William Beckford had two lives: one real and sensational, the other an elegant forgery he invented in retirement after the young Disraeli mischievously sent him a homoerotic epic based loosely on Beckford's own career. Biographers have been bemused by Beckford's faked letters and dream encounters with celebrities, but his real life was far more significant: he is the pivotal Romantic between Horace Walpole and Byron.

Beckford was reared in exotic isolation in a Palladian palace where he grew up obsessed with dark grottoes, towers and images of the living dead. Rushed into marriage by an apprehensive mother, he indulged his actual passions (both legal and paedophile) until a Tory administration staged a sex scandal that exiled him. In his absence his novel, Vathek was treacherously pirated. Returned to England, Beckford flung his wealth into the creation of Fonthill Abbey, which, by its shadowy vistas and glamorous camp furnishings, paved the way for the wildest excesses of Victorian taste.

'That Prussian pedant', 'Herr Professor Doktor': these were two of the jibes John Betjeman levelled at Nikolaus Pevsner, who, it must be said, received them with great restraint. Betjeman and Pevsner were polar opposites, the one giving voice to an alluring threnody for the destruction of our historic landmarks, the other articulating the case for international modernism. Their different outlooks are most obviously manifested in the "Shell County Guides," edited by Betjeman, and the magisterial "Buildings of England" series, which within the confines of impeccable scholarship, represents Pevsner's credo. The former is imbued with a most agreeable dilettantism that is strikingly successful in capturing ambience, the latter brilliantly and in compelling detail anatomizes individual buildings.

Betjeman and Pevsner personified two opposing sensibilities and in this most engaging book Timothy Mowl shows how the two rivals became, behind a polite facade, irreconcilable foes who fought for the supremacy of their alternative visions until the same fatal illness struck them down.

'This entertaining analysis of Betjeman's dislike of what he believed Pevsner stood for is a subtle and unique contribution to twentieth-century English social and cultural history. Mowl has written an absolutely gripping story, full of irony and surprise, about two men who were so similar yet so totally different.' David Watkin

Horace Walpole, famous for his novel The Castle of Otranto and his gothick castle-villa, Strawberry Hill, has been oddly shielded by his previous admirers. The most famous of these was W. S. Lewis, a rich American scholar, who collected virtually all of Walpole's surviving letters and papers and edited them in forty-eight impressive volumes. He was however a conventional man of his times and could not bring himself to acknowledge Walpole's homosexuality and its implications. R. W. Ketton-Cremer, who wrote what was otherwise a very good biography of Walpole, was similarly evasive. Timothy Mowl's study of Horace Walpole is the first to give a complete and convincing picture of the whole man. It is the first to show that, despite his aristocratic connections (he was the youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, Britain's first Prime Minister) Horace Walpole was a sexual and social outsider whose talents as a publicist were used to serve his own agenda. Also revealed for the first time is Walpole's passionate affair with the 9th Earl of Lincoln. The ending of that relationship, and Walpole's subsequent resentment of Lincoln's relatives, affected his judgment, friendships and emotions for the rest of his life. This book provides an honest and radical reassessment of one of the most influential men of taste of the eighteenth-century, and is reissued to coincide with a major Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition dedicated to Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill. 'This is a lively, provocative and hugely entertaining book. Whatever one makes of Dr Mowl's interpretation of Walpole's career, it is always intelligently argued, and presented with a polemical vigour and sense of style which are worthy of his subject's own.' John Adamson, Sunday Review '. . . he is lively and convincing on the gradual accretions to Strawberry Hill, and often shrewd on the character of his subject . . .' Pat Rogers, Times Literary Supplement 'In general, Mowl writes delightfully, and there are witticisms that Horry (Horace Walpole) himself would relish.' Bevis Hillier, The Spectator 'In this vivid and entertaining biography, Horace Walpole is properly outed.' Duncan Sprott, Gay Times '. . .he presents the most credible picture of the man and his achievement to date.' Martin Postle, Apollo 'This wicked, enjoyable book should provoke wide debate.' David Watkin, Evening Standard

Worcestershire is particularly rich in great gardens from the last 250 years, such as: Madresfield Court, the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited" and the restored early eighteenth-century Hanbury Hall, both near Malvern in the south of the county; Hagley Hall of the mid-eighteenth century and William Shenstone's Arcadian masterpiece The Leasowes, both near Halesowen in the north; Croome Park by Capability Brown and the Victorian extravaganza of Witley Hall with its magnificent restored fountains.