At its best, the aesthetic experience is (as one commentator has expressed it) 'arresting, intense and utterly engrossing'; it 'seizes one's whole mind or imagination and conveys [its subject] so vividly that the result is delight and knowledge' (Collinson 1992: 115). Pleasure may therefore be found in, for example, a moment of recognition, even if what we are recognising is a truthful rendition of man's inhumanity.