Howard Webber Before the Arts Council: Campaigns for State Funding of the Arts in Britain, 1934–1944 London: Bloomsbury, 2021. 264 p. £85. ISBN: 978-1-3501-6793-3.

libretto directly with his musical score. Prokofiev left Russia for the United States in 1918, where he wrote his opera in the abrupt dialogue Bartig beats out, like music. Love for Three Oranges was premiered in Chicago in 1921, and in Leningrad in 1926, directed by Sergey Radlov – a detail among other necessary details in Bartig’s map of its itinerary. (Radlov was formerly Meyerhold’s student.) Inna Naroditskaya lovingly charts its music, and Natalia Savkina its narrative. The perplexing thing is that Prokofiev and Meyerhold were friends, yet the former never acknowledged, not even at the beginning (before Meyerhold’s politics spelled his doom), that Meyerhold’s play was his immediate inspiration; and Gozzi, who had become a third degree of separation, was not of direct interest to his artistic ambitions. Posner rightly points out the discrepancy in the Italian and Russian titles, explaining that collaborators had agreed to ‘of’ in the Italian and ‘for’ in the Russian because this corresponds with each language. What is the fiaba of this wonderful story, in an erudite book invaluable both for those who know something about its subject and those who would like to know? It is that accrued overwriting gives a complete orange! maria shevtsova