When Stuart Morgan died at age 54 in 2002, London's Guardian newspaper wrote, "Stuart Morgan became known during the 1980s in Europe and the United States as the most significant British writer on contemporary art. When he started writing in the 1970s, he knew that, in a country not receptive to contemporary art, the mediating role of criticism needed defending, and he brought to it refinement and audacity. His cadences moved through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Max Miller, Nathanael West and his beloved William Empson, often in the same essay. The liveliness he brought to his work endeared him to students and those artists whose inner lives he fathomed." This new collection of Morgan's sometimes-diaristic and always illuminating writings and exceptionally well-edited interviews covers artists ranging from Francis Bacon to Joseph Beuys, Pina Bausch, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, Matthew Barney and Tracey Emin.