Status Updates From The Arts

I feel as if I'm reading 2 books so lightly layered over each other that I'm only aware of one of the histories when van Loon breaks into an aside about the state of the world in 1937 when "The Arts" was written. This shape-shifting creates little bursts of enlivened interest; a unique experience.

van Loon is a wonderfully entertaining, wry and good-natured critic of his own time (1937) in contrast to the history he is creating of the human arts. I smile as I read!