The great detective

As a child, Mark Girouard must have been easy to buy for at Christmas.  An ideal gift would have been a puzzle, preferably the sort that looks easy, but is actually fiendish; one you have patiently to tease away at for hours until finally you unlock it, and long to share its cunning solution. This is more or less what Girouard does in several of the essays in this delightful collection.

Girouard is our most distinguished architectural historian and writer on great houses, but here he solves puzzles, and also reveals a rich and diverse literary taste.

He solves puzzles because he is sure there is something more to this or that received version of a story than meets the eye, and wants to dig deeper. Take two well-known facts about the rise and fall of Oscar Wilde. ‘If one looks into it, the success was not as great and the decay not as miserable as he and others have portrayed it.’