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 building was designed in 1934 by Emily & Williamson for an International insurance company which used the “aegis”, the shield of Jupiter (Father of the Roman Gods) and Minerva (Goddess of Wisdom and War.) The storeys rise higher and higher until almost out of sight, and draw the eyes upward to the stepped roof line and the sky, the abode of the Gods.