'...it was a pleasure to discover Lara Marlowe’s book of essays and revel in their content.The commentaries are attentive, intelligent and informed, and many thoughts and ideas arose from my reading of it. The highest praise I can offer the author is to say that she is definitely on my list for the perfect dinner party.'

A fine collection. Writing about art should not be left to art critics. Lara Marlowe is a reporter and is best known for her bold, war-zone reporting from the last twenty years. But writing news means producing that story every day by the five o'clock deadline - or whenever that deadline is. It requires finding that revelatory anecdote that is the core of each story. It demands both vividness and brevity of writing. Painted with Words, a collection of pieces on painters and writers from various periods, discusses art as it is not usually done. I was barely finished with the first chapter that I wanted to get out and go see a Picasso. None of the pompous language of exhibition catalogues and art reviews: this marries biographical detail, nuggets about the artists' lives, and references to their better and less well-known works. Perhaps it is also that Marlowe is used to proximity with the great and the good, having interviewed so many of them, from film stars to politicians and including some of the artists written up in this book. She is more prepared to see Bonnard, or Raphael, or Victor Hugo as a human being, not just some monumental figure. Her stories are accordingly variegated, filled with their protagonists' failings as well as their successes, literal on the many accidents of their careers. Painted with Words contains collections of essays on modern painters, a few of the old masters, a selection of nineteenth and twentieth-century French writers, and a group of modern Irish artists and poets. The chapters focus to differing degrees on biography and on artistic contribution. But I consider myself reasonably well read, and every one of the pieces taught me something on its protagonist's artistic or intellectual legacy. Inevitably the selection reflects Marlowe's career: she lived in France for a while, and she writes for the Irish Times. Yet, after a few chapters, a pattern emerges, like stepping back from an impressionist painting after having had one's nose to it. One is struck by the elusiveness of artistic success, or even conviction, as with De Chirico. The complete absence of a set artistic temperament emerges, as when comparing Magritte to Gauguin, or Sartre to Robbe-Grillet. The point that collectors matter sometimes as much as artists is strikingly made with the Vollard story. And one pauses both at the durability of French culture and the creativity of that small, Irish nation. One gets used to these miniature portraits, and one begins anticipating each new morsel with relish. This appeals both to the complete amateur and to the already enlightened.