Yippee!! Order placed, and within a few days I shall set up a perching stool behind the letterbox.
That I enjoyed 'Leaves from Life's Tree' so much, and hugely admired the real scholarship that had so clearly gone into it, is, I suppose, a fact about me and of no ultimate concern to the rest of the world. What is far more worth saying is that the book seemed to me a first rate contribution to our knowledge of Raff's family circumstances, his nature and character, the environment in which he lived and worked, and of utmost importance to our understanding of German history up until the Great War. So the new book has some high standards to meet!
Incidentally, Mark, too late now - but maybe you should have 'tendered' for expressions of interest on this Forum for the work of compiling an Index? It can be an irksome task (though it depends on the text in question), but strangely it is less irksome and in fact can be immensely rewarding to do the work on a text of which you yourself are not the author or editor. Provided the text 'grabs' you, indexing can be real fun and a great learning exercise. Sure, indexing a scholarly work on 9th Century Northumbrian chant would be equivalent to me of being a member of a jury on an immensely complex fraud trial that lasted a few months, but doing so on a well translated Raff biography would be....well, great!
