Explore the vast range of titles available.

Matisse The Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour: 1909-1954

HILARY Spurling's acclaimed biography of Matisse scooped the Pounds 25,000 Whitbread Prize four years ago.

Hilary Spurling's comment that, during the 1960s, \"the world exploded in light, space and colour\" (A life in writing, 17 April) resonated with me strongly.

Should even biography's claims to offer insights into an artist's life be taken seriously? In separate events, both Caroline Moorhead and Hilary Spurling pointed out that the French attitudes to biography they encountered in their own researches (Moorhead's into diarist Lucie de la Tour du Pin, Spurling's into Matisse) verge on the vituperative. The work, not the life, is what matters, the French insist - although both Moorhead and (especially) Spurling's work came up with new insights that the French had been blind to for decades, such as the fact that Matisse had been innocently caught up in one of the greatest corruption scandals of the Third Republic. Suppose I try to explain it, that I point out that he was retelling the final scene from his novel Pontoon, the one where Evelyn Peterson's ashes are dropped into Lake Wobegon in a bowling ball, and that this coincides with Debbie Detmer's \"day of commitment\" to her partner Brent at one end of the lake and a barbecue on a boat for 24 visiting Danish Lutheran pastors at the other and that everything that could possibly go wrong to every one of those events does so - why, even then I can't hope to convey just why the Main Tent in Charlotte Square was rocking with laughter at 8pm on Saturday night and those who had been there, or at least the glass-half-full people among them, were still smiling at the memory of it all a full half hour afterwards.

Matisse: The Life condenses into one shorter volume Hilary Spurling's two longer biographies of the flamboyant painter, The Unknown Matisse , which described his early life, and Matisse The Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954 . This new book is, she writes, the \"short, sharp, clear portrait I should have liked to write in the first place\".

Hilary Spurling and Xinran discuss their writing about China...

Is it not possible for Hilary Spurling or anyone else to imagine that a great artist might have been incompetent (\"A perfect balance\", May 12)? Matisse was no sculptor.