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
In 1890 Eduard Lippert bought part of the farm Braamfontein and renovated the farmhouse for himself and his wife, Marie, naming it Marienhof after her death in 1893. Advised by the forester Genth, Lippert developed a plantation called the Sachsenwald to supply timber to the mines. The Pro-Boer Lippert obtained the Dynamite Concession, a monopoly which was often cited by the Uitlanders as a cause of the war.