On the wintry afternoon of Monday 28 November 1768, an architect and three artists were granted an audience with George III at St James's Palace; their mission, the foundation of a royal academy of arts in London.

This book, written by Charles Saumarez Smith, the current Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy, is the first day-by-day account of the events that led up to that meeting and what happened immediately afterwards. In its telling, it reveals the strong personalities involved, the rivalries and intrigues that divided them, the competing ideas about the teaching and exhibition of art, and the problems of governance that forged the Royal Academy, and continue to reverberate within it today, some 250 years later.