In Ruins

The brilliant young art historian Christopher Woodward takes us on a thousand-year journey with artists and writers who have delighted in ruins. We travel from the plains of Troy to the monuments of ancient Rome, from the crumbling palaces of Sicily, Cuba and Zanzibar to the rubble of the London Blitz. We meet the teenage Byron in the mouldering Newstead Abbey, Flaubert watching buzzards on the pyramids, Henry James in the colosseum and Freud at Pompeii. Even the decay of an ordinary house can be as moving as the collapse of a temple: we see our own mortality, as Dickens Pip, in Great expectations, sees in Miss Havisham's house the wreck of his hopes. We see doomed visions of the future, whether in grandiose Nazi fantasies or in the battered Statue of Liberty prophesying the end of the American Empire in Planet of the Apes. But has the artist's joy in ruins found at its most charming in the follies of eighteenth century landscape gardens been banished by the forensic archaeologists of today? This elegant, provocative book argues for the values of solitude, mystery and picturesque decay seeing a ruin not as a pile of stones, but a living expression of human imagination. With its colourful characters and stories and its telling illustrations, In Ruins is full of strange delights, exploring the melancholy charm of eternal fragments.