James Yorke

The Travellers Club was founded in 1819 to provide congenial surroundings for those who had ‘travelled outside the British Islands to a distance of 500 miles from London in a direct line’, and opportunities to meet distinguished foreign visitors. As it nears its bicentenary, John Martin Robinson has produced a thorough, scholarly and highly readable biography on an institution that has served among other things as the ‘Foreign Office Canteen’ and a refuge for derring-do adventurers. The Club’s members included royalty, dukes, ambassadors and explorers, not to mention aesthetes, artists and even authors, despite Anthony Powell’s claims to the contrary.

The château at Versailles remained the grandest palace in the whole of Europe from the moment that Louis XIV established his court there in May 1682 until his great grandson Louis XVI was forced to leave by a mob of 30,000 in October 1789. Such was its reputation that Lord Chesterfield earnestly advised his son that ‘an hour at Versailles is now worth more to you than three hours in your closet with the best books that were ever written’. Embassies came from as far afield as Siam and Persia. Leather-bound engravings of the palace served as diplomatic gifts and spread its reputation throughout Europe. Every sovereign, leafing through his copy, simply had to recreate his own Versailles.

If you had the resources, Georgian Ireland must have been a very agreeable place in which to live. It was certainly more prosperous and peaceful than it would be after the 1848 famine. This idyllic world is captured in Patricia McCarthy’s scholarly and highly entertaining work, which stretches from the start of the building of Castletown House, Co. Kildare, in 1722, to the 1848 famine.

Italian cabinets and tables decorated with inlaid semi-precious stones known as ‘pietre dure’ were a ‘must-have’ for English milords returning from their Grand Tours. The finest example is perhaps the Sixtus V cabinet at Stourhead, in Wiltshire, which has just been written up in a thorough, scholarly way by Simon Swynfen Jervis and Dudley Dodd, two eminent furniture and architectural historians. As well as placing the Sixtus V cabinet within the contexts of Roman manufacture and English collecting, the book brings to life its Roman provenance and its subsequent residence at Stourhead after the banker Henry Hoare bought it in about 1740.

The Coronation Chair currently stands all spruced up, following last year’s conservation, under a crimson canopy, by the west entrance to Westminster Abbey. The sovereign has used this throne during the actual ceremony almost continuously since the coronation of Henry IV (1399). The oldest dated piece of English furniture (1297-1300) made by a known artist (Walter of Durham) to survive has been given the comprehensive study it deserves by Warwick Rodwell, with supplementary chapters on its most recent conservation by Marie Louise Sauerberg and its current display by Ptolemy Dean.