It was my longtime interest in social realism and heroic realism in Germany and Soviet Russia between the wars that brought me to this book, and although its focus was much more on the history than the painting, sculpture and architecture, it didn’t wholly disappoint. There was much of interest in its pages and it kept me reading, and in that I have positive feelings towards it. One misgiving I have, however, is that although it never says it directly, it gives the impression that Nazis in Germany, and the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, represented a time, unlike other periods in history, when politics got involved in art. One might look back to medieval paintings when kings were presented with authority, or when merchants paid handsomely to be placed in religious art works. One might also look the case of abstract expressionism after the second world war, especially to Jackson Pollock, Rockefeller, and the CIA. The above , however, is such a small misgiving and shouldn't put anyone off reading it.