Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #141054 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 601 pages

Daily Mail, A.N. Wilson
'a very remarkable book about a very remarkable man'

The Guardian, Alan Hollinghurst
'Hill's absorbing book is a marvellously clear guide through the agitated density of Pugin's life ... the picture is unforgettable.'

The Sunday Times, John Carey
'A magnificent biography, as sumptuous and intricate as anything Pugin built'

Customer Reviews

THE MAN WHO DESIGNED BIG BEN
This is a superb biography. If you're interested in the history of English architecture and interior design then this book is unmissable. But Hill's vivid and rich portrait of a complex and driven man, whose ideas were highly influential but whose projects were often blighted, deserves to be read by a much wider readership. Witty, wise, often moving and always informative, GOD'S ARCHITECT is a great read.

Simply superb
One of the best biographies i have ever read. Beautifully written and fascinating even for someone like me who had little previous interest in either architecture or the nineteenth century.

A pre-eminent Victorian
Rosemary Hill's masterly life of Augustus Pugin is quite the best biography I have read for many years. Pugin was not high on my list of eminent Victorians. Thanks to her, he is now. An extraordinary creature, prodigious, amazingly precocious, wilful, cantankerous and quirky to an extreme; a figure that certainly belies the canard that men of his time were frock-coated and bewhiskered prigs.
Hill is most persuasive in her argument that Pugin was the seminal figures in the Gothic Revival and she brings to her task wide historical leaning and broad cultural interest, all presented with an easy elegance not always found in works so immaculate in scholarship and documentation. In the publishing bonanza of recent years, lucidity and precision so often is lost in the rush to get the latest volume into the current lists. Her book, in this, as in all other respects, is exceptional.
I have only one grouse, and a trifling one at that: the book needed more copious illustration. It is a comment upon the enthusiasm which Hill provokes that I longed to behold each rood screen, choir stall and chasuble she describes in something other than my mind's eye. Of course, such a book would be well beyond my and many another reader's pocket. We will have to be content with the finely chosen illustrations which economy has allowed us