British architecture between the wars is most famous for the rise of modernism - the flat roofs, clean lines and concrete of the Isokon flats in Hampstead and the Penguin Pool at London Zoo - but the reality was far more diverse. As the modernists came of age and the traditionalists began to decline, there arose a rich variety of styles and tastes in Britain and across the empire, a variety that reflected the restless zeitgeist of the years before the Second World War. At the time of his death in 2017, Gavin Stamp, one of Britain's leading architectural critics, was at work on a deeply considered account of British architecture in the interwar period, correcting what he saw as the skewed view of earlier historians who were unable to see past modernism. Beginning with a survey of the modern movement after the armistice, Interwar untangles the threads that link lesser-known movements like the Egyptian revival with the enduring popularity of the Tudorbethan, to chronicle one of Britain's most dynamic architectural periods. The result is more than an architectural history - it is the portrait of a changing nation. As an account of the period that still shapes much of Britain's towns and cities, Gavin Stamp's final work is the definitive history of British architecture between the Great War and the Blitz.

Edwin Lutyens' Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval in Northern France, visited annually by tens of thousands of tourists, is arguably the finest structure erected by any British architect in the twentieth century. It is the principal, tangible expression of the defining event in Britain's experience and memory of the Great War, the first day of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, and it bears the names of 73,000 soldiers whose bodies were never found at the end of that bloody and futile campaign. This brilliant study by an acclaimed architectural historian tells the origin of the memorial in the context of commemorating the war dead; it considers the giant classical brick arch in architectural terms, and also explores its wider historical significance and its resonances today. So much of the meaning of the twentieth century is concentrated here; the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing casts a shadow into the future, a shadow which extends beyond the dead of the Holocaust, to the Gulag, to the 'disappeared' of South America and of Tianenmen. Reissued in a beautiful and striking new edition for the centenary of the Somme.