Philip Marchand:
For his book [The 20th Century Baedeker] He intended to do a series of thousand-word essays on the various achievements he inventoried. These quickly transformed, in his mind, into one-hundred-word ‘groupings,’ highly aphoristic, that emphasized two basic themes: the first reflected his long-held belief that there was no real split between artistic and scientific enterprises, particularly in the twentieth century. The second heme underlined his belief that artists, far from merely being influenced by scientific discoveries, tended actually to anticipate those discoveries by several decades, in the patterns and approaches of their own work.