Of another 19th-century commentator, the Reverend Stopford Brooke, she is dismissive. I doubt however whether she is a poetess, for she doesn't like poetry in her predecessors. Long experience of Turner (the man as well as his art) led Ruskin to find mighty spiritual themes in the Liber. Gillian Forrester's catalogue gives us the most detailed account of Turner's enigmatic print-making project.

Her writing immediately becomes the standard work on a subject that, all are agreed, was close to Turner's imaginative heart Forrester is comprehensive, precise and apodictic. The Liber Studiorum usually disturbs the people who attend to its messages. They certainly confirm that Turner had a grander mind than Constable's. But, as the National Gallery's Cornfield exhibition demonstrates, Constable's painting has always been loved in simple ways, and it consoles the lonely. They were intended to demonstrate the artist's mastery over all kinds of landscape painting. Now the Tate has opened a new Turner exhibition, devoted to his Liber Studiorum. This was Turner's "drawing book", 71 mezzotints (out of a projected 100) issued between 1807 and 1819.

THE GREAT romantics of English painting continue to haunt us. Last week I wrote about the love for Constable that leads people to treasure reproductions of the Cornfield. Travolta is back, bigger, wiser and as assured as a genie, no matter that he still looks like a sweet kid whose dream has come home.! 'Get Shorty' (15) is released on 15 March; 'Broken Arrow' (15) is released on 12 April.. If only because he has always seemed to carry his own intellectual or spiritual mirror with him, this is something to look forward to.

You can see the look of horror and curiosity on Travolta's face. And then, later this year, for $20m, he takes on a special challenge. ($20m? Why not, he's playing two guys?) He goes to Paris for Roman Polanski to do a version of Dostoevsky - The Double - about a cool dude who wakes up one day to find the world contains his mirror image. He holds the camera like few others alive today, and he has a confidence now that begins to offer a chance of growing up. At 42, it's about time.His projects are lined up years in advance. In Phenomenon, for instance, likely to open in America for Christmas, he plays a man possessed of extraordinary intelligence. (The picture includes a nuclear bang, the long-term effects of which are dismissed with chilling slickness in the rush to make a buck.) And Travolta stands there, grinning, tossing off his lovely, sinister gestures or posing like Napoleon so that you forget the stupid story.

Broken Arrow is being compared to Speed, but it's not as good because Woo has so little real interest in human beings - as opposed to cuts, angles and explosions. Don't be surprised if you see Americans doing this all the time. It's a 10-year- old's idea of evil, in a mastermind who is as smart and attractive as an action figure who talks trash. But Travolta's evil genius has plans: he means to hijack the Stealth's two nuclear weapons and sell them back to the US government.Travolta doesn't have evil in him - but he has found a terrific gesture, brushing the underside of his chin with the backs of his fingers. Directed by John Woo, it has Travolta and Christian Slater as co-pilots of a Stealth bomber They set off for an exercise over the Utah desert.