PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Gavin Stamp was an architectural historian and scholar, one of Britain's leading experts on pre-war building and design. 'Brought up in a Tudor bungalow on the Orpington by-pass', as he recalled, he was educated on a scholarship at Dulwich College. Prolific as an author, curator and journalist, as 'Piloti' he wrote Private Eye's 'Nooks & Corners' column from 1978 until his death in 2017. He was chairman of the 20th-Century Society from 1983-2007, and wrote more than twenty books on topics including Edwin Lutyens, George Gilbert Scott, brutalism and telephone boxes.
Praise for Gavin Stamp * : * It is a puzzle to me that Stamp is not better known. He is eloquent, funny and eccentric. He is as familiar with the streets of our cities as a taxi driver with The Knowledge, and brilliant at connecting sublime ideas with the ordinary aspects of our daily lives -- Charles Moore * Sunday Telegraph * Acute, erudite, elegant * The Times * A wonderful celebration of the best in English design, and a stylish invective against the worst. -- Mary Beard, on 'Anti-Ugly' * Observer * Informative and engaging about all kinds of English things, from royal tombs to London buses ... Stamp always tell[s] you something new, which is a wonderful thing -- Ian Jack * Guardian * Much, much more than architectural history, for here, encapsulated in marmoreally angry prose, is an account of that collective act of mass murder, without parallel in history, known as the Great War. An unforgettable, passionate book -- A.N. Wilson, on 'The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme' * Evening Standard *
