I feel a particular debt to the many people who read parts of what came to be this book—even long before it looked like it might come together as a book—and whose comments and challenges have helped make it what it is: David Peters Corbett; Whitney Davis; Lily Foster; Martin Golding; Jack Hartnell; Alexander Hutton; Nicky Kozicharow; Polly Mitchell; Bence Nanay; C. Oliver O’Donnell; Stephanie O’Rourke; Gavin Parkinson; Barbara Pezzini; Alistair Rider; Claire White; various anonymous reviewers; the Penn State Refiguring Modernism editors Ellie Goodman and Jonathan Eburne; and copyeditor Annika Fisher. Many others have offered help and advice, answered questions, or contributed in other important ways: Natalie Adamson; Allan Antliff and Kim Croswell; Kate Aspinall; Lynn Ayton; Wendy Baron; Samuel Bibby; Paul Binski; Richard Braude; David Carrier; Sharon and Richard Collier; James Day; Andrew Demetrius; Charlotte DeMille; Samuel Elmer; Katie Faulkner; Bill Feaver; James Fox; Jenni French; Luke Gartlan; Linda Goddard; Martin Golding; Christopher Green; Emily Hannam; Shona Kallestrup; Elsje van Kessel; Sonal Khullar; Perrin Lathrop; Anneke Lennsen; Jules Lubbock; Julian Luxford; Peter Mandler; Alex Marr; Owen Martin; Derek Matravers; John, Victoria, and Lizzie Mitchell; Laura Moretti; Sylvester Okwunodo Ogbechie; Richard Read; Christopher Reed; Margaret A. Rose; Kate Rudy; Vid Simoniti; Catherine Spencer; Andrew Stephenson; Telfer Stokes; Ilse Sturkenboom; Lisa Tickner; Bernard Vere; Fernanda Villarroel; Dawn Waddell; Karolina Watras; Paul Wood; Annie Woudhuysen; my research assistants Frankie Dytor, Meredith Loper, and Kriszta Rosu; and the students in the courses on art theory and on global, canonical, and British modernisms that I’ve taught at Cambridge and St Andrews. I would also like to acknowledge here the scholars I haven’t met whose work on Fry, form, modernisms, questions of the “global,” and many other things has been fundamental to the conception and development of this book.
Research for the book would not have been possible without the assistance of staff at numerous libraries and archives: the British Library; the Courtauld Institute Library; the University College London Library; the Royal Collection Trust; the Gerard Sekoto Foundation; the King’s College Cambridge Archive Centre; the National Art Library, London; the Archive of Art & Design, London; the National Archives, London; the BBC Written Archive Centre, Reading (in particular Jessica Hogg); the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the University of Victoria Library and Archive, Canada; the Royal Academy Library and Archive, London; the Tate Library and Archive, London; the Cambridge University Library; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the National Library of Scotland; and the University of St Andrews Library. Finally, I’d like to acknowledge the various institutions and funding bodies that have supported my work on this book: the Arts and Humanities Research Council; the Courtauld Institute of Art; the Master and Fellows of Peterhouse, Cambridge; and the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews.