This is not an easy book to read and therefore difficult to review. The topic is interesting and informative and Martin Gayford has written a thoroughly commendable book with a bibliography, endnotes and an index. The latter is invaluable.

I guess the topic is always overshadowed by the big three of the title and the reader is possibly expecting more about them. To his credit Martin Gayford sticks to his guns and puts them in context.

The writer, perhaps to his credit, uses a wide variety of sentence types which makes reading easier. But it is his longer ones with the use of em-dashes (long ones) which are challenging. They occasionally have one reading a sentence several times to get the meaning. An example:

p.6 Nonetheless, that such a record could be set at all makes a point: painting done in London in the decades after the Second World War has come to seem hugely more significant - internationally - than it did, for the most part, when it was being created.

The reader is called on to observe what happened - he or she can only truly see what happened in this period by looking at the works of these painters. Perhaps Gayford's book is required reading before looking again.