Chroma is more than an Aids autobiography...it is a paean to colour...Shot through with sass and moving testimony...this complexly written, yet stylish and readable book locates most powerfully the sublimal brilliance of one artist

Chroma sparks off pieces of Jarman's poetry and prose against fragments that span Ovid, Alberti, Goethe and Wittgenstein...to form a highly personal reflection on colour, a keleidoscopic experience that throws out different facets like a prism in the light

Full of anger, wit, emotion, and knowledge, this collection informs and astounds...Immensely powerful

Jarman reminds us how much there is to be smelled, observed and listened to in the world if we do not walk past it

The context of the writing of this book inevitably turns it from an amusing bricollage to a gesture of extraordinary generosity, a tribute to the continuing need to create and communicate on the very edge of darkness

At once diary and confessional, biography and autobiography and something between the two... This book lets the reader into a world of sadness, loneliness and isolation. At its heart, however, is that unexpected kernel of confidence and self-belief that the author shared with Gwen John.

[An] intimate, immediate form of memoir [combined] with elements of biography and art criticism. The end result is a beguiling, singular work of art - a portrait of two lives, entwined through time and space... Paul's prose...glints and gleams on the page.

Powerfully honest... Her voice is deceptively plain and her insights about her own art, as well as the choices she had to make as a woman, are both illuminating and full of courage... a beautiful book.

It is really Paul who's centre stage, and she is fascinating; I do not feel, at this point, that I could ever tire of her mind, and the unlikely, singular way it turns.

An excellent new book. . . . In a nod to the epistolary novel, she addresses her letters to 'Dear Gwen.' It's a risky conceit, but as the intimacy grows - if not with John, then certainly with us - their clarity on the grammars of gender is compelling, and utterly contemporary. Truthfulness does not run one way, any more than power and vulnerability do.

An utterly revelatory piece of art writing.

It's a work of biography, analysis, reverence, and supplication, and it's filled with buoyant representations of both Paul's and John's work. A charge runs through it, the crackly static electricity of two connected souls touching hands across a century.

Paul's prose is spare and luminous, revealing her painter's eye in attention to colour, texture, and depth... The included paintings, both John's and Paul's, are breathtaking. Fellow artists will relish this lucid look at what is required to "live and paint truthfully."

Remarkable dialectics of loneliness and desire, of love and manipulation, that Paul handles with patient - even disarming - frankness... Alongside the imaginative biography of John, and alongside the dated journal entries, the book is also a foray into Paul's past. The effect is one of a dreamscape, a mesh of past and present, as the borders between the two female artists soften and start to give.

Celia Paul, in both her painting and her writing, is a formidable guardian of her own inner life, as well as a careful chronicler of what it means to traverse a boundary that is barely perceptible, hardly there at all, and yet is the place where truth emerges, hangs in the balance, is not quite distinguishable from a lie. Letters to Gwen John...is a profound act of truth-telling made possible by the thrilling risk of tarrying at that contested border. Paul's writing is a kind of ritual, as well as a pilgrimage, in which she leads us into those hidden places where understanding is beside the point, and invites us simply to dwell with her and whomever else she summons.

A loving and inquiring text, a lyrical correspondence between two women filtered through the inner life of one. It is also an intimate cataloguing of how loneliness and desire transmute to artistic awakening.

There’s no hint of pretentiousness here, so why not revel in Barnes’ wit and arch insight.

In Keeping an Eye Open [Barnes] proves to be a thoughtful observer of art, and a keen student of its history.

Absorbing.

[Barnes] is bold, acerbic and free from phony reverence. He is also genuinely fascinated by visual art in itself and not as a prompt for flights of prosodic fancy. The pieces are replete with unashamed pleasure in looking and teasing out connections.

Fully illustrated in colour throughout, this is a fascinating and insightful look into the world of art from Romanticism to Realism.

The essays are not just novel in form but clear and even elegantly written.

Combining what is clearly a life-long love of art with an admirable depth of knowledge, Barnes brings a novelist’s eye to the gallery wall and, with this, a fresh, accessible approach to the stories being told in each painting.

Thought-provoking, beautifully presented, tender.

Barnes has a wonderful eye for what makes a good picture, and a command of language that again and again allows readers to share what he sees.

Well-informed and deeply admiring, but never didactic.

[It] gave me a new confidence in how to engage with, understand and, more importantly, enjoy wandering around an exhibition.

For those…insecure when viewing art, not always sure how to decode it or emotionally engage with it, this offers a lifeline…Utterly compelling.

A typically elegant ad absorbing book by one of t great contemporary English Writers, and with strong Gallic undertones – a wonderful set of essays about artists, many of them French, covering the period from Romanticism through to modernism.

Opinionated, enthusiastic, witty and beautifully written.

Julian Barnes is best known for his fiction...but he's also an excellent art writer... Peppered with personal insights and select historical detail, each piece is as engaging as the next

Unusually moving.