Robert Hughes, art critic of Time magazine and twice winner of the American College Art Association's F.J. Mather Award for distinguished criticism, is author of The Shock of the New, and of Heaven and Hell in Western Art, both written before the present work. He is also author of the acclaimed Nothing if Not Critical, "criticism at its most intelligent and impressive, trenchant, lucid, elegantly written..."in the words of William Boyd; a work on Frank Auerbach; Barcelona, and Culture of Complaint, essays on the fraying of America, described in the Observer as "the most bracing of critical broadsides against new anti-intellectual tyrannies".