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
This site has been a base for planning different struggles against apartheid. It remained under surveillance by the Security Branch during and after June 1976. It was here that Seth Mazibuko, the youngest member of the Student Action Committee, was arrested in July 1976, aged just sixteen. He was held in solitary confinement for 11 months in Number Four at The Fort Prison, in Braamfontein.