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Title: A somewhat annoying companion
Review: This book may be of value to someone who really knows Virgil and Virgilian scholarship, but Horsfall's style is so idiosyncratic, and his approach so random, that students and other intermediate readers are best warned off. Ideas are presented, or hinted at, in sentences or sentence fragments overflowing with parentheses, exclamation points, question marks, footnotes, and cross-references. The text is poorly edited and in places doesn't make any sense at all. Overall, one gets the impression that Horsfall (who wrote most of the book, and translated two chapters from Italian into his own idiom) is a brilliant scholar who welcomes us into his brain but really can't be bothered tidying up before we come in.
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