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A few weeks ago I went along to a lecture on the Welsh artist, poet and soldier David Jones. Kenneth Clark considered him ‘the most gifted of all the young British painters’. The talk, by a recent art-history graduate with a first-class degree from a reputable university, began at a cracking pace. It was only when he started to show slides to illustrate his talk that I began to feel very hot and sweaty. The paintings were not by Jones but his near-contemporary Stanley Spencer. Jones did share with Spencer the experience of serving with the British Army during the first world war. And both were stimulated by this immersion
