What a pleasure it is to take part in the conversation that is every issue of Katherine Mansfield Studies! For in these pages, as we hear a range of voices, styles of discussion and ways of conveying ideas, it's as though, every time we open up a new volume, we’re at the very best sort of cocktail party.

This third volume on ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Arts’ is full of that kind of fun. The Katherine Mansfield on display here is the one who's at the centre of cultural life – with her love of painting and of music and of the quicksilver interchange of thought and inspiration that comes from looking and looking again and remembering and imagining and turning it all into her art – her ideas the start of a host of others.

Indeed, colour and music are most present in this volume – and line. Mansfield's line. That beautiful fastidiousness of hers turned to every sentence she wrote, drawn right into the centre of her thinking about the way a sentence might fall and sit upon the mind. Angela Smith's opening piece sets the tone exactly as she places the relationship between Mansfield and the Scottish painter J. D. Fergusson along that same line of certitude and exactitude in art, showing us how two exiles fetched up in the swirl of colour and life that was Paris at the beginning of the last century and forged a precise aesthetic from that experience that drew their art together.