Timothy Mowl is a Reader in Architectural and Garden History at the University of Bristol. His recent publications include biographies of two eighteenth-century aesthetes, Horace Walpole (1996) and William Beckford (1998), and a polemical study, Stylistic Cold Wars, of John Betjeman and Nikolaus Pevsner (2000). He is currently writing an historic gardens series of the English counties.