To call Praeterita an autobiography is to tell only part of the truth.
Yet above all he was loved as a personality by friends and readers alilke, and it is the individual human qualitites which shine through the mercurial pages of Praeterita.
Ruskin was not merely the most important anglophone art critic and social commentator of the late nineteenth century: for his admirers - who included Proust - he was a Tolstoyan figure with the magic of an artist and the moral authority of a sage.
A book like no other, by oneof the greatest masters of English prose., it is less a narrative than the prismatic sotry of an extraordinary mind and a passionate heart told in terms of the author\'s aesthetic education.
To call Praeterita an autobiography is to tell only part of the truth
