Books
Russia: A World Apart, by Simon Marsden - review
Here are acres of desolate countryside, pockmarked by once great estates, ravaged by rot. Could it be much bleaker? Many aristocrats fled Russia during the Revolution. Even Tolstoy’s family were… Read more
The Hermit in the Garden, by Gordon Campbell - review
In his 1780 essay On Modern Gardening Horace Walpole declared that of the many ornamental features then fashionable, the one ‘whose merit soonest fades’ was the hermitage. Inspired by the… Read more
How to Read a Graveyard, by Peter Stanford - review
Peter Stanford likes cemeteries. Daily walks with his dog around a London graveyard acclimatised him, while the deaths of his parents set him wondering about customs of mourning and places… Read more
William Burges and the High Victorian Dream', by J. Mordaunt Crook - review
It is 32 years since the first edition of this hefty book appeared in 1981. The original was based on the research materials amassed by Charles Handley-Read, the pioneer scholar… Read more
‘On Glasgow and Edinburgh', by Robert Crawford - review
Glasgow and Edinburgh are so nearby that even in the 18th-century Adam Smith could breakfast in one city and be in the other for early-afternoon dinner. For all that, these… Read more
The shape of things to come
I opened Futurescapes with anticipation, knowing Tim Richardson to be a forceful commentator, and landscape architects to be in dire need of an articulate champion. The mixed marriage of ‘landscape’… Read more
Amazing grace
It was in 1814 that the Benedictine monks arrived in Stratton-on-the-Fosse in Somerset from Douai in Flanders where, in 1606, they had established an exiled, but English, monastic house. They… Read more
Rather in the lurch
Will it ever end? The romantic interest in the architecture, history and life lived in the country house is as alive today as it was in 1978, when Mark Girouard… Read more
Murder in Madison Square Garden
In Victorian and Edwardian England architects did not get themselves murdered. They weren’t playboys, they didn’t have it off with their clients’ wives, they were in no way fashionable even… Read more
Oh Brother, where art thou?
Benjamin Franklin had this ambition for his body: that after his death it should be reissued ‘in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended by the author’. Benjamin… Read more
In and out of favour in Iraq
Nowadays the TV cameras make Baghdad look like a suburban car park, and for Tamara Chalabi, raised in England and Beirut on memories of pre-Saddam Iraq, the first encounter in… Read more
Built for eternity
The Escorial, as a monastery and a royal palace, was the brain child of Philip II of Spain. Built in the latter half of the 16th century, about 30 miles… Read more
Secrets and silences
Charlotte Moore’s family have lived at Hancox on the Sussex Weald for well over a century. Charlotte Moore’s family have lived at Hancox on the Sussex Weald for well over… Read more
The pride of the Sackvilles
Knole is a country house the size of a small village in the Kent countryside. For the past 400 years it has been inhabited by 13 generations of a single… Read more
Flights of futuristic fantasy
The Great Court of the British Museum is a good place to start. Norman Foster brought light into the wonderfully elegant and inspiring glazed space at the heart of the… Read more
Array of luminaries
In November 1660, on a damp night at Gresham College in London, a young shaver named Christopher Wren gave a lecture on astronomy. In the clearly appreciative audience were 12… Read more
A dream made concrete
You are celebrated as the architect of one of the most famous buildings in the world, now in your late eighties and living quietly in your home outside Copenhagen. One… Read more
Repeat that, repeat
When the Louvre invited me to organise for the whole of November 2009 a series of conferences, exhibitions, public readings, concerts, film projections and the like on the subject of… Read more
Not so serene
Is there anything original left to say about Venice? Probably not, but that doesn’t stop the books from coming, tied in, as they mostly now are, with a television series.… Read more
Shrine of a connoisseur
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, by Tim Knox, photographs by Derry Moore Sir John Soane’s Museum is very nearly a folly — a mad grotto in the midst of Georgian… Read more
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