"Everybody always elevates some other era over his or her own, but as the pages roll by and the names drop, you'd be hard-pressed not to feel that the period Field writes about was a richer time than ours. Or perhaps it's just that art had more of a claim to centrality than it does now — art's importance derives from its moral authority, and we increasingly live in a world where morality is irrelevant and authority comes only from armaments."