Had I not been sent this year’s art books to review, the one I would most have liked to receive as a present would be Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill edited by Michael Snodin (Yale, £40).
Had I not been sent this year’s art books to review, the one I would most have liked to receive as a present would be Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill edited by Michael Snodin (Yale, £40). J. H. Plumb — the historian who achieved the unusual distinction of being shouted out as a wrong answer by a schoolboy in Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film If…. — dismissed the creator of this delectable Gothick meringue of a house as ‘incurably mannered and irrelevant’. Earlier, in a passage oddly not quoted in this book, Lord Macaulay had put the boot into Walpole still more effectively:
After the labours of the print-shop and the auction room, he unbent his mind in the House of Commons.
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