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“... Toward the end of their correspondence, which spanned years 1851-79, John Ruskin, who hitherto had addressed Thomas Carlyle more or less in terms of deferential formality (‘Dear Mr Carlyle’), suddenly shifted to ‘Dearest Papa’, signing himself ‘Ever your loving disciple-son’. Whatever the immediate reasons for the change, it simply made explicit Ruskin’s steady conception of his relation to Carlyle, the older man by 24 years ...”

“... in the early 1960s,’ Mr Hilton writes, ‘I was asked to understand that an interest in Ruskin was as foolish as an enthusiasm for modern art.’ This is incomprehensible, until it is observed from the cover note that Mr Hilton was at Oxford. Even so, either he was very unlucky or this is an example of that interesting and recurrent phenomenon in ...”

“... Tim Hilton’s foreword to the concluding volume of his biography of Ruskin is intimate and magisterial in a way that would seem presumptuous in anyone else. But Hilton has worked with Ruskin since the early 1960s and no one has a deeper understanding of either him or his writing ...”

“... and ‘art’. Hilary Fraser’s book, and the new edition of correspondence between Ruskin and Norton, illuminate elements of this long and unfinished interaction. It is interesting that neither Ruskin nor Carlyle seems to have known this particular heterodox tradition of absolute spiritual ...”

“... According to John Ruskin, ‘in the work of the great masters death is always either heroic, deserved, or quiet and natural.’ Not so in Marguerite Yourcenar’s world. She is renowned for her timeless narrative gift and lucid style, and she regards her books as defining that unfashionable thing, an ‘ideal of humanity ...”

“... It was in the winter of 1929 that the young American scholar Helen Gill Viljoen went to Brantwood, Ruskin’s old home on Coniston Water, to pursue her postgraduate researches. In that dilapidated building, stripped of its more saleable treasures but housing still a wealth of manuscript material, she worked for some weeks: unsupervised, but advised by W ...”

“... spiritualist scribbles and to computer sculpture. Fuller is particularly interested in Ruskin’s attempts to discover a principle of beauty in the natural world-attempts animated at once by devotional awe and scientific curiosity. Amid the graffiti, the piles of refuse and the space-age appliances, Fuller addresses us with his own apocalyptic ...”

“... paying a price for it in the form of global warming, acid rain and so forth. Over a century ago, John Ruskin was arguing that Cartesian (‘modern’) thought had destroyed man’s reverence and wonder in the face of the external world, and that the death of God-in-nature would eventually bring the end of nature. Gore’s book is squarely in this ...”

“... in a letter that the wombat had successfully interrupted a seemingly uninterruptable monologue by John Ruskin by burrowing its nose between the critic’s waistcoat and jacket. Rossetti drew the wombats repeatedly; he sketched his mistress – William Morris’s wife, Jane – walking one on a leash. In the image, both Jane and the wombat look ...”

“... private lives considered are those of Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle; Effie Gray and John Ruskin; Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill; Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens; George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. This is the form in which Rose presents the couples, with the women taking precedence and ...”

“... It has never been easy to place Ruskin. In his own lifetime, his influence was fragmented by the bewildering range of subjects he undertook to write about. The dislocation has continued since his death. As far as the mainstream disciplines in Britain are concerned (his legacy in America is a separate story), he has always seemed tangential ...”

“... out that in fact he went back to England for a few years, where his time at Oxford overlapped with John Ruskin’s tenure as Slade Professor of Fine Art. Rhodes wasn’t there to hear Ruskin give his inaugural lecture – the one about England’s duty to ‘found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of ...”

“... an indigenous British current of it had got under way, passed from Coleridge and Carlyle to John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. From this radical-Romantic viewpoint, industrial capitalism was to be condemned for stifling a creativity which the arts, above all, most finely exemplified. Art was the enemy of alienation, craftsmanship the antithesis of ...”

“... Venice is an elegant and distinguished first book. Like its predecessor The Rise to Empire, John Julius Norwich’s The Greatness and the Fall has the modest aim of providing ‘a straightforward record of the main political events of Venetian history, for the general non-academic reader’. This second volume takes the story from 1405 to 1797, from the ...”