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the program. Hello John Ruskin was the most brilliant art critic of his age perhaps

the most brilliant that Britain's ever produced.

But he was much more than that.

A champion of Turner and an enemy of Whistler, he placed the study of art and architecture

at the heart of a moral assault on Victorian life. In the stonework of a Gothic

cathedral, Ruskin saw all that was right about medieval society and all that was

wrong about his own capitalist age. But why was Ruskin so critical of his own time? What deep currents

of thought infused his ideas and how much as our thinking about society,

and environment, art and work owed to this unusual man? With me to discuss John Ruskin at Dyna Birch,

Professor of English at Liverpool University,

Keith Hanley, Professor of English Literature and Director of the Ruskin

programme at Lancaster University,

and Stephen Kalini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at the

University of Cambridge.

...