This book is conceived as a sequel or successor to an earlier collection, On Art and War and Terror, not merely in the scansion of the title, but in its nature and purpose and mode of address. It seeks to engage important ethical and political questions in the modern world through the medium of works of the imagination – works of art – painting and writing, photography and film. At the same time it tries to fathom what artists of various stripes are up to, in order to come to some assessment of their endeavours, and the consequences of their actions. To do that – not an easy task – it pays close attention to what the artists themselves have to say. In other words, it takes painters and others seriously as thinkers – philosophers, even – not to mention public intellectuals. It also treats them as moral agents. More particularly, it treats the art, and the artist, as a witness of our current discontents; indeed, the essential moral witness of the terrible twentieth century, as Winston Churchill called it, and the torturous twenty-first.

It may be objected that this is to place excessive faith in a broken reed, or at any rate an unthinking one.