... a brilliant cultural history ... Dreary hardback, sparkling text. Fox paints a great rainbow of natural history, philosophy, religion, art, optics, myth and the occult. It is a book that takes in Manichean duality and popular detergent adverts ... This intelligent, vividly written book is full of such black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple and green nuggets. I’m going to buy three copies for my mother and aunts for Christmas and hope to brighten their winters.
... the principal delights of the book are the more recherché cul-de-sacs into which Fox delves ... The World According to Colour fairly shimmers with Fox’s eye for arresting facts and anecdotes ... Despite his instinct for freshness and vivacity, Fox is occasionally less deft. His preface opens with the dispatch of a greenbottle fly with a rolled-up magazine, a scene he apparently observed in uncanny detail aged six and which led him to start seeing colour (emphasis his). It is an odd way of establishing his bona fides with the reader, and one of the few occasions where his knack for detail leads him astray ... these are quibbles. The World According to Colour, although in parts perhaps too academic for a general reader, is an enlightening, enjoyable and deeply researched cultural history of colour. It is also funny, particularly when poking fun at puritanical chromophobes like Joseph Duveen and his ilk.
... nubbly detail, gathered from a considerable hinterland...puts flesh on the bones of this ambitious yet concise volume ... For Fox, the difficult topics of colour theory and optics are essential to colour’s allure; he encourages us to think of colour as a process, in which the structure of a material determines which wavelengths of light are absorbed and which are reflected, and so which colour we perceive ... As a compendium of stories and anecdotes, the book is a pleasure to dip into, but it is also a compelling and elegant whole ... The book is a rare achievement—a scholarly reference work that invites reading for pleasure. Fox moves beyond colour as a study of materials with symbolic meanings, and his book, though no panegyric, places colour, and therefore art, at the heart of the human story.
Fox’s fondness for...miscellany leads down some wonderful rabbit holes ... Just like a real rainbow, though, an abundance of colour masks something of a lack of substance. The overarching narratives of each chapter...end up overshadowed by diversions and insufficiently explored, while specific reflections...can be unconvincing ... the art historian asks: 'How many meanings can a colour have before it ceases to have meaning?' It is not an unfair question, given the kaleidoscopic complexity of a phenomenon that we often take for granted. But in a book itself inclined towards the multiplicity of our interpretations of colour, it is perhaps a dangerous one to pose.
This is interesting stuff, but Fox’s real interest is social construction ... Through meticulous research and authoritative writing, Fox helps us to see the world around us in a different light.
