The cheapest important book I own.

Printed cheap, sized like a pamphlet, bold black type on the cover, and worth more to me than every art monograph on the shelf above it. My copy cost two pounds in a charity shop in Hebden Bridge and carries somebody else's pencil in the margins — arguing.

The move that made it matter: three of the seven essays are pictures only. No text whatsoever. He builds his case in words, then hands you the images and refuses to tell you what to make of them, having spent the previous chapter teaching you how to look. I've never seen another critic take that risk and it works! You catch yourself doing the reading unaided and realise the lesson took.

The nude chapter is the famous one and deserves to be. Men act, women appear; the woman inside the painting watching herself being watched. It has been repeated so often that people assume they've absorbed it by osmosis, and then they read the actual pages and find it sharper and stranger than the summary they were carrying.

Where I'd push back: the oil painting chapter overreaches. Reducing four centuries of a medium to a demonstration of property relations is a fine corrective and a poor total account, and I suspect he knew that, and did it anyway because the corrective was what the moment needed.

Nine, and I'd give a copy to anyone who tells me they don't understand art.