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Powerful use of pictures.

I haven't actually started this. I'm starting tomorrow as a group read with some friends. p3 is the actual first page of actual book. The Forward.

The conclusion to the main book - there are two appendices to come - is an astonishing piece of writing. You can see how it influenced Oscar Wilde and others. You can see why the book mildly freaked out the Victorians too: "To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."

"All art aspires to the condition of music." I always thought I knew what that phrase meant. Now, I'm not so sure. Pater has that Victorian habit of writing lovely, meandering, multi-clausal sentences that require careful attention so that one does not lose ones way when following a line of argument or thought.

A brilliant chapter on Leonardo let down slightly by the fact that some of his examples are not now considered to be by Leonardo. But his section of the Mona Lisa is a doozy.

I've reached Pater on Michelangelo's poetry, which isn't the first thing you think of when you hear Michelangelo's name: "People have often spoken of these poems as if they were a mere cry of distress, a lover's complaint over the obduracy of Vittoria Colonna."

I'm enjoying Trotsky's snarky pen portraits of leading Mensheviks and Narodniks.