This work is another of Douglas Barrett's important contributions to the study of South Indian art. Dealing with temple construction and stone sculpture created during the period ca. A.D. 866–1014, this book appears to have been produced as a companion volume to the author's Early Cōla Bronzes (Bombay, 1965). However, the broader scope of Early Cōla Architecture and Sculpture provides an even greater wealth of opinion and information which supplies opportunities for endless conjecture and debate.

Kuga Katsunan, regarded by his contemporaries as one of the three leading publicists of the eighteen nineties, was something of a hero to many young intellectuals who were attracted by his synthesis of liberalism and nationalism in the concept known as kokumin. This effort to construct a theoretical justification for fusing the two predominant forces of modern Japan in a union in which the individual and the state would be balanced in a condition of interdependence was Katsunan's contribution to Japan's early liberal tradition. Rejecting for himself the label “liberal” in its orthodox sense of advocacy of doctrinaire individualism, Kuga was no more willing to regard himself as a “nationalist” unless that term were so defined as to include a positive affirmation of the value of the individual. He sought to develop instead a theory within which liberalism and nationalism could coexist in almost perfect balance.

Until recently, modern Chinese art attracted little scholarly attention, either in China or in the West. Western art historians might occasionally glance at the more traditional kinds of painting in the twentieth century, but their serious publications were on the great periods of Chinese art, Ming or before. The contemporary China-watchers—social scientists and modern period historians—trained their gaze on the harder stuff of politics and economics, ideology and organization. In the United States and the West in general, art seemed to slip through the crack between ACLS- and SSRC-funded research projects. In China, anything on the twentieth century, even art, was too sensitive politically for safe handling. The result was that throughout the Maoist years modern Chinese art could occasionally pique the interest of collectors or dealers outside China or draw carefully calculated praise from critics and publicists within, but it was not a promising area for critical scholarship. Michael Sullivan's pioneering survey, Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century, London and Berkeley, 1959—strong on developments in the later Guomindang period when he was in China, but understandably rather out of touch with the main currents in the People's Republic—remained for almost thirty years the sole monument in a neglected field.