As several readers may know, my day job is looking after Chedworth Roman Villa in the Cotswolds. Chedworth sits comfortably within a region that supported some of the most prosperous rural estates in Britannia. Yet the world that sustained and shaped the villa extended far beyond the Coln valley.
BOOK REVIEWS
Stephen Coan’s The Buried Man can only be described as magisterial. It is the culmination of decades of patient, methodical, and deeply informed scholarship. Coan has lived with, traced, and tracked H. Rider Haggard for much of his adult life, and this monumental volume represents the distillation of that long engagement. It is unlikely to be surpassed for a very long time.
BLUE PLAQUES
The Synagogue, an impressive souvenir of Jewish Doornfontein, was built in 1906 to serve the growing Jewish community. The architect was M.J. Harris, son of Johannesburg’s first rabbi, M.L.. Harris. The architecture is eclectic, combining western Mannerist columns with Lithuanian domes thus evoking memories of the homelands of this immigrant community.