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.

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To Graham Greene, ' Africa will always be the Africa of the Victorian atlas, the blank unexplored continent the shape of the human heart.' IN SEARCH OF A CHARACTER contains two African notebooks: Congo Journal, which records Graham Greene's travels in 1959, & his stay at the Yonda leper colony in the jungle which inspired the story for A Burnt-Out Case. Convoy to West Africa describes Greene's voyage in a cargo boat during the Second World War, from Liverpool to Freetown, Sierra Leone, the setting for THE HEART OF THE MATTER. ...

To Graham Greene, ' Africa will always be the Africa of the Victorian atlas, the blank unexplored continent the shape of the human heart.' IN SEARCH OF A CHARACTER contains two African notebooks: Congo Journal, which records Graham Greene's travels in 1959, & his stay at the Yonda leper colony in the jungle which inspired the story for A Burnt-Out Case. Convoy to West Africa describes Greene's voyage in a cargo boat during the Second World War, from Liverpool to Freetown, Sierra Leone, the setting for THE HEART OF THE MATTER. ...

THE ACCLAIMED FULLY REVISED EDITION OF THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF & KILMARTIN TRANSLATION

In the opening volume of Proust's

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