This also came during the week - The Worlds of John Ruskin by Kevin Jackson. Littered with typos and the now prevalent hyphen in the middle of a word (a result of copy going straight to print from disc I suspect?), it's a great resource for Ruskin's visual work (pages from the sketchbooks in particular). It was Jackson who sent me off to Proust. There's also a paragraph or two about Wilde - giving up his normal lie-in to assist in the 'Useful Muscular Toil' (!) scheme digging the Hinskey Road. Wilde subsequently boasting of having been allowed to fill "Mr Ruskin's especial barrow" and being given lessons by "the Master" on how to roll it. That would have been worth seeing.

And here's Millais' famous picture of Ruskin for our correspondent in Cheshunt who likes the way he seems to float over the rocks.