Presenting a mesmerizing picture both of British intellectual life in the 1940's and ‘50's and the mental, emotional, and cultural formation of a man destined to transform many aspects of that world over the next 40 years, Episodes is both a gripping story and a vividly analytic tour de force. From early childhood in Cardiff and the valleys of South Wales to school and adolescence in Manchester and more, the book brilliantly recaptures the formation of the young man who finally decides not to write novels but to become a scholar. First recounting, in coruscating detail, life and work with John Pope-Hennessy at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and then narrating the debate and final acceptance of an invitation from the Warburg Institute at London University, Episodes shows the formation of the extraordinarily learned and original mature scholar. A personal testimony, a spellbinding series of vignettes and characterizations of famous and infamous contemporaries, and a contribution to the cultural history of the mid-20th century, this is an essential and unforgettable book. Cultural historians will welcome this posthumous memoir by an authoritative, independent-minded art critic and scholar, esteemed within his professional circles. --Times, London Readers will know that they are in the presence of a searching and highly particular mind... Baxandall observes people sharply and is even harder on himself. His rare humor is as dry as blotting sand. Sly teasing of John Pope Hennessy, his undentable boss at the V&A, is fun to read, though Baxandall admits it bounced off. The high points are the vivid evocation of his mentors, above all the literary critic F.R.Leavis who taught him as an undergraduate at Cambridge. Baxandall saw art the way that Leavis taught him to read book, less for pleasure than as 'judgments of life'. -- RA Magazine One of Europe's most celebrated historians, Carlo Ginzburg is best known for his ground-breaking microhistory The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, which examined the beliefs of an Italian heretic. Other works include The Night Battles, on European witch persecutions, and The Judge and the Historian. He has been instrumental in persuading the Vatican to open the Inquisition Archives to researchers. Michael Baxandall was probably the most influential art historian of his generation. In books including Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, Patterns of Intention and Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (with Svetlana Alpers) he expanded the discipline's range of topics, approaches, and ways of writing. A professor at London's Warburg Institute and the University of California at Berkeley, he was also a member of the British Academy, and was awarded the Mitchell Prize, and prizes by the University of Hamburg, and the MacArthur Foundation. He died in 2008. Summer evenings were long but one still had to go to bed early, and at my school lights were put out at half past seven. For one summer term at that school, perhaps 1945, I and another trust-worthy senior boy, Donovan (say), had been moved to a dormitory of much younger boys, of whom we were meant to be in charge. The infants soon slept, with whimpers and snorts, and the room was stuffy. One lacked the general after-lights sociability of the normal dormitory of contemporaries, and while relations between Donovan and myself had at one time been warm they had recently become cool. So it was my habit to go down to the lavatories and read for a time. That night I left Donovan noisily sucking on an Oxo cube and went down with a book called, I will insist, The Broad highway. But before going to the squalid shelter of one of the stalls to read it, I had a look out of the window of the murky shower-room beyond. This window was long and low and partly open, and gave on to what had once been a stable-yard. It was a bright June evening, calm and quietly humming, an evening of the kind that suggests wasting it will forfeit something forever. Living was out there and it seemed unbearable and stupid to be inside in this dark. On an impulse I climbed out through the low window into the yard - easy enough even with dressing-gown and The Broad Highway - and then went quickly to ground in a shrubbery that bordered a little-used back drive. Orders are despatched from our UK warehouse next working day.