Hannah Rose Woods

The author seems coldly intellectual in chronicling the history of British culture, from literature to art to architecture, looking back with fondness on the past as a place from which the march to modernity has been one of loss as well as gain. It is easy to demonstrate that such retrospective views can be incomplete, and I wasn't deeply impressed in her overview of the topic. She also seems superficial in her lighting fast summary of the writers involved. Great poets and novelists such as Edward Thomas and Henry James are casually enlisted in the cause of her argument with one or two sentence quotations, which sometimes indicate how shallow her reading of their wider work has been. If she had read Italian Hours and English Hours then perhaps she might be more understanding of Henry James' deep love of the patina of architectural history. Most importantly I find that Woods does not understand that the last 500 years of Western social and environmental history have been uniquely disruptive if you zoom out and consider wider stretches of human history. This book covers fascinating territory, but is ultimately unsatisfying in its glib judgements of the issues and figures involved.… (més)