In Ruins - Softcover

"This book itself is marvellous proof that the prospect of ruins can elicit the finest cadences of the language, whereby a languorous and clamant prose is drawn out of the spectacle of desuetude and decay-In Ruins is a rich and absorbing volume" (Peter Ackroyd The Times)

"Woodward ravishes the reader with the sudden twists and turns of his elegant narrative as it moves in whatever direction he wishes it to go-Woodward's infectious enthusiasm for his subject will send his readers in many new directions" (Frances Spalding Sunday Times)

"Christopher Woodward's paean of praise to the ruin fizzes with felicitous detail, anecdote, literary reference and art history-An enchanting and informative voyage" (Evening Standard)

"An enchanting kaleidoscope of ruins from all times, cultures, and places, is full of stimulating juxtapositions" (Country Life)

Why are we so fascinated by ruins? Do we see them as jig-saws and riddles or romantic evocations of the damage of Time, complete with crumbling stone and 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 and writers thrilled to Rome's poetry of decay, and in Paris the great chef Careme even served blancmanges shaped like classical ruins. He takes us from Troy and Pompei to Sicilian palaces and Nazi fantasies, and 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 and to Chelsea Flower Show's brand-new 'Millennium Ruin'. Even the decay of an ordinary house can be as moving as the collapse of a temple - with its fascinating stories and characters, and its telling illustrations, In Ruins is full of strange delights and startling surprises, exploring the mysterious, melancholy charm of eternal fragments.