AN EVENING WITH LOUIS DE BERNIERES, Dorset County Museum

AS a preview to his appearance at the Edinburgh Festival in August, the noted author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin took to the stage at the rather more modest Dorchester Festival for a programme with a difference.

This was not so much a literary evening as an indulgent musical entertainment accompanied by professional flautist Ilone Antonius-Jones in which the author played a variety of instruments, related some funny stories and read a couple of extracts from his latest book A Partisan's Daughter.

With self-deprecating wit de Bernieres also explained the gestation of this novel, which is based upon the reminiscences of a Serbian flatmate with whom he shared a run-down house some 30 years ago when as a car mechanic the author was experiencing the low-life of London.

But if writing is his career, music is plainly his passion and the evening is mainly made up of pieces played on guitar, mandolin, bouzouki and lyre, before admitting that he was 'suffering from a sad delusion that I can play the saxophone'.

Well, yes, my advice to him is not to give up his day job as the suffering was mutual on this occasion.

Amusing, entertaining and engaging, Louis de Bernieres is all these, but musician he is not. His gift is with words, and his descriptive narrative of his youth is both light-hearted and captivating.

Just don't mention That Book or the film based upon it - both subjects are clearly off limits to the man who put Cephalonia on the tourist map and has regretted it ever since.