Besides her career as a novelist, Anita Brookner is a respected art scholar and her book on Jacques- Louis David is a valuable one. It is possible that this work is partially a spin-off from it, since it takes the theme of French Romanticism in the immediately succeeding generation, that of Delacroix and Ingres, the contrasting poles of painting. From there she moves on to the study of personalities who embodied Romanticism in it's successive phases: Baron Gros, the Goncourt Brothers, Baudelaire, Zola, Huysmans. Some of the choices seem rather arbitrary and the book is intermittently stimulating, but somehow rather less than the sum of it's parts.