As Catherine Pickstock so forcefully demonstrates in her brilliant introduction to this new publication of Beauty Looks After Herself, for 600 or more years, the Real has been progressively stripped of transcendental content, so that today an "unbearable lightness of being" presents us with the terrible spectacle of numberless possibilities evacuated of all substantive content. A middlebrow landscape of normal nihilism surrounds us at every turn.

Eric Gill saw through our dilemma long ago. Here, in essays on industrialism, architecture, stone-carving, lettering, clothes, philosophies of...