Barry Forshaw writes: There was a time when the composer Mahler was something of a specialist taste, admired by the cognoscenti but whose music was much neglected since his death, despite such advocates as Bruno Walter. How times have changed! Mahler’s name is now a guarantee of box office success in concert halls, and his own, much-quoted dictum, ‘My time will come’, has proved prescient. There have been many books on the composer (with important contributions by Deryk Cooke and Michael Kennedy), but Steven Johnson’s new volume is unique, concentrating on the composer’s mighty Eighth Symphony (the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’), setting the piece and Mahler’s work in general within the context of the world and society he lived in. This is a book written with both passion and scholarship that will send listeners to the composer afresh.