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Professor Dinah Birch is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Cultural Engagement and Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She is also a huge fan of the subject of today’s Verb, John Ruskin. Dinah celebrates Ruskin as a writer and critic who loathed the concept of separation – whether of people, or ideas and knowledge. For Dinah, reading Ruskin is ‘exhilarating’, and he is a master of prose rhythm, albeit a reluctant one, who wanted readers to focus on his ideas, not his style. 

Particularly in his later years, John Ruskin was fascinated by Geology. With this in mind, we asked Verb regular Ira Lightman to collaborate with Marie-Angélique Bueler, who performs as ‘Sonic Pleasure’, making music out of the most everyday of objects – household bricks. Over this soundbed of musical bricks, slate, marble and other substances Ruskin wrote about, Ira remixes John Ruskin’s words. Ira also explains why he found researching Ruskin at times a frustrating process…

Kristen Roupenian is the other of ‘Cat Person’. First published in the New Yorker, it became the first short story to go viral in a very different critical landscape from the one John Ruskin knew. She has just published her debut short story collection ‘You Know You Want This’ (Cape),which she describes as a book of stories about how difficult it is to reach understanding with another person when we are always standing in the way of ourselves. Kristen explains that although she knew very little of Ruskin prior to this Verb recording, she fully embraces reading her work through a Ruskin lens.

Sarala Estruch is part of the Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critics scheme, founded to encourage diversity in poetry reviewing culture and support emerging critical voices. Sarala considers the role of the critic in the 21st century, and reviews John Ruskin’s classic text Modern Painters, a review that appeals to modern audiences who may not be familiar with his work to seek him out.