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
First opened in 1928, each Operating Theatre honoured a pioneering surgeon, namely Van Niekerk, Davies and Murray. The two-storey brick building was designed by Gordon Leith, the architect for many of the historic buildings in the Hillbrow Health Precinct. The old building was restored in 2011, and a lightweight steel structure was added to make a third floor, designed by Henry Paine Architects.