AustLit

'When I told a cultivated London friend that we were planning to go to Berlin in the autumn, he was delighted, told me the Gemäldegalerie was a remarkable collection with hardly anyone there and that he and his wife go as willingly to Berlin as they once went to Paris. Most artists look to Berlin as the place they need to know. Nothing and nobody beats the beauty and splendour of Paris, nor its food, but Berlin’s diversity and accessibility make it a no-frills, no-fuss pleasure. From Bitburger Lager to Augustiner, the beer lives up to its reputation. We made a logistical mistake and took the train from Amsterdam. I wanted to look at the landscape of the northern tier of Europe. You don’t see much of interest and it’s dark by four o’clock.'  (Introduction)

'Barry Hill’s collection of essays from the last four decades is commanding and impressive. Few could match his range of subjects: from Tagore to John Berger, Lucian Freud to Christina Stead – all, for the most part, carried off with aplomb. He catches the ‘raw’ edge of Freud’s studio – ‘worksite’ as Hill calls it – ‘the sea of bare boards that rise into so many paintings, the tatty chair, the piles of used rags on the floor and up the walls, the soiled flotsam of a painter’s toil, tossed aside like offal in an abattoir’. He characterises so well ‘the ambiguous aura of melancholy’ in Freud’s figures, with their paradoxical mixture of ‘implacable vigour’ and ‘their listlessness’, the latter the product of the exhaustion of the models compelled to pose for extended periods.' (Introduction)