Architecture

The Escorial, as a monastery and a royal palace, was the brain child of Philip II of Spain. Built in the latter half of the 16th century, about 30 miles north-west of Madrid, the huge granite complex with 4,000 rooms, 16 courtyards, a basilica, a library and picture gallery as well as the king’s private apartments, came to be regarded as the creation of a cold-hearted despot cut off from the outside world. For Richard Ford, whose 1850 Handbook for Travellers in Spain is the most learned guidebook ever written, the Escorial ‘was as cold as the grey eye and granite heart of its founder’. For the 19th-century conservative Spanish

Charlotte Moore’s family have lived at Hancox on the Sussex Weald for well over a century. Charlotte Moore’s family have lived at Hancox on the Sussex Weald for well over a century. Hancox is a large, rambling house, and the Moores are a family who throw nothing away. Charlotte Moore still cooks on a 1934 Aga. Every drawer and every cupboard bulges with letters, diaries, receipts, even cheque book stubs. Moore has pieced together this chaotic archive to construct the history of her family. It is a complex but riveting story. Hancox was bought in the 1891 by a 23-year old spinster named Milicent Ludlow. Both her parents had died,

Knole is a country house the size of a small village in the Kent countryside. For the past 400 years it has been inhabited by 13 generations of a single family, the Sackvilles. The present Lord Sackville, Robert Sackville-West who lives with his family there, has written a scholarly book on Knole’s effect on the family and vice versa. It was Thomas Sackville who in the 1590s transformed a late medieval manor house into the Renaissance mansion that has become today’s tourist attraction. Like the Cecils, who were his colleagues in government, he made little distinction between enriching the crown and his own family, just as today’s MPs fiddled expenses

The Great Court of the British Museum is a good place to start. Norman Foster brought light into the wonderfully elegant and inspiring glazed space at the heart of the museum where there had been nothing but greyness around the domed Reading Room. It also put Lord Foster of Thames Bank OM at the heart of the British cultural establishment. Why don’t we know more about him? His creative achievement is enormous. He is 75 this year and his firm grows, employing over 1,000 people in 25 offices around the world. His clients include rulers of Middle Eastern oil rich states; the President of Kazakhstan; Commander Chen, responsible for all

In November 1660, on a damp night at Gresham College in London, a young shaver named Christopher Wren gave a lecture on astronomy. In the clearly appreciative audience were 12 ‘prominent gentlemen’, who in discussions afterwards, possibly over a drink or two, decided they would meet every week to talk about science and perform experiments. In a flash, this informal gathering coalesced into a society, which they called ‘a Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’. As Bill Bryson writes in his introduction, ‘nobody had ever done anything quite like this before, or would ever do it half as well again.’ In 1662 Charles II granted them a charter,

Tom Coraghessan Boyle, in some 20 books, has energetically demon- strated his enthusiasm for turning the bio- graphies of figures from early 20th-century American life into quasi-historical fiction. After writing the story of the sex-obsessed researcher Dr Alfred Kinsey and the rare tale of the inventor of the cornflake, Will Keith Kellogg and his health farm, perhaps it was inevitable that the roaring private life of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright would be a natural sequel. The Women is certainly not a novel about architecture, although the narrator of the story, Tadashi Sato, is a young Japanese architectural student who is drawn to the studio/commune run by Wright at Taliesin

If you can’t afford the airfare you might take this delicious guided tour instead. Exploring some of the best contemporary Turkish houses (or caves), the photographer, Solvi dos Santos, divides her subjects by season, as if to emphasise the perpetual variety of Turkey’s terrain — and the successive civilisations that have held sway there. Berrin Torolsan’s informative text explores the inspiration behind such gems as a classical wooden yali on the Bosphorus; a rustic chalet in the mountains; a tea-planters mansion on the Black Sea; a Cappadocian cave-dwelling, with beautifully hewn piers and arches. We are also given a peek into the lives of some of Turkey’s leading figures, including