Militants, Artists, PoetsPaperback, 23 December 2019

It's difficult to get away from Paris when writing about art, and several reviews in this collection inevitably refer to the city, though not only for art but also for the cafés, cabarets and other locations where artists and writers met to socialise. Paris wasn't the only place where such activity happened, so London, Berlin, New York, and several other cities also come into view. As a background to what went on artistically in Paris there is a review of a book dealing with the "vice, crime and poverty" which shows that it was all there while the painters and poets and their patrons carried on their conversation. This isn't to single out Paris for its perversities, and the review of writing from nineteenth century Prague shows that prostitution and its perils thrived there. As before, I've taken the liberty of including a handful of short prose pieces. They're not stories, in the strict sense of the word, and perhaps "sketches" best describes them?