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successful in calling off the restorers. While Ruskinian principles won out, Hewison wryly observes how efforts to make good the damage have left us with a curious structural hesitation: ‘The south side of St Mark’s that is seen today’, he suggests, is ‘a restoration of a restoration’ (384). The book ends with an exploration of Venice’s status as ‘The Paradise of Cities’. This brings us to the final stage of Ruskin’s development, in which the historicism of his early ‘Protestantism’ encounters the mythic catholicity of his maturity. An allegorical method of reading developed during childhood provides the bridge into this new sensibility. Hewison stresses the corresponding force of the Edenic model in Ruskin’s late thought. There is symbolic consistency, as well as madness, in his increasing reduction of affairs to a struggle between the building of paradise and the perpetual threat of the serpent, the enemy of mankind whom he imagines fighting on that terrible night of 22 February 1878. Hewison closes the book by arguing against the common claim that The Stones of Venice is really a displaced autobiography, infused with frustration generated by an unconsummated marriage. Acknowledging the ‘seductive’ qualities of this thesis, Hewison dislikes its tendency to ‘diminish Ruskin’s achievement’ (414). He counters with the suggestion that ‘The Stones of Venice turns out to be not Ruskin’s autobiography but a biography of the city’ (415). This parting claim is backed by the cumulative weight of the whole book, which prefers to demonstrate the interest in what Ruskin does say without recourse to messages between the lines. It is worth registering some tonal and structural difficulties. When mentioning an author by name, Hewison indicates professional status by means of a prefatory formulation, such as ‘the Ruskin scholar Paul Tucker’ (89), or ‘the critic Dinah Birch’ (272). This may be the result of editorial guidance, and is perhaps a gesture in the direction of accessibility; but it is odd to imagine that a reader cannot type an unfamiliar name into a search engine. Equally, it is faint-hearted to imagine that Hewison’s wonderfully clear and hospitable prose would not otherwise calm the nerves of those who do not know the critical terrain. The tactic backfires when we come to consider on what grounds Tucker is primarily a ‘scholar’ while Birch is ‘a critic’ (and not a Ruskin critic?). It is correspondingly strange to saddle another literary critic, Tony Tanner, with the unendearing tag, ‘the cultural critic’ (65). Less negligible is the sense at points that a work announced as ‘Ruskin on Venice’ is covering the ground ordinarily reserved to a biography. Read over a series of long sittings, one understands why apparently extraneous biographical material claims so much space. Hewison sees the shifts in Ruskin’s view of the city as functions of a wider cultural and emotional landscape. One never resents being taken through Ruskin’s life in this way, and certainly not with the authority that Hewison commands; but it is tempting to think that Venice could have been kept more central at the reasonable cost of abbreviating the connecting narrative. A related attitude is discernible in the treatment of critical material. An awful lot of quotation makes its way in. This is understandable where it reflects dutiful acknowledgement of other people’s ideas, but not when it marginalizes the author’s own voice. Considered as a whole, such quibbles pose no threat to Ruskin on Venice. The book is a magnificent achievement. A life’s learning finds convincing form across its stylish, readable, and challenging pages. Hewison is most successful in identifying the links between changes in Ruskin’s intellectual position and his personal life, and in finding a source for his dilemmas in the recurrence of ideas deliberately left behind. The frequently human form of this recurrence, in John James Ruskin’s Romanticism, or Rose La Touche’s