W. G. Collingwood was a man of many talents and interests: a geologist, an antiquarian, an artist as well as a critic and historian of art, a novelist, a translator, and a scholar of Icelandic history and literature. He achieved distinction in all these fields, but he is now best remembered in connection with John Ruskin. In the 1840s and 1850s Ruskin had established himself as the foremost art critic of the age with a series of major books, notably Modern Painters (1843-1860), The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and The Stones of Venice (1851-1853). But his belief that any work of art, good or bad, was necessarily the exponent of the political and spiritual values of the society in which it was produced had driven him to write a series of essays in social criticism, furiously attacking the liberal ideology of the nineteenth century, and to support his...