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 house was designed in 1902 by architects Leck and Emley for Richard Baumann, an attorney who served on Milner's Permits Committee. This committee controlled the return of so-called Uitlanders - British subjects who had been forced to leave Johannesburg when war between Britain and the ZAR broke out. Ridgeholm marks the first use in Johannesburg of Cape Dutch gables as a clearly South African element.