Amanda Foreman

The Earth Moved for Him

The Omnipotent Magician: Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, 1716–1783

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Chatto and Windus 384pp £20 order from our bookshop

‘Capability’ Brown, the most famous of all eighteenth-century landscape designers – and the father of the landscape garden – never wrote a manual or recorded his musings for posterity. In fact, were it not for an illuminating conversation with Hannah More in 1782, the year before he died, critics might have got away with the accusation that he possessed nothing but a good eye for effect.

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