Barbara Hepworth A Life of Forms, by Sally Festing (Penguin, £9.99)

I have already reviewed this biography in hardback, and I see no special reason to revise my first time impressions. It is sympathetic, wide ranging (though unscholarly) in its research, and generally well balanced, though Hepworth was a notoriously difficult woman and a hard person to come to terms with. As a sculptor, she appears to be just coming out of the trough into which her reputation subsided about twenty" years ago, and she is no longer overshadowed by Henry Moore whom she seems to have viewed as her main rival. The book's faults are a certain critical naivete and an occasional tendency to sink into amateur psychologising.