Lamb takes preternatural offence when a Tracey Emin-esque bed sculpture is installed outside his college lodgings, and departs to London in a sulk for a new museum gig.

However, I don’t want to be too damning… for the most part I was engaged and intrigued to see where the story went next; and Cahill does well at creating a few plot twists and tying up of lose ends towards the book’s conclusion. What is more, public opinion in pre-revolution France would have cast aspersions on such aristocratic fripperies. Finally, in a triumph of trompe l'oeil five unfortunate souls - symbolising avarice, lust, heresy, arrogance and the Devil - tumble headlong out of the painting. Beneath the former, sit two women one with serpents in her hand and hair and the other clutches some golden coins.The thing is that one doesn’t really read Amis for the plot, but the language; it’s kind of the other way round with this novel.

As a reader I was hoping that Don would somehow redeem himself but once he indulges in his passion for Ben, a young artist, you know all will not end well. James Cahill's Tiepolo Blue tells the tale of a fusty ferociously fusty art historian whose academic career is upended by a ferociously unbeautiful sculpture.He earned a degree in Classics and English at Magdalen College, Oxford, followed by a master's degree in Contemporary Art from the Courtauld Institute. Don Lamb, an art historian at Peterhouse who is writing a monograph about skies in the works of rococo master Tiepolo, is particularly irked. His move to London yields even more of these scandals, alongside a slow-burning realisation ab Don caught the eye of Valentine Black, two decades his senior, on his first day as an undergraduate. Occasionally, I wondered if Ben was rendered as sufficiently charismatic to justify Don’s attentions and ardour.

I think it’s vital that contemporary art is always in some sense moving forward or redefining the debate or challenging the terms of the argument, but back then it was almost more than that; there was this very special social world and this feeling among those artists coming out of Goldsmiths [art school] in the early 1990s that anything was possible. Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them. It is also in the subtlety of expression and gesture as well as in trompe l'oeil virtuosity that Tiepolo shows his hand. The sympathetic descriptions of the people he meets in his new role as a gallery director in London seem always to redeem them. It is not a masterpiece by any means, but it is an important painting, for it shows that Tiepolo did not, as it were, spring fully armed from the thigh of Zeus like Athena.

He tries not to look at it, but his rooms face out onto the Court; even through closed curtains he can see its lights mocking him. I don’t know or particularly care about art, however this book read like a piece of artwork in itself, and I couldn’t have wanted more than the beautiful tragic ending we were given. heads up beforehand that the art criticism is cool and the setting and place is done well, and that other people seem to like this one more than i do. The novel doesn’t stay there, though: like all such closed spaces, the people within them are prone to endless backbiting, gossip, and power games – indeed, such institutions demand them – and after one controversy, Professor Lamb leaves, and instead becomes the Director of a small but well-respected art museum in Dulwich. The embodiment of the verve and unpredictability of this cityscape is artist Ben, a mercurial enfant terrible who breezily challenges Don’s dusty wisdoms, shows him the delights of Soho, takes him to openings of provocative and punky exhibitions.

Charles did not object, finding Mengs's brand of cold classicism more befitting the image of a strong Catholic King. A ship awaits them at the right centre of the frame, leaving one in little doubt as to how the story must end. At its best, academic writing is brilliant and sparkling and inspiring, but at its worst it can turn people away from the very ideas that it’s trying to expound.The upshot is high drama tempered by a light-hearted Rococo charm and grace of form for which Tiepolo is famous.