Paul Johnson
For London this has been a year of outstanding exhibitions: Venetian painting at the Royal Academy, which also had a charming show on the European vision of the Orient; English Romanesque at the Hayward and English Rococo at the Victoria and Albert, which is now showing a superb collection of Lake District paint- ings; the great Dutch genre exhibition at the Royal Academy; and, at the Tate, the Pre-Raphaelites and now George Stubbs. Each of these exhibitions produced a cata- logue combining excellent scholarship with fine colour reproductions. They are easily the best buys in the art-book market at present, for the large print-run which a successful exhibition makes possible keeps the price well down. Of all these admirable catalogues, I must award the prize to the Pre-Raphaelites (Tate Gallery), though the sumptuous Stubbs catalogue runs it close for both visual delight and scholarship. Of the books I have been sent, the one which gave me the greatest pleasure was Gavin Stamp's The Changing Metropolis: Earliest Photographs of London 1839-1879. I was fascinated to see that the police were taking photos of demonstrations, for re- cord purposes, as early as 1848 — which give the lie to the Left's current claim that Police photos of mobs, pickets and so forth are a sinister Thatcherite innovation.
I have read no really bad books during the year. But I was disappointed by Peter Collier and David Horowitz's much boosted The Kennedys: an American Dream, which had too little to say about the Kennedy family's capture and man- ipulation of the East Coast media. I also disliked Graham Greene's Getting to Know the General which I found self-indulgent, confused and rather childish in its political bias.
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