Why are we so fascinated by ruins? Do we see them as jig-saws & riddles or romantic evocations of the damage of Time, complete with crumbling stone & ivy? Do they stir us to remember past glory or warn against future arrogance? In this elegant, provocative book, the brilliant young art-historian Christopher Woodward looks back to the start of the cult in the eighteenth century, when follies were built in English landscape gardens, artists & writers thrilled to Rome's poetry of decay, & in Paris the great chef Careme even served blancmanges shaped like classical ruins. He takes us from Troy & Pompei to Sicilian palaces & Nazi fantasies, & whirls us forward to modern times
- to the shattered Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes, to Florida's Museum of Natural Phenomena, designed as a court-house dumped upside-down by a hurricane & to Chelsea Flower Show's br&-new ' Millennium Ruin'. Even the decay of an ordinary house can be as moving as the collapse of a temple
- with its fascinating stories & characters, & its telling illustrations, In Ruins is full of strange delights & startling surprises, exploring the mysterious, melancholy charm of eternal fragments.