ABOUT THE BOOK
Ruskinland: How John Ruskin Shapes our World
Part unconventional biography, part travelogue tracing the profound influence on how we look, live, work and think of Victorian critic, artist, activist and environmentalist John Ruskin.
The Ruskin Society Book of The Year. Who was John Ruskin? What did he achieve – and how? Where is he today? One possible answer: almost everywhere. John Ruskin was the Victorian age’s best-known and most controversial intellectual. He was an art critic, a social activist, an early environmentalist; he was also a painter, writer, and a determined tastemaker in the fields of architecture and design. His ideas, which poured from his pen in the second half of the 19th century, sowed the seeds of the modern welfare state, universal state education and healthcare free at the point of delivery.
His acute appreciation of natural beauty underpinned the National Trust, while his sensitivity to environmental change, decades before it was considered other than a local phenomenon, fueled the modern green movement. His violent critique of free market economics, Unto This Last, has a claim to be the most influential political pamphlet ever written. Ruskin laid into the smug champions of Victorian capitalism, prefigured the current debate about inequality, executive pay, ethical business and automation.
Gandhi is just one of the many whose lives were changed radically by reading Ruskin, and who went on to change the world. This book, timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of John Ruskin’s birth in 2019, will retrace Ruskin’s steps, telling his life story and visiting the places and talking to the people who – perhaps unknowingly – were influenced by Ruskin himself or by his profoundly important ideas.
What, if anything, do they know about him? How is what they do or think linked to the vivid, difficult but often prophetic pronouncements he made about the way our modern world should look, live, work and think? As important, where – and why – have his ideas been swept away or displaced, sometimes by buildings, developments and practices that Ruskin himself would have abhorred? Part travelog, part quest, part unconventional biography, this book will attempt to map Ruskinland: a place where, two centuries after John Ruskin’s birth, more of us live than we know.
Andrew Hill is an award-winning columnist and senior journalist at the Financial Times. As the FT’s Associate Editor and Management Editor, he writes a weekly column on business, strategy and management, as well as contributing longer features and taking part in video discussions and podcasts. He is a regular public speaker and chair of panels on leadership and management.
Since joining the FT in 1988, Andrew has worked in various roles, including editor of the daily Lombard column on British business and finance, Financial Editor, Comment & Analysis Editor, New York Bureau Chief, Foreign News Editor, and correspondent in Brussels and Milan.
He was named Business Commentator of the Year 2016 in the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards and Best Commentator at the 2009 Business Journalist of the Year Awards, where he also received the Decade of Excellence award for sustained achievement in business and financial journalism.
Andrew is a trustee and chair of The Blueprint Trust, the charity behind Blueprint for Better Business, which supports and challenges business to be a force for good. He is also a trustee of The Ruskin Foundation, responsible for the UK’s largest archive of material relating to the life and work of John Ruskin, the Victorian art and social critic.
Andrew is the author of Leadership in the Headlines (FT Publishing, 2016), a selection of his FT columns and insights about how leaders lead.
His next book is Ruskinland (Pallas Athene), a personal exploration of John Ruskin’s life, work and enduring influence on our world, due out in 2019 to coincide with the bicentenary of the great thinker’s birth.
Andrew lives in St Albans with his wife and children.
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