It must be a source of endless frustration to Davidson's friends and fans that his work isn't better known, because good lord it deserves to be. This collection is a joy and a pleasure - right from the riotous opening story and all through the various layers of disparate and even warring elements that combine in perfectly balanced recipes to produce the others, to the impending passing from history and memory of the fourth-largest empire in Europe. To say the Doctor is a kind of Sherlock Holmes is truly insufficent - he is a kind of court sorceror of a rational age filled with surviving superstitions and ambiguous occurences and every now and the the just plain magical. A wonderful read, a wonderful listen, incredibly funny, deeply learned, Umberto Eco crossed with PG Wodehouse set in the place next door to Ruritania.