Taste and passion — with a dash of luck

Available from Heywood Hill, 10 Curzon Street, London W1J 5HH

Producers of ‘period dramas’, on film or television, go to tremendous trouble to create the right ‘period look’. In the late Victorian town house, everything is late Victorian; in the Regency rectory, everything is Regency; and so on. All of which is, of course, absurd — not as absurd as having late Victorian things in the Regency house, admittedly, but absurd nonetheless.