Amazon.com description: Product Description: This novel and thoroughly documented study of Sir John Soane (1753-1837) contains the fullest intellectual biography yet published of any English architect. It also sheds new light on eighteenth-century British and continental architectural theory. Dr Watkin enters Soane's private dialogue with an astonishing array of philosophers, architectural theorists, art-historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, whose writings he studied while preparing his lectures on architecture at the Royal Academy from 1809. The texts he studied range from classical authors to many of his most famous contemporaries. The book relates Soane's reading to his own architecture and to his lectures, which are published here in full for the first time, with over one hundred and fifty of his superb lecture illustrations, including twenty-five in colour. Recipient of the 1997 Sir Banister Fletcher Prize