I have been reading Lily Le Brun’s Looking to Sea with the utmost pleasure: it’s so calm, so lucid, so well informed and beautifully well written. I have been trying to figure out its influences: not academic art history, because it is so much better written than most current art history, not trying to show off its learning, but actually a model of cultural studies – demonstrating how the way that particular, carefully selected and sometimes unexpected artists in the twentieth century, including Bridget Riley and Hamish Fulton, have responded to the sea can illuminate so much about the ways in which we view and respond to the environment more generally.