A certain amount of discipline is needed faced with the bewildering variety of events on offer at the LitFest - or Feast as my keyboard keeps wanting to type. This week it has been music, poetry, history and geology.

Music first. If you have seen Amadeus, you know that Mozart was a spoilt brat who wrote music with too many notes in it, had a domineering father and an airhead wife and was probably poisoned by Salieri.

Enter Jane Glover, sometime director of the London Mozart Players and a passionate Mozartian. Read her new biography, Mozart's Women, and you get a far more rounded picture. Spotlighting the women in Mozart's life - his mother and sister, his wife Constanze - she shows us a child prodigy growing into a mature and responsible adult, a husband and father deeply loved and loving.

Concentrating on the singers he wrote for, we see a consummate musician who saw his music as fitting the performer like a well-made suit of clothes. Ludwig was a control freak, vital to his son's career, but Constanze was equally important to his legacy, sorting out his finances in extremis and controlling the publishing of his music after his death.

Jane Glover's evocation of his death, coupled with an analysis of the Requiem he was desperately trying to finish, is infinitely moving.

Speaking at Craiglands on Tuesday, she drew her audience into this world and into eager anticipation of the 2006 celebrations of the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth.

Thursday at the Kings Hall saw more

music, this time live. Poet Carol Ann Duffy was reading from her new collection of love poems, Rapture, some of which were given a jazz rendering by Eliana Tomkins and her band. Clearly highly personal, the performance struck a chord with the diverse

audience.

Meanwhile Saturday's readers' afternoon, Making History, at Otley Courthouse drew a full house of committed readers and writers. Justine Picardie movingly explores family history through clothes in My Mother's Wedding Dress.

Lorna Gibb's Lady Hester is a portrait of Lady Hester Stanhope, intrepid traveller. Juliet Barker's Agincourt brings that battle vividly to life and Tom Holland's Persian Fire is a tale of the first major east-west conflict.

Responding to questions from James Nash, they talked about their influences, inspiration and working practices.

Then came workshops, giving the audience chance to explore their own interests with the individual writers. Just how successful these were, was apparent in the final question and answer session when the audience found ample confidence to engage in a real exchange of ideas with the panel.

Two things came over very strongly: just how vital reading is in childhood and, secondly, the uncanny links with past and present. As Tom Holland pointed out, the Roman Empire was the original globalisation and September 11 a powerful argument in favour of the relevance of the study of ancient east-west relations.

And if confirmation of such links were needed, Simon Winchester's account of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, The Day the World Went Mad, had a tragic topicality against the background of the horror in Kasmir.

Speaking at Ilkley Playhouse on Sunday, Winchester's presentation was an object lesson in clarity. He explained plate tectonics so that you really understood how these forces created continents, threw up mountains, opened chasms and generally made the landscape.

And how the more beautiful and dramatic that landscape, the more dangerous it is to live there. San Francisco - like New Orleans - should have been built somewhere else. Simon Winchester's account of the earthquake was riveting and his comparison of the speed of response by the authorities with the recent chaos in New Orleans was devastating. Altogether, an entertaining and informative week - and there is another week to go!

Judith Dunn