Culture and Consensus, first published in 1995 and a revised edition in 1997, explores the history of the relationship between politics and the arts in Britain since 1940, and shows how the search for a secure sense of English identity has been reflected in official and unofficial attitudes to the arts, architecture, landscape and other emblems of national significance. Illustrating his argument with a series of detailed case histories, Robert Hewison analyses how Britain's cultural life has reached its present enfeebled condition and suggests a way forward. This book will be of interest to students of art and cultural studies.

The study of Ruskin's work and influence is now a feature of several critical disciplines. New Approaches to Ruskin, first published in 1981, reflects this, gathering some of the most distinguished writers on Ruskin and joining them with others who have undertaken significant research in the field of Ruskin studies. The authors were all specially commissioned for this volume and were chosen to represent as wide a variety of approaches as possible to this key figure of nineteenth-century culture. This book is ideal for students of art history.

Leadership has never been more important to the cultural industries. The arts, together with museums and heritage sites, play a vital part in keeping economies going, and, more importantly, in making life worth living. People in the sector face a constant challenge to find support for their organizations and to promote the value of culture. Leadership and management skills are needed to meet the mission of creative arts and cultural organizations, and to generate the income that underpins success. The problem is, where can you learn these essential skills? The Cultural Leadership Handbook written by Robert Hewison and John Holden, both prime movers in pioneering cultural leadership programmes, defines the specific challenges in the cultural sector and enables arts leaders to move from 'just' administration to becoming cultural entrepreneurs, turning good ideas into good business. This book is intended for anyone with a professional or academic interest anywhere in the cultural sector, anywhere in the world. It will give you the edge, enabling to you to show creative leadership at any level in a cultural organization, regardless of whether your particular interest is the performing arts, museums and art galleries, heritage, publishing, films, broadcasting or new media.

First published in 1987, The Heritage Industry sets out to protect the present and the future of life in Britain from their most dangerous enemy: a creeping takeover by the past. The author sets today's obsession with yesterday in the context of a climate of social and political decline. The economic uncertainties and cultural convulsions of post-war life have made the past seem a pleasanter and safer place. But how true is that image of the past, and whose past is it, anyway? Hewison questions the way institutions like the National Trust are helping to create a past that never was. While the real economy crumbles, a new force is taking over: the Heritage Industry, a movement dedicated to turning the British Isles into one vast open-air museum. This book will be of interest to students of history, art and cultural studies.

First published in 1986, Too Much records the tumultuous period between 1960 and 1975 when, more than at any other time in history, the arts were a battleground for the conflicting forces of social change. With the new affluence of the Sixties the cultural conformism of the previous decade was rejected in favour of new forms of expression. Pop Art, pop music, fringe theatre and performance poetry helped to create the semi-mythological image of 'Swinging London.' The liberation ethic was feted as it masked the insecurities of a society in decline but, as a real political challenge to the status quo, it also led to conflict. The confrontation between official culture and the underground came in 1968, a year with its own mythical resonance. This book will be of interest to students of art, media studies and cultural studies.

The study of Ruskin's work and influence is now a feature of several critical disciplines. New Approaches to Ruskin, first published in 1981, reflects this, gathering some of the most distinguished writers on Ruskin and joining them with others who have undertaken significant research in the field of Ruskin studies. The authors were all specially commissioned for this volume and were chosen to represent as wide a variety of approaches as possible to this key figure of nineteenth-century culture. This book is ideal for students of art history.

This was first published in 2000: A study of John Ruskin's engagement with art and architecture as a critic, a patron and a teacher. It offers insights into both his writings and the visual economy of the Victorian world. Each essay examines Ruskin's relationship with an individual artist or a distinct aspect of art practice. J.M.W. Turner, D.G. Rossetti, W. Holman Hunt and E. Burne-Jones are among those artists discussed whose personal relationships with Ruskin affected his critical writing. Ruskin's attitude to women artists and his approach to the teaching of art are given special attention.

This was first published in 2000: A study of John Ruskin's engagement with art and architecture as a critic, a patron and a teacher. It offers insights into both his writings and the visual economy of the Victorian world. Each essay examines Ruskin's relationship with an individual artist or a distinct aspect of art practice. J.M.W. Turner, D.G. Rossetti, W. Holman Hunt and E. Burne-Jones are among those artists discussed whose personal relationships with Ruskin affected his critical writing. Ruskin's attitude to women artists and his approach to the teaching of art are given special attention.

Culture and Consensus, first published in 1995 and a revised edition in 1997, explores the history of the relationship between politics and the arts in Britain since 1940, and shows how the search for a secure sense of English identity has been reflected in official and unofficial attitudes to the arts, architecture, landscape and other emblems of national significance. Illustrating his argument with a series of detailed case histories, Robert Hewison analyses how Britain's cultural life has reached its present enfeebled condition and suggests a way forward. This book will be of interest to students of art and cultural studies.

In celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of Victorian Britain's greatest thinkers, the art critic and social reformer John Ruskin, the distinguished Ruskinian Robert Hewison introduces Ruskin's ideas and values through revelatory studies of the people and issues that shaped his thought, and the ideas and values that in turn were shaped by his writings and personality. Beginning with an exploration of the rich tradition of European art that stimulated his imagination, and to which he responded in his own skilful drawings, Ruskin and his Contemporaries follows the uniquely visual dimension of his thinking from the aesthetic, religious and political foundations laid by his parents to his difficult personal and critical relationship with Turner, and his encounters with the art and architecture of Venice. Victor Hugo makes a surprising appearance as Ruskin develops his ideas on the relationship between art and society. Ruskin's role as a contemporary art critic is explored in two chapters on Holman Hunt, one focussing on the Pre-Raphaelite's The Awakening Conscience, one examining his later Triumph of the Innocents. The development of Ruskin's role as a social critic is traced through his teaching at the London Workingmen's College and his foundation of the Guild of St George, a reforming society that continues to this day. Oscar Wilde came under his personal influence, as did Octavia Hill, a founder of the National Trust. The evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin are shown to have been deeply unsettling to Ruskin's worldview. The book concludes with a demonstration of the profound influence of the Paradise Myth on all of Ruskin's writings, followed by an exploration of the concept of cultural value that shows why Ruskin's ruling principle: `There is no wealth but Life' is as relevant to the twenty-first century as it was to the nineteenth.

'One of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century.' William Morris, in the Preface. The Nature of Gothic started life as a chapter in Ruskin's masterwork, The Stones of Venice. Ruskin came to lament the 'Frankenstein monsters' of Victorian buildings with added Gothic which 'The Stones' inspired; but despite his misgivings the original moral purpose of his writing had not fallen on stony ground. The Nature of Gothic, the last chapter of the second volume, had marked his progression from art critic to social critic; in it he found the true seam of his thought, and it was quickly recognised for the revolutionary writing it was. As Morris himself put it, The Nature of Gothic 'pointed out a new road on which the world should travel'; and in its indictment of meaningless modern labour and its celebration of medieval architecture it could be called the foundation stone of Morris's aesthetic and purpose in life. 40 years after he first read it, Morris chose Ruskin's text for one of the first books to be published at his Kelmscott Press, using his own Golden type. It is one of the summits of his career, and one of the most beautiful books ever published. Few books can so completely sum up an era. The Kelmscott Nature of Gothic encapsulates the meeting of two remarkable minds and embodies their influence in word, image and design. But more than that, Ruskin's words are increasingly relevant for our times. In this facsimile edition, the first ever made of this rare book, the reader can fully appreciate their importance and their legacy, as understood by one of the most potent visual imaginations to have worked in Britain. In this enlarged edition, essays by leading scholars, Robert Hewison (who was one of Ruskin's successors as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University), Tony Pinkney (Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University) and Robert Brownell (lecturer, stained glass maker and author of Marriage of Inconvenience) explain the importance of this book for Ruskin, for Morris and for us today.

Britain began the twenty-first century convinced of its creativity. Throughout the New Labour era, the visual and performing arts, museums and galleries, were ceaselessly promoted as a stimulus to national economic revival, a post-industrial revolution where spending on culture would solve everything, from national decline to crime. Tony Blair heralded it a "golden age." Yet despite huge investment, the audience for the arts remained a privileged minority. So what went wrong? In Cultural Capital, leading historian Robert Hewison gives an in-depth account of how creative Britain lost its way. From Cool Britannia and the Millennium Dome to the Olympics and beyond, he shows how culture became a commodity, and how target-obsessed managerialism stifled creativity. In response to the failures of New Labour and the austerity measures of the Coalition government, Hewison argues for a new relationship between politics and the arts.