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“... in architecture, but country houses manage to secure a much wider, even popular, audience. Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House has actually become a best-seller – extraordinary in the field of architectural history – and its unprecedented success has encouraged Yale to issue as a companion volume a new edition of his earlier ...”

“... the seeds of cant. These are the themes (though they are not spelled out in such a fashion) of Mark Girouard’s broad and crowded canvas. Through poetry, fiction, sermons, the literature of uplift, art and architecture, this machine-age recrudescence of Medieval idealism permeated Victorian culture, inspiring, in the end, Boy Scouts and ...”

“... This is not, of course, a universally valid dictum. Even the combined and mellifluous resources of Mark Girouard and Yale University Press have yet to unfurl the full panoply of best-selling nostalgia on behalf of such doomed and dodoed delights as education before the comprehensive (Life in the English Secondary Mod?), arithmetic before the pocket ...”

“... the social relationships (master to servant, husband to wife, family to outsiders) which, as Mark Girouard has shown, were crucial in determining the form of the country house are omitted altogether. Mr O’Neill is not interested in the life of the building after construction is completed, but only in its architectural conception and birth – a ...”

“... tiny fragments of glass are assembled to form a picture – not always in the best possible taste. Mark Girouard’s biography of James Stirling is constructed by a similar procedure, an astonishing accumulation of small details, asides and memories building up to a portrait. Big Jim is vividly told and convincingly three-dimensional. And it ...”

“... beautifully produced, but falls short of the scholarship of works in this area by F.M.L. Thompson, Mark Girouard and Brent Elliott, to which it owes a great deal. The text represents an extensive trawl of material, which is presented in the form of a verbal scrapbook covering a range of topics, under headings such as ...”

“... we can anyway infer from the changing ideas of house type which have been described so well by Mark Girouard in Life in the English Country House. The two Southern counties went in for vast houses in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Those were the days when political ambition dictated a pattern of house with a big suite of state rooms which ...”

“... pie and strawberries and cream set out to tempt me from the path of wisdom.’ Remarking on this, Mark Girouard has written: ‘One can’t help feeling that Webb would have been a happier man and a greater architect if he had helped himself to more strawberries and cream.’ Happier, perhaps; greater, no. When the braggadocio of Vanbrugh, Nash or ...”

“... Their language is different, and so is their subject matter, but their approach resembles that of Mark Girouard thirty years ago in Life in the English Country House. The book’s splendid illustrations make it a pleasure to turn the pages, but the text itself is uningratiatingly printed in smallish type, with two columns on each page. Moreover, Hamling ...”

“... in the words of its current chairman (Francis Carnwarth, the personable banker who took over from Mark Girouard), ‘saved 18th-century Spitalfields’. There were warm memories from the early days of art-historical activism: the squats and sit-ins which the Trust’s members undertook as they confronted the vandalism of private developer and municipal ...”

“... which tells the entire story of a country house from the servants’ standpoint. Above stairs, Mark Girouard’s sumptuous study of The Victorian Country House looked in detail at their architecture and their owners; and more recently, in his much-acclaimed Life in the English Country House, he sought to relate changes in the built form to broader ...”