These books are forcible reminders that artists know best about art and can write best about it. Both authors taught at the Slade, are Royal Academicians – Tess Jaray elected this summer, Jeffery Camp in 1984 – and demonstrate how much that institution still has to offer.

Jaray is an abstract painter of precise pattern and solid colour, and the designer of the pavement of Centenary Square, Birmingham, and the floor of Victoria Station, among other public commissions. Her book contains thirty-eight essays, some less than a page in length, each crafted as meticulously as