Praeterita

For as I look deeper into the mirror, I find myself a more curious person than I
had thought.'John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a towering figure of the nineteenth
century: an art critic who spoke up for J. M. W. Turner and for the art of the
Italian Middle Ages; a social critic whose aspiration for, and disappointment in,
the future of Great Britain was expressed in some of the most vibrant prose in the
language. Ruskin's incomplete autobiography was written between periods of serious
mental illness at the end of his career, and is an eloquent analysis of the guiding
powers of his life,both public and private. An elegy for lost places and people,
Praeterita recounts Ruskin's intense childhood, his time as an undergraduate at
Oxford, and, most of all, his journeys across France, the Alps, and northern Italy.
Attentive to the human or divine meaning of everything around him,Praeterita is an
astonishing account of revelation.