John Ruskin

Ruskin, whose life spanned almost a century from 1819 to 1900, was one of the most influential cultural and intellectual figures of his age. He was fundamentally a post-Romantic visionary; this fact underlies his activities as art critic and writer on architecture and also his passionate advocacy of an alternative social model for England. There is no Wealth but Life, wrote Ruskin in his political essays of the 1860s. This new biography shows him as a whole, demonstrating that his seemingly disparate ideas accrue into a developed - though constantly evolving - vision of the good society, and that the public activity of the man was at every stage closely associated with his disastrous private life.