Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness 1832-1869
David Cairns
(Penguin £12.99)
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Why the French disdain to pen biographies of their own artistic greats is baffling, but their reluctance has made possible Hilary Spurling's Matisse, Graham Robb's Balzac and Cairns's award-winning study of Berlioz. Covering a period that includes Benvenuto Cellini, the Requiem and The Trojans, and the composer's marriages to the actress Harriet Smithson and the singer Marie Recio, the second volume depicts the post-Romantic musical scene in Balzacian detail, with walk-on appearances by Liszt, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Rossini and Wagner. Its analysis of the works is as acute as that of the subject's moods and relationships.

Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII
John Cornwell
(Penguin £7.99)
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John Paul II plans to canonise Pius XII. But as a Vatican diplomat in the 1930s, the then Eugenio Pacelli masterminded a concordat with Hitler, extending the church's power over Germany's 23m Catholics in exchange for its withdrawal from politics and the disbanding of the Catholic Centre Party. And after becoming Pope in 1939 he refused to condemn Nazism and the Holocaust, failed to protect Rome's Jews, and formed links with Croatia's fascist Ustashe. Rather than a simple indictment, Cornwell's superb biography is a complex study of self-delusion, resembling Gitta Sereny's life of Albert Speer.