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 Spanish-style home was designed by Norman Hanson for Harold and Cicely Jeppe. Apart from his business interests, Jeppe was an Olympic athlete in 1920 while studying at Oxford, an international polo player and was instrumental in moving the first polo club founded by his father and associates, to Inanda. They moved to Parktown in the mid 1940s.