Tim Abrahams of Machine Books is doing a great job in publicising my forthcoming biography of Vanbrugh:-

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” In an era, when we have lost our understanding of the past’s remove, when events back then, must be judged by the values of right now, we struggle to find the importance of art and architecture which do not accord with our present preoccupations.

Swimming against this tide is Charles Saumarez Smith’s wonderful book about the great British architect John Vanbrugh – and he was great, Wren and Hawksmoor fans – which neither judges him by the moral standards of our age nor asserts an appreciation of him as somehow essential to preserving our national selfhood.

He is though, in Charles’s description, a mercurial figure who helps form Britain’s understanding of architecture’s potential; what it can do in symbolic terms for different political entities including the state.