No review could hope to do full justice to the beauty and learning of this magnificent book. With 516 pages and over 600 illustrations, including many stunning colour plates by the leading architectural photographer Martin Charles, and with coloured title-pages to the chapters framed in strapwork decoration based on the frontispiece to the translation of Serlio’s First Book of Architecture (1611), it has an almost Edwardian opulence.

In an earlier book Town and Country (1992), Mark Girouard recalled that, staying as a child at Chatsworth, he was hauled along the gallery of the Painted Hall each evening on his way from the nurseries to be shown to the grown-ups. ‘The experience of a succession of