Country Life

Curiosity piqued and bafflement banished

John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities

Bruce Boucher (Yale, £35)

THE architect John Soane was born late in the reign of George II and died six months before Victoria came to the throne. He lives on in the house and its contents that he gave to the nation, which Bruce Boucher, recently retired as director of the Soane Museum, has lucidly described in his new book.

Although a few rooms resemble conventional living spaces of the Regency period, the property, extending across the back of three houses, also acted as an office for Soane’s architectural practice, quite apart from accommodating his diligent and sometimes extravagant collecting (The legacy, April 17). Prof Boucher takes the reader from room to room, unwrapping the timeline of Soane’s career in terms of what he collected and the way he chose to arrange it.

The book’s title, , is suggestive of a magpie accumulation rather than a reasoned process, but we learn how Soane inclined more to the

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