Eric Gill was perhaps the greatest English artist-craftsman of the twentieth century: a typographer and lettercutter of genius and a master in the art of sculpture and wood-engraving. 'A wonderfully detailed account of his personality - so vivid, you feel you know just what it would have been like to visit him at one of his patriarchal communes . . . A Dominican, dining with the Gills, once thought he saw a nimbus shining around Eric's head. Despite the sexual improprieties it unearths, MacCarthy's authoritative biography allows you to understand how someone might have thought that.' John Carey, Sunday Times