Well-researched. a fascinating look at postwar London artists, filled with entertaining figures.--Kirkus Reviews If you are interested in modern British art, the book is unputdownable. If you are not, read it. You soon will be.--Financial Times Martin Gayford has been talking with artists for 30 years. He doesn't just nip into the studio with a notepad: he has a gift for sustaining conversations that unfold across decades. Other studies have debated the effects of state art funding and cold war cultural politics; this one brings us the expression of Leon Kossoff as he moves through heaven and hell with each brushstroke, Bridget Riley introducing the whisker of white that makes a black painting live, Gillian Ayres and Howard Hodgkin talking hour after hour in the car down to Bath School of Art.

--The Guardian [A] superb survey of British painting from 1945 to 1970, London. Gayford recounts the artists' lives and their travails with sympathy and understanding. [a] wonderfully accomplished book, full of anecdotes and aperçus.--The Times (London) Superb. Gayford deploys Bacon's voice to brilliant effect, and you hang on to every word. This is a book about community and influence; about the connections, sometimes powerfully strong and sometimes only thread-like, between artists of dizzying talent and wildly varying impulses.--Observer Review A masterpiece, a major work of modern art history. As [Martin Gayford] traces London's art scene from the 1940s to the 1970s, the configuration of friends and rivals he presents is as lucid as a family tree.

filled with vivid anecdotes that might have otherwise disappeared into the Soho air. --The Wall Street Journal Through interviews, anecdotes, and ample illustrations, Gayford brings to life London's art world. By focusing on the art, Gayford convinces readers that postwar-London artists were right: painting really can do marvelous things.--Booklist A radical reassessment of the School of London canon. Engaging and erudite. Gayford offers a rethinking of his complex subject that is pluralistic and inclusive, nuanced in its examination of individual artists, and precisely attuned, from beginning to end, to today's critical issues.--Art in America Absorbing and lavishly illustrated. encompasses art history and biography.

But the main subject is painting itself, confounding and inspiring in 'its moral value and its sheer difficulty.--The New Yorker "There's a wonderful sense of intimacy and an abundance of critical insights in Martin Gayford's vivid portrait of Britain's post-World War II modernist painters. Well-documented and elegantly written.Gayford covers terrain from the historical to the biographical, from the sociological to the psychological, from the stylistic to the technical."--ARTnews.