Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of the World's Greatest Lost Buildings

Buildings are more like us than we realise. They can be born into wealth or poverty, enjoying every privilege or struggling to make ends meet. They have parents -- gods, kings and emperors, governments, visionaries and madmen -- as well as friends and enemies. They have duties and responsibilities. They can endure crises of faith and purpose. They can succeed or fail. They can live. And, sooner or later, they die.

In Fallen Glory, James Crawford uncovers the biographies of some of the world's most fascinating lost and ruined buildings, from the dawn of civilisation to the cyber era. The lives of these iconic structures are packed with drama and intrigue. Soap operas on the grandest scale, they feature war and religion, politics and art, love and betrayal, catastrophe and hope. Frequently their afterlives have been no less dramatic -- their memories used and abused down the millennia for purposes both sacred and profane. They provide the stage for a startling array of characters, including Gilgamesh, the Cretan Minotaur, Agamemnon, Nefertiti, Genghis Khan, Henry VIII, Catherine the Great, Adolf Hitler, and even Bruce Springsteen.

Ranging from the deserts of Iraq, the banks of the Nile and the cloud forests of Peru, to the great cities of Jerusalem, Istanbul, Paris, Rome, London and New York, Fallen Glory is a unique guide to a world of vanished architecture. And, by picking through the fragments of our past, it asks what history's scattered ruins can tell us about our own future.

Review

'Witty and memorable ... moving as well as myth-busting'
Mary Beard, TLS

'The most interesting book I have come across this year ... magnificent'
Alexander McCall Smith, NEW STATESMAN

'Delightful ... The chapter on the Twin Towers is one of the best such pieces I have read'
SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

'Crawford conveys superbly these absorbing tales of hubris, power, violence and decay'
SUNDAY TIMES

'Crawford is a striking storyteller ... resoundingly fine writing'
THE TIMES

'Magnificent ... Many of these buildings can be seen as microcosms of the decline and fall of whole civilisations'
DAILY TELEGRAPH

'Crawford has a striking ability to summon the reality of these long-vanished places … he writes exquisitely, combining economy and clarity with beautiful flights of phrase ... Fallen Glory is a marvellous book.'
LITERARY REVIEW

'A cabinet of curiosities, a book of wonders with unexpected excursions and jubilant and haunting marginalia . . . Ideas spin off ideas and facts off facts like a marvellous clattering snooker-table'
THE SPECTATOR

'Read a chapter a night and set up camp in Genghis Khan's tented cities and pace the Forum of Ancient Rome at leisure. This is a beautiful book, and an admirable monument to the most spectacular buildings man's ingenuity and ambition have ever raised'
MAIL ON SUNDAY

James Crawford works for Scotland's National Collection of architecture and archaeology. Born in the Shetlands in 1978, he studied History and Philosophy of Law at the University of Edinburgh, winning the Lord President Cooper Memorial Prize. His first major work of non-fiction, 'Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of Twenty Lost Buildings From the Tower of babel to the Twin Towers' was published in November 2015. He has previously written a number of photographic books, including 'Above Scotland: The National Collection of Aerial Photography', 'Victorian Scotland', 'Scotland's Landscapes', and 'Aerofilms: A History of Britain from Above'. In 2013, he wrote and acted as design consultant on 'Telling Scotland's Story', a graphic novel guide to Scottish Archaeology. He lives in Edinburgh.