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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.
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