Delacroix, Manet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin. Seurat, Degas, Matisse and thousands of other French artists, many penniless then and still unknown, had studios in Paris. Foreigners such as Sargent, Whistler, Chagall and Miró felt they had no choice but to rush there. From the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, almost all artists looked to Paris as their mecca. In this unusual and carefully illustrated book, John Milner, head of the Department of Fine Art at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in England, describes how French tradition and government policy, along with Parisian commerce and practical necessity, combined to create a kind of factory of art in Paris in the 19th century...

You can hear the moments of boredom tick away whenever you tell Americans that no other industrialized democracy has the same dispiriting problems as the United States--not the crime, not the guns, not the homeless, not the unschooled, not the poor, not the racism, not the ugliness. Listeners may mimic interest for a short while, then their glances roll up and away. They may not doubt me but, content in smugness, they do not care. After 21 years as a foreign correspondent, I returned home late last year to a country bristling with astonishing problems, most left untended. Yet many Americans persist in believing that their country has a divine mission on Earth, a model for all others. Ignorance about the rest of the world seems total. Our son set off for high school the other day in a T-shirt emblazoned with a bust of Lenin. I jokingly warned him to be careful. “Don’t worry,” he said, cynically not jovially, “no one at school knows who he is.” Few if any peoples can boast as much democracy and energy as Americans. These are wondrous gifts that foreigners can hardly fathom. Yet I often wonder now to what purposes they are put...

Economic blows and urban blight savaged the great city, a fortress of Victorian grandeur, but now things are looking up...

To be an independent artist in the USSR until recently was to live a secret, underground existence. Things are very different these days...