In Ruins

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A brilliant young historian, Christopher Woodward takes us on a thousand-year journey with artists and writers who have delighted in ruins. We travel from the plains of Troy to the monuments of ancient Rome, from the crumbling palaces of Sicily, Cuba, and Zanzibar to the rubble of the London Blitz. We meet the teenage Byron in the moldering Newstead Abbey, Flaubert watching buzzards on the pyramids, Henry James in the Colosseum, and Freud at Pompeii. Woodward illuminates doomed visions of the future, whether in grandiose Nazi fantasies or in the battered Statue of Liberty prophesying the end of the American Empire in Planet of the Apes. He uncovers intimations of mortality in the decay of an ordinary house. He revels in the charm of the follies of eighteenth-century landscapes.Elegant, thought provoking, and beautifully illustrated, In Ruins is a revelation of the expression of the human imagination where we might otherwise have seen only a pile of stones.