The exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists was the closest thing, metaphorically, to a bomb in the National Gallery. It was, as one of its organisers, Clive Bell, later remarked, "the Art-Quake of 1910".

Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin and Van Gogh – all five artists were introduced to the British public in a single exhibition in 1910. Reactions ranged from outrage to disbelief to a sense of ecstatic liberation, as visitors to the Grafton Galleries found themselves face to face with art that seemed to mock five hundred years of tradition. British painters were still working in the shadow of the Old Masters, but here were Continental artists reaching for the new light of Modernism.

Vividly evoking the personalities of Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury Group members who staged the exhibition, as well as the artists themselves, David Boyd Haycock captures not just a pivotal moment in British art but a whole society on the brink of cataclysmic upheaval.

'In or about December 1910, human character changed' VIRGINIA WOOLF