In ruins - Christopher Woodward

Why are we so fascinated by ruins? Do we see them as jig-saws and riddles or romantic evocations of the damage of Time, complete with crumbling stone and ivy?
Do they stir us to remember past glory or warn against future arrogance? In this elegant, provocative book , the brilliant young art-historian Christopher Woodward
looks back to the start of the cult
in the eighteenth century, when follies were built in English landscape gardens,
artists and writers thrilled to Rome's poetry of decay, and in Paris the great chef Careme even served blancmanges shaped like
classical ruins. He takes us from Troy
and Pompei to
Sicilian palaces and Nazi fantasies,
and
whirls us forward to modern times - to the shattered Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes,
to Florida's Museum of Natural Phenomena, designed as a court-house dumped upside-down by a hurricane and to
Chelsea Flower Show's brand-new 'Millennium Ruin'.
Even the decay of an ordinary house can be as moving as the collapse of a temple - with its fascinating stories and characters, and its telling illustrations,
In Ruins is full of strange delights
and
startling surprises,
exploring the mysterious, melancholy charm of eternal fragments.