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Though he often wrote in matchless prose, Ruskin's thought developed slowly and sometimes repetitively. His ideas, if we come to them unprepared, can seem obscure, confused, and difficult to grasp. Wolfgang Kemp's biography - the first properly conceptual biography of its subject - at last makes sense of what Ruskin was saying. With perception and lucidity, and largely by allowing Ruskin to speak for himself, Kemp demonstrates how Ruskin's whole life was founded on his early visits to the Continent with his parents, and on the theories of nature which he worked out there. From these he derived his beliefs about art and beauty, and from these in turn his ideas about craftsmanship, his philosophy of work and the social order. It was this last which won him the affection of thousands of working men and women and which - though he often proclaimed himself a high Tory - furnished Britain's first socialists with their spiritual armour. It is simply one of the contradicitons with which the life of the frenzied man was overlaid. Kemp shows how all things were part of a whole, and from this book Ruskin's passions for nature, art and ultimately for living rightly emerge fresh and overwhelming.
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