Enfilade

From Pan Macmillan:

Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise (London: Picador, 2024), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-1529066678, £20 / $28.

“A garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world . . .”

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an 18th-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.

But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She’s the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Funny Weather, and Everybody. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages, and in 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. She lives in Suffolk.

From Boydell & Brewer:

Susan Haynes, Charles Bridgeman (c.1685–1738): A Landscape Architect of the Eighteenth Century (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2023), 270 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1837651177, £75 / $115.

An examination of the garden plans of eighteenth-century landscape architect Charles Bridgeman, shedding light on his artistic vision and contributions to English garden history.

Charles Bridgeman was a popular and highly successful landscape architect in the first part of the eighteenth century. He was Royal Gardener to George I and George II, designing the gardens at Kensington Palace for them and working for many of the ruling Whig elite, including Sir Robert Walpole at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. His landscapes were audacious and monumental, but he is barely known outside the world of academic garden history; most of his gardens have disappeared, changed out of all recognition to chime with later tastes shaped by Lancelot Brown’s vision of a more ‘natural’ landscape, or buried under housing developments and golf courses; and there is little archaeological or written evidence of his work. This book aims to redress this injustice and rescue his legacy. It draws on the only significant body of evidence which survived him: an extensive but wildly heterogenous corpus of garden plans. Close examination of them reveals an artistic vision heavily influenced by the late seventeenth-century geometric garden but deeply rooted in the ‘genius of the place’, and working methods that include a proto-business model which prefigures the gentleman improvers who followed him. The volume brings Bridgeman from obscurity to demonstrate his skill as an artist, a manipulator of space on a grand scale, and a consummate practitioner, a deserved member of the canon of famous and revered English landscape gardeners.

Susan Haynes is a retired teacher with a PhD in landscape history from the University of East Anglia. Her principal interest is seventeenth- and eighteenth-century garden history.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

Introduction
1  Who Was Charles Bridgeman?
2  Towards A Reliable Corpus
3  A Revised Catalogue
4  Reading The Plans
5  The Art-Historical Context Revisited
6  The ‘Ingenious Mr Bridgeman’
7  Building a Landscape
8  A Commercial Enterprise
Conclusion

Appendices
I  A Summary of Willis’s Catalogue from Charles Bridgeman and the English Landscape Garden
II  A Revised Catalogue
III  Bridgeman’s Projects by Year
IV  Bridgeman’s Income

Gazetteer of Bridgeman Sites
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

From Penguin Books:

Alan Titchmarsh, with photography by Jonathan Buckley, Chatsworth: The Gardens and the People Who Made Them (London: Ebury Spotlight, 2023), 288 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1529148213, £35 / $65.

Follow Alan Titchmarsh into Chatsworth’s irresistible world of visionaries, pioneers, heroes, villains, and English eccentrics and celebrate the men and women who have shaped the history of the estate over five centuries. With his passionate knowledge of both the house and gardens, as well as his long-established relationship with the Cavendish family, Alan is the perfect guide with whom to explore the Palace of the Peaks. Featuring stunning, specially commissioned photography of the gardens and parkland, alongside long-forgotten images and memorabilia newly unearthed in the estate archives, this vivid companion, crowded with character and colour, is a book to treasure and revisit over and over again.

Alan Titchmarsh MBE is an English gardener, broadcaster, and author of over 40 books, many of which have been bestsellers. He has twice been named Gardening Writer of the Year and for four successive years was voted Television Personality of the Year by the Garden Writers’ Guild.

From Thames & Hudson:

Sau Fong Chan, with photographs by Sarah Duncan, Chinese Dress in Detail (London: Thames & Hudson, 2023), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-0500480939, £30 / $40.

A head-to-toe exploration of Chinese dress through sumptuous, detailed photography of some of the most fascinating historic and contemporary pieces in the V&A’s outstanding collection (part of the V&A Fashion in Detail series)

Chinese Dress in Detail reveals the beauty and variety of Chinese dress for women, men, and children, both historically and geographically, showcasing the intricacy of decorative embroidery and rich use of materials and weaving and dyeing techniques. The reader is granted a unique opportunity to examine historical clothing that is often too fragile to display, from quivering hair ornaments, stunning silk jackets and coats, festive robes, and pleated skirts, to pieces embellished with rare materials such as peacock-feather threads or created through unique craft skills, as well as handpicked contemporary designs. A general introduction provides an essential overview of the history of Chinese dress, plotting key developments in style, design, and mode of dress, and the traditional importance of clothing as social signifier, followed by eight thematic chapters that examine Chinese dress in exquisite detail from head to toe. Each garment is accompanied by a short text and detail photography; front-and-back line drawings are provided for key items.

Sau Fong Chan is a curator in the V&A’s Asian department and looks after the textiles and dress collections from China and Southeast Asia.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
1  Headwear
2  Necklines and Shoulders
3  Sleeves
4  Pleats
5  Edgings
6  Buttons
7  Embroidery
8  Footwear

Glossary
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Picture Credits
Index

From Bloomsbury:

Ludmilla Jordanova and Florence Grant, eds., Where Words and Images Meet (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2024), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-1350300569 (hardback), $120 / ISBN: ‎978-1350300552 (paperback), $40.

From 19th-century frontispieces to Soviet photo albums, from the relationships between portraits and biographies to museum labels, the book’s richly illustrated chapters open up historically specific connections between word and image to collective examination and fruitful analysis. Written by both established and emerging scholars in a range of interrelated fields, the chapters deliberately foreground previously overlooked topics as well as unfamiliar disciplinary approaches, to offer a stimulating and carefully developed framework for looking at these ubiquitous phenomena afresh. Where Words and Images Meet opens up for analysis and reflection the forms of attention, practices, skills and assumptions that underlie visual interpretation and meaning-making in the writing of history. By bringing the features of the materials we read and look at into focus, we can grasp more effectively the complex interrelationships involved, and enhance our practice and understanding.

Ludmilla Jordanova is Emeritus Professor of History and Visual Culture at Durham University. She is also the author of History in Practice, 3rd Edition (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Florence Grant holds a PhD in History from King’s College London and is currently an independent writer and editor based in Western North Carolina.

c o n t e n t s

List of Plates
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I | Identifying with Books
Discussion
1  Fronts Matter: The Role of the Authorial Frontispiece in Germaine de Staël’s Corinne: or, Italy — Seren Nolan, Durham University
2  Othering the Ex-Libris: Israel Solomons (1860–1923) and the Invention of the Jewish Bookplate — Tom Stammers, Durham University
Bridge

Part II | Representing Authority
Discussion
3  Picturing Criminal Law in Old Regime France: Brunel, Known as Bétancourt, Being Led to the Scaffold (1670) — Tom Hamilton, Durham University
4  Word and Image in Popular Science— Joseph D. Martin, Durham University
Bridge

Part III | Order and Disorder
Discussion
5  Museum Labels: Word and Object on Display — Lola Sánchez-Jáuregui, University of Glasgow
6  Play with Literacy in Edward Lear’s Nonsense Alphabets — A. Robin Hoffman, Art Institute of Chicago
Bridge

Part IV | Authenticity and Interpretation
Discussion
7  On Taking Artists at Their Word: Artists’ Writings and Statements from 1850 to the Present — Lucy Whelan, University of Cambridge
8  Portraiture and Biography: Harmonious Marriage or Difficult Relationship? — Ludmilla Jordanova, Durham University
Bridge

Part V | Making, Compiling, Arranging
Discussion
9  Extra-Illustration in Early Twentieth-Century England — Ludmilla Jordanova, Durham University
10  Beyond the Caption: Words and Images in an Interwar Soviet Amateur Photograph Album — Antonia Miejluk, Durham University
Bridge

Part VI | Words in the Visual Field
Discussion
11  Word as Image: The Verbal in the Photograph — J. J. Long, Durham University
12  Text-Image Hybridity in Know Thyself and Early Modern English Print — Finola Finn, Independent Scholar, Germany
Bridge

Afterword: Word, Image, and Play

Bibliography
Index

From Profile Books:

Madeleine Pelling, Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Rebellion, and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Britain (Profile Books, 2024), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-1800811997, £25.

What if walls could talk? For historian Madeleine Pelling, they can—if you know where to look. Hear the voices of the eighteenth century in this eye-opening new history of Britain’s most tumultuous period, told through its graffiti.

A brilliant new cultural history of the long eighteenth century, Writing on the Wall is told through the marks its citizens left behind, bringing into focus lost voices from the highest to the lowest in society. From the centre of London to the islands of the Caribbean, Pelling goes in search of graffiti, evidence of how ordinary people experienced the world-changing events that defined their lives—from political prisoners to sex workers, homesick sailors, Romantic poets, and the artisans of the industrial revolution. Here are lives, loves, triumphs, and failures, scratched into the walls of prisons and latrines, chalked up on doors, and etched into windows. The names of their creators may be lost to history, but together they tell the real story of Britain’s most rebellious and transformative century.

Madeleine Pelling is a cultural historian, author and broadcaster. She holds a PhD from the University of York and has held research fellowships at the universities of Yale, Edinburgh, and Manchester.  She is co-host of History Hit’s After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal, a podcast that shines a light on the shadier corners of the past and which brings a rigorous historical lens to folklore and true crime. She is also a regular contributor for television, most recently for Titanic in Colour (Channel 4, 2025), Mayhem! Secret Lives of the Georgian Kings (2025), Queens that Changed the World (Channel 4, 2023), and Who Do You Think You Are? Australia (Warner Bros, 2023). Her words appear in The Guardian, The Independent, BBC History Magazine, and History Today.

From W.W. Norton:

Lee McColgan, with a foreword by Roy Underhill, A House Restored: The Tragedies and Triumphs of Saving a New England Colonial (New York: Countryman Press, 2024), 224 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1682688366, $25.

Shop Class as Soulcraft meets A Place of My Own in this lyrical meditation of a woodworker steadfastly repairing a historic home.

Old houses share their secrets only if they survive. Trading the corporate ladder for a stepladder, Lee McColgan commits to preserving the ramshackle Loring House, built in 1702, using period materials and methods and on a holiday deadline. But his enchantment withers as he discovers the massive repairs it needs. A small kitchen fix reveals that the structure’s rotten frame could collapse at any moment. In a bathroom, mold appears and spreads. He fights deteriorating bricks, frozen pipes, shattered windows, a punctured foundation, and even an airborne chimney cap while learning from a diverse cast of preservationists, including a master mason named Irons, a stone whisperer, and the Window Witch. But can he meet his deadline before family and friends arrive, or will it all come crashing down? McColgan’s journey expertly examines our relationship to history through the homes we inhabit, beautifully articulating the philosophy of preserving the past to find purpose for the future.

Lee McColgan has worked on Boston’s Old North Church, Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, and other buildings. His work has appeared in Architectural Digest, The Boston Globe, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives with his wife in the Loring House in Pembroke, Massachusetts.