LUCKY was the Cambridge parish whose monthly Newsletter had the articles that became the book A Joyful Noise: Some authors, their times and their hymns by Charles Moseley, a Church Times contributor (DLT, £16.99 (£15.30); 978-1-915412-15-7). This presentable hardback, with a colour frontispiece of St Ambrose, discusses 27 authors, from that Latin Doctor to that figure of the 1960s folk revivial Sydney Carter, selected partly on the criterion that they got into The New English Hymnal in 1986 — even if John Mason, for example, had only “How shall I sing that majesty?”, and Eleanor Farjeon had only “Morning has broken”. Here, too, though, are Venantius Fortunatus, Aquinas, Herbert, Charles Wesley, J. M. Neale, Mrs Alexander, Catherine Winkworth, Newman, and Dearmer, even if we miss Charlotte Elliott and the church bazaar that she missed, too. Informed and opinionated, the author discusses tunes as well as words, and deserves space on the hymn-lover’s shelf alongside the hymnologists Ian Bradley and J. R. Watson.

Gordon Giles’s paperback Sing to the Lord!: 30 hymn meditations (RSCM, £19.99; 978-0-85402-354-7) could stand alongside: it does some of the same things, but proceeds by hymn rather than author, prints the words and tunes, and passes over Carter in favour of the often derided Fred Kaan and into the era of the now almost ubiquitous Graham Kendrick and Stuart Townend. Each “meditation” ends with a prayer, but seekers after mere information or literary criticism will find points of interest — even about “songs” that might not be to their personal taste — which are not in Bradley, Watson, or Moseley.