FOR OVER THIRTY-FIVE years the London office of Yale University Press has been the leading publisher of art history in the English language. When we heard of a new book planned by a leading scholar in the field we expected to learn that Yale had pledged to publish it. Surely it owes a considerable debt to the work of the editors whose achievement this has in large part been in the last two decades: Sally Salvesen and Gillian Malpass. It was therefore a shock for academics and curators, the authors of Yale books and their readers, in the United States and beyond, to discover that Salvesen and Malpass have been made redundant.

Accident and design have joined together in creating one of the most fascinating of recent exhibitions of the works of J.M.W. Turner, one that reveals a whole new aspect of his vision. The repeated demands of large, prestigious Turner exhibitions, combined with the relatively restricted space of the Hôtel de Caumont, Aix-en-Provence, the new exhibition centre that opened last year, has led to Ian Warrell producing a fascinating exhibition, Turner et la Couleur (to 18th September), covering all Turner’s career but with a relatively new selection of works and an important new group of sketches.

HUGH HONOUR was born in Eastbourne on 26th September 1927 and was brought up in Sussex. His father, Herbert Percy Honour, together with his uncle George, ran the silverplating firm of George Gates Honour & Sons (successor, in 1900, to Eastborn and Honour of Hatton Garden, a partnership established around 1880). In his later years Hugh sometimes speculated on the influence this may have had on his interest in the decorative arts and on the way objects are made. It may have influenced him in other respects, notably a determined self-reliance. The business was precarious. ‘My father made a great many duck presses, for which, as you can imagine, there was little demand after the war’. He filed for bankruptcy in 1929. Hugh’s brother, his only sibling, eleven years his senior, was itching to modernise the business, but as soon as he took control it went under. It was finally wound up in 1936. The brother then moved to ‘the wrong part of Portugal’ and out of Hugh’s life.