Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) was one of the great architects of the twentieth century. His Edwardian country houses, surrounded by rhapsodic gardens, beguiled clients with their romance and wit. After 1918, the war memorials that he created symbolised a grieving nation’s sense of loss. In the new capital of the British Raj, New Delhi, the Viceroy’s House or Rashtrapati Bhavan had a footprint bigger than Versailles. His unfinished Liverpool Cathedral would have rivalled St Peter’s in Rome.

Intensely shy, Lutyens hid his personality behind puns and jokes - and yet he could be called ‘part mystic’, a reference to an inner profundity. Rich in stories, the Talk will cover the entertaining and stylish biography of the architect, based on Clive's forthcoming book, a major new study incorporating fresh research which shows this most charismatic of architects in a new light.

Clive Aslet is an award-winning writer and Visiting Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. In 2019, he founded Triglyph Books with the photographer Dylan Thomas, whose first title was their joint book Old Homes, New Life: the Resurgence of the British Country House.

Clive has published more than thirty books on architecture and British culture, beginning with The Last Country Houses for Yale University Press in 1982. This was republished by Frances Lincoln as The Edwardian Country House in 2012. In 1990, Yale also published his book The American Country House, a study of a comparable phenomenon to the Edwardian country house which arose in the United States during the Gilded Age. He returned to Yale for The Story of the Country House published in 2021. Other of Clive’s titles include Landmarks of Britain (Hodder and Stoughton, 2005) and War Memorial (Penguin, 2013).

For many years Clive was Editor of the magazine Country Life and he is now Chair of the Lutyens Trust. Married with three children, Clive lives in London and Ramsgate, England.

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