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 elegantly neoclassic Bear Lodge was designed in 1906 by Robert Howden for Henry John Hofmeyr. Prominent in politics and education, Hofmeyr served as Chairman of the King Edward VII School Governing Body for twenty-five successive years, was Mayor of Johannesburg in 1910/1911, and was elected the first President of the Convocation of Wits University in 1923.