William Whyte
The Battle of Big Ben
Mr Barry’s War: Rebuilding the Houses of Parliament After the Great Fire of 1834
By Caroline Shenton
Oxford University Press 288pp £25 order from our bookshop
Architects rarely live in houses they have designed themselves. The avant-garde modernist Berthold Lubetkin, for instance, planned the pioneering new town of Peterlee from an old farm in rural Gloucestershire. George Gilbert Scott, that eminent Victorian campaigner for Gothic architecture, designed many of his neo-medieval buildings while living in a well-appointed Georgian terrace. And small wonder, for architects know far better than anyone else just how awful the process of building actually is.
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
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3
'Shopkeepers even cut out their names from shop paper bags and pasted them onto their books’ endpapers to feign wealth and gain cultural capital, as seen in a book owned by William Straw, a grocer.'
@laurenohagan91 on the Edwardian bookplate fashion.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/stepping-up-to-the-bookplate
Thank you to Timothy Ryback @TheIHJR - for his generous review of #Burningthebooks in this month's @Lit_Review - I LOVE the cover too!! Confess I have bought a print copy to frame ... Bonfires of Reason | Literary Review | Issue 489 https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonfires-of-reason