In the February edition of New Criterion, our cultured doctor has penned a lengthy essay on his visits to two strikingly different art collections in Paris.

The Marquis de Custine, in his great book Russia in 1839, remarks, in connection with the military parades of which Tsar Nicholas I was inordinately fond, that tyrannies command immense efforts to bring forth trifles. I confess that this remark was often uppermost in my mind as I toured the Pinault Collection in the restored Bourse de Commerce in Paris: not, of course, that billionaires such as M. Pinault can properly be called tyrants.