EUROPEAN CERAMICS

It's difficult to ignore a basic text on ceramics authored by a Victoria and Albert Museum curator or any scholar with subject-specific content and a reasonable way of communicating. And Hildyard does a very credible job, by way of occasionally soporific prose, of examining the 500 years of pottery development from 1500 to the present. The best part is when he pulls out the most intriguing facts and figures into two or three well-illustrated sidebars. A survey that does justice to the data, but could have been formatted with more visuals and less text.