I sadly wasn’t able to attend this year’s prize-giving for the Berger Prize, a prize given annually for a work of art history, and so have only just heard that it was won by Eleanora Pistis for her brilliant, scholarly investigation of all aspects of early eighteenth-century Oxford – Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford.

It’s a book that I greatly admired for its uncovering of the huge range of proposals for the development of Oxford beyond those that were actually built, including the Clarendon Building, All Souls and the Radcliffe Camera, and for its understanding of the complexities of architectural culture, as much about the dons who commissioned the buildings as the architects who designed them.

A good win !