast. His incredible mental powers, which encompassed philosophy, science, politics and poetry, brought him into confrontation wherever he went. He even managed to attack both the Church and atheism simultaneously. He died aged 84 having published 15 million words. This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but Voltaire's work brought us closer to it.

The Bawdy Bard

Say that you find Shakespeare amusing and it usually does not take long before the men in white coats are in hot pursuit. Shakespeare may be the greatest of playwrights but even Book Notes, his most ardent defender, must concede that his notion of comedy is an acquired taste. The claim that Shakespeare is the lewdest writer of all time would seem to be something of a laugh, but this is the view put forward by academic Pauline Kiernan in Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Most Outrageous Sexual Puns.

Kiernan believes that Shakespeare did indeed have a sense of humour and a pretty saucy one at that. His plays are loaded with double entendres and his poems with naughty rhymes. Even character names and metaphors in the tragedies are supposedly salacious. These gags were added to please the peasants who made up the majority of Shakespeare's audiences and their meanings have been obscured by time. Kiernan's task is to explain them. Most humourous books have the longevity of a Christmas cracker joke, but this one may actually add a valid new dimension to the Bard. To all those schoolgirls who sniggered at the implications of the name Benedick, Book Notes offers absolution.