The Pleasure of Ruins

Imagination, irony, an appetite for travel and an enchantment with the past are the hallmarks of Rose Macaulay's classic study. Through more than 500 pages, the author takes us on a journey encompassing four continents visiting Thebes 'so old that no-one remembers its beginnings', Mycenae, Knossos, Palmyra, Baalbek, Petra, Carthage. We linger at Corinth, the golden San Francisco of the ancient world, buried for centuries until an archaeologist's digger, one afternoon in the 1890s, suddenly cried out that he had found columns and statues. We visit Rome, who's progressive ruining, Miss Macaulay writes, 'has been observed closely, and without intermission, by citizens and travellers for nearly two thousand years'; Sybaris, the forgotten home of the Greek pleasure-seekers, where 'sybarites, forlornly expatriate ghosts, seem to wander, murmuring of rich sauces, far from home'; Pompeii, the very gem of ruins, of whose upturned splendours Goethe wrote, 'Many a calamity has happened in the world, but never one that has caused so much entertainment to posterity as this one'.

Further afield, we find Byzantium, Persepolis, 'pure ruin and legend', Xanadu, Goa, Delhi, Angkor-Wat, the great ruined cities of Ceylon and Spanish America. And back to the West, to Britain itself, we enjoy those familiar but much-loved antiquities - Silchester, Tintern, Malmesbury, Godstow, Cashel, Glendaloch, and Battle Abbey, of which Horace Walpole, in an age that dearly loved a ruin, wrote, 'A Miss of the family has clothed a fragment of a portico with cockle shells'. Rose Macaulay was one of the most artful writers of English, known for using a vast and rich vocabulary with evocative cadences, never more poignantly and magically than in this exhilirating account. Here they stand, covered in moss, festooned with ivy, swept by sandstorms, the monuments of civilisation.

One of Don McCullin's favourite books.  

Good condition. One copy has no dust jacket. The other has wear to the dust jacket.