Simon Heffer
Ignore the Girls, Look at the Gables
The Buildings of England: Essex
By James Bettley and Nikolaus Pevsner
Yale University Press 939pp £29.95 order from our bookshop
The volume of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series that covers Essex has long been one of the more inadequate titles in the series. Though famed for its atrociousness, Essex actually has more listed buildings than any but six other counties. Once one gets away from the hideous dormitory towns, and especially from the sprawl along the north bank of the Thames estuary, the wealth of architectural heritage should be plain to all but the most ignorant, or bigoted, observer.
When Pevsner wrote his original volume in 1954 Essex was notably rich in two sorts of building: medieval parish churches and timber-framed houses from the late medieval period. In this magnificent, and long overdue, revision of that volume (itself
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Things began to go wrong between Mr and Mrs Eliot almost immediately. Ostensibly the problem was Vivien’s mysteriously fluctuating health. It would be easy to reduce the Eliot marriage simply to a catalogue of Viv’s medical crises.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/marriage-made-in-hell
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions