Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival

Reading different types of non-fiction calls for different mental muscles than reading fiction, and, when one is reading outside one's expertise (as I usually am, being a dilettante), a strong degree of humility. I just finished Kenneth Clark's The Gothic Revival, the first book he published as a then-brash and brilliant young art historian (in 1928, when he was all of 25). Although clearly and persuasively written, it is something of a challenging book for non-specialists because Clark assumes an extensive familiarity with the subject of Gothic revival in English architecture in the 18th and 19th centuries; he is making advanced arguments. For background, the Wikipedia article is not bad at all and actually made a few things clearer to me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_Revival

The historical and intellectual territory that this subject takes in is vast, including the literary Gothic movement, the romantic taste for ruins (and even sham ruins), the histories of famous buildings such as Strawberry Hill, Fonthill Abbey, and the Houses of Parliament, the Oxford Movement in theology, the debatable relations between ethics and aesthetics (do virtuous men build good buildings?), and the challenging art criticism of John Ruskin. I did my best to keep up with Clark, but I clearly have some more reading to do!

For starters: Rose Macaulay's Pleasure of Ruins, which I have been meaning to get to for years; Rosemary Hill's God's Architect, on the influential Gothic revivalist Augustus Welby Pugin; and Penelope Hunter-Stiebel's Of Knights and Spires, on the Revival in France and Germany.