Thumbing through a very old Penguin New Writing I flipped to the Colour Plates and found this marvellous painting by Graham Sutherland. Sutherland's art is a particular passion of mine because it possesses a complex simplicity. By which I mean it looks like it should be simple to paint, but once you get into it there are so many left-turns he makes decision-wise that the whole thing becomes intensely idiosyncratic. Just try to paint a Graham Sutherland and you'll see. It's hard. He's that good.