Moyle's superb biography rigorously tackles the myths surrounding Turner's life and presents a vivid portrait of a man whose ideas and behaviour were rooted in the 18th century - and whose work is too often taken out of context

An exemplary work . . . Moyle is especially good at delineating Turner's artistic methods and her enthralling account is filled with an impressive understanding of his unique talent

A thorough, balanced and wonderfully fluent account. Franny Moyle [is] one of the best in the long line of [Turner's] biographers

Fresh and lively . . . Turner's life is given a vivid colour and depth as Moyle deftly interweaves his professional career with his private life

Elegant and thorough . . . This is a biography that leaves you with a fresh impression of both Turner and his time. It frees its subjects from myth, and imbues them with the quality of wonder

Moyle is good on Turner's momentous times, interweaving history, the history of art and the public's attitude toward art.

Franny Moyle tells a compelling story of a self-taught prodigy... A restless painter who always sought new forms of expression in watercolour and oils. Moyle is an unpretentious art historian, and she has written an inviting and easily digested biography of the best of British painters

Of the two recent books on Turner, Moyle's is the more satisfying, not least because it allows for the intimacy of reading. Less is more when it comes to biography - and Moyle gives Turner's restless life a perspective and a frame

Moyle's art-historical perceptions make this detailed and beautifully balanced biography a compelling read... Turner emerges from it larger... revealed as a man of his moment

The words on the page offer views every bit as captivating as Turner's ageless panoramas

A colourful narrative describing the travails and triumphs of an equally colourful cast.

With evocative imagery Roe sketches out the intensely visual spectacle on which Montmartre's artistic community was able to draw

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.

A compelling and thoroughly absorbing amalgam of history, autobiography, travelogue and philosophical ruminations on the nature of creativity and many other things besides

De Waal…sees the world in a shard of white porcelain, thoughtfully and poetically tracing its invention and material production from imperial China through medieval Europe, and Cherokee creeks to the satanic factories of Nazi Germany. Global cultural history, structural and individual: this should be a humanising core text on the now sadly abandoned liberal arts curriculum.

An intimate and lyrical writer with a sophisticated grasp of cultural history… De Waal’s prose thrives on exchanges of curiousity… The White Road feels like a long book, and a long book may sometimes have qualities peculiar to its size. It may be by turns capricious, slow-drifting, and affected. It may yet enlarge your world.

A stylishly written account with a surprisingly spiritual dimension. Engrossing.

De Waal’s charm lies in his ability to undertake obsessive research, to pile up and accrue, to involve the reader in almost frantic travelling, note-taking and reading. There’s no doubting that The White Road is a mighty achievement.

His enthusiasm is infectious... This is not just about one ancient industry – somehow, superbly, it's about industry itself

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.