Art Books: A sumptuous tour

In 1930 Evelyn Waugh, already at 27 a famous novelist, spent two days in Barcelona. He came upon one of the art nouveau houses designed by Antonio Gaudí, who had died four years earlier. Waugh was captivated by the swooshing ‘whiplash’ lines of the building. He hired a taxi and asked the driver to take him to any other buildings in the same style. So he saw a number of Gaudí’s fantastical creations, including his church (often mistakenly called a cathedral), La Sagrada Familia. It took an extra-ordinary leap of taste for Waugh to admire this flamboyant architecture at the height of the Modern Movement, with its insistence on ‘clean lines’ and ‘form follows function’.

More than 20 years after Waugh was in Barcelona, I had a similar epiphany, aged 12, on a visit to Paris with a school party. I suddenly encountered one of the strange, tendril-like Métro entrances (c.1900)