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“... Few authors​ of such historical importance have so high a proportion of their writings forgotten or neglected as Walter Pater. I used to think his essays on ancient sculpture the least studied portion of his work, but a glance at the bibliographies to Volumes III and IV of the new Collected Works suggests other candidates. Their editors have found little to cite on Pater’s short fiction, and there seems to be no secondary literature to speak of on his unfinished experimental novel Gaston de Latour ...”

“... Elizabeth Prettejohn’s​ book opens with a discussion of The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown, made in 1852-55 and now in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The painting shows a couple leaving England for Australia on a crowded boat. It is insistent in its sharp focus, and brilliant, even strident, in its modern palette: the purple and green of cabbages hanging from the ship’s railing, the bright rose of a windswept silk bonnet ribbon cutting across the centre of the picture, and the mauve fingers of an otherwise concealed infant ...”

“... Why does one have these reactions: why is it not possible to be indifferent? Tim Barringer and Elizabeth Prettejohn have written an introduction to the latest of the Mellon Centre Studies in British Art, Frederic Leighton, which worries at the subject. The centenary exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1996 was greeted with critical abuse: ‘flamboyant ...”

“... have ‘been chopped up’. The oddness and severe limits of this artistic education, which Elizabeth Prettejohn emphasises in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of Burne-Jones’s work at Tate Britain (until 24 February), is even more striking when you consider that Rossetti, despite having spent several years first at Sass’s Drawing ...”