In this book, Mark Girouard tells how he became intrigued by architecture as a small boy. Combining anecdote and information about both buildings and their inhabitants, he writes of the places he has visited in town and country. Girouard provides an interpretation of the English origins of rococo art, he describes the formation of an English seaside resort, recreates the Georgian architecture and society of Jane Austen's world and traces changing attitudes towards landscape in architecture from 18th-century Britain to 20th-century America. Old Slaughter's Coffee-House in the mid-18th century; Holdenby, an Elizabethan great house build by a lord who was called by his contemporaries a mere vegetable of the court that sprung up at night and sank again at...noon; Belvedere, the 18th-century Irish country house that was witness to a tragic story of adultery and revenge; these are just a few of the buildings described by Girouard in these essays on architecture and society in bygone eras of England and Ireland.