In 1878 he suffered a breakdown, which recurred, with violent raving and vivid delusions, before he succumbed in 1888 to total dementia and silence.Did this still the angry inner voices which gave his writings the tumultuous excitement that makes the reader alternately applaud and expostulate? Digressions are the sunshine of any text, as Tristram Shandy observes; without them cold eternal winter reigns. With Ruskin they are the substance, beating all to boiling point.In his more concise book, John Batchelor prefers to dwell not on Ruskin’s affections or insanity but his opinions. He paraphrases the chief works, taking their inconsistencies tutorially to task. There are some inaccuracies, in relation to Rossetti for example, but several acute observations.Batchelor notes how Ruskin preferred to address his intellectual inferiors – women and working men – and claims persuasively that Ruskin’s mental disorder was manic depression, the scattered irrational thought reflecting a desire for integrative harmony. “For myself,” wrote Ruskin in 1858, “I am never satisfied I have handled a subject properly until I have contradicted myself at least three times.”Hilton, having spent 15 years on the second instalment of his biography, has assimilated unrivalled detail and context. His account of Ruskin is full, perceptive and loving, as he sadly traces the tragic outcome of heroic energies.Ruskin was certainly demented, but also full of sweetness, gravity, generosity and humour. Wryly (as if there were not too many already), Hilton laments the “loss” of Ruskin’s numerous unwritten books and drops in much for Ruskinians to dispute.Rather than commend the aesthetic or political theories, Hilton argues for the unrecognised contribution to English literature, especially in the serial publication Fors Clavigera.

(The puzzling title is linked, I have been told, to a passage in Walter Scott, Ruskin’s favourite author). In this regard, Coleridge comes to mind as well as the intemperate Carlyle, Ruskin’s polemical mentor, although the wonderful stream-of-consciousness prose also stands midway between Sterne and Joyce.One issue of Fors segues through Goethe, goose pie, the Poor Laws, the Otomao Indians, Greek myths, female education and dragons. A man of much sensibility, said Jowett, but no sense.He has a bird’s eye, said painter Rosa Bonheur, in reference to his minuteness of observation. If Hilton focuses on literary qualities and Batchelor on visionary indignation, Robert Hewison (current Slade professor of art at Oxford) insists on the pre-eminence of Ruskin’s eye: what might be termed his “close seeing” in regard to the visual, with its influence on art and architectural history. The fruits of this are in Hewison’s catalogue for the Tate exhibition, which complements the biographies with a full range of illustrations, without which Ruskin’s words can seem windy.It is an awesome thought, but we may be in for a Ruskin renaissance.Jan Marsh’s biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The Third Way and its Critics, by Anthony Giddens (Polity Press, £7.99, 167pp)

The Third Way and its Critics, by Anthony Giddens (Polity Press, £7.99, 167pp)
The Third Way is defended in this book against its many critics on the left. It is a robust work, rejecting the idea that bigger government is always the answer.

It warns the left against hostility to markets and globalisation. It tells them roundly that “combined with entrepreneurial energy, a market economy is vastly more dynamic than any other type of economic system”.It provokes the left further by turning on government itself. We are told that “Government and the state are at the origin of social problems”, and reminded that “All welfare states create problems of dependency.. bureaucracy, interest-group formation and fraud”. Governments and states “can be simultaneously oversized and under-performing”.So far, I feel happy with the argument.

My cup flowed over when I read some of Professor Giddens’s thoughts on the EU: “the Union has been largely created by political elites: the European Commission is heavily bureaucratic; the European Parliament lacks much influence, and in most EU countries voters take little interest in the EU elections”. Exactly.Yet you will be relieved to hear that I do still disagree with the Third Way. Woven into the text are ideas designed to make these sound home truths more palatable to a left-wing audience. There are passages hinting at higher taxation on the rich, although everything in moderation and by stealth. There is a proposal for a tax on foreign-exchange speculation.