Peter Cormack’s magisterial, beautifully illustrated Arts & Crafts Stained Glass is a triumph, the culmination of prolonged research and a development of his pioneering series of exhibitions at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow. Victorian and Edwardian glass in Britain has the image of being ubiquitous rather than alluring – despite Martin Harrison’s path-breaking Victorian Stained Glass (1980) and fine studies of Irish and Scottish glass by Nicola Gordon Bowe and Elizabeth Cumming. Arts and Crafts glass was, however, a bold critique of the antiquarianism of large commercial firms such as Clayton & Bell that dominated

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