Lord Kenneth Clark began his seminal 1969 television series Civilisation by quoting Ruskin: “Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts: the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.” Perhaps the same can be said of great men. James Stourton’s superb new biography, Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation, revisits Clark’s long career of deeds, quotes extensively from his large corpus of written work, and examines the televised art that he produced (“Civilisation was in a sense Clark’s autobiography”) to present a compelling picture of a great man.

Stourton, the former chairman of Sotheby’s U.K., begins at the beginning, describing Clark’s Edwardian childhood as the neglected son of rich parents (in Clark’s words, “many people were richer, there can have been few who were idler”); Clark’s discovery of the power of art as a sensitive Winchester schoolboy (“nothing could destroy me as long as I could enjoy works of art”); and his exposure, at Oxford, to Ruskin’s ideas that “beauty was everyone’s birthright” and that “art should belong to all.”

Stourton then turns to Clark’s long and spectacular career, and uses it to highlight aspects of his personality—and to mark the path that led to Civilisation. At twenty-seven, Clark was offered the Keepership of Fine Art at the Ashmolean Museum, the oldest public museum in Britain, and he accepted knowing that “administration would prevent me from writing the great books that I already had