WORK

His most recent book is Sir Edwin Lutyens: Britain’s Greatest Architect?, was published by Triglyph Books in May 2023. Product of a lifelong engagement with the subject, it brings new insights to Lutyens’s life and work, as well as important new research.

In 2021, The Story of the Country House (Yale University Press) provided a short narrative history based on decades of writing about country houses. Reviews can be seen below.

One of several projects Clive has undertaken for the Ax:son Johnson Foundation is a study of Halewell, a country house in the Cotswolds. This will be published by Stolpe Press in 2024.

In 2019, Clive collaborated with the photographer Dylan Thomas on Old Homes, New Life: th Resurgence of the British Country House, which inspired the to set up Triglyph Books as an imprint to publish it. This examines the role of the country house in the 21st century.  

Clive’s first novel is The Birdcage, published by Sandstone Press, which appeared in 2012. Set in Salonika during the First World War, it evolved out of the letters, diaries and memoirs that he read while researching his book War Memorial. 

Having directed an architectural summer school for the University of Buckingham in 2019, he became instrumental in establishing the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture at Downing College, Cambridge, which opened in 2021.

Clive often writes about issues concerning the countryside, planning, the provision of new homes and British history.

HOME

Married to Naomi, who is a publisher, with three sons, William, Johnny and Charlie (sometimes known as Jojo), Clive divides his time between Pimlico, in central London, and Ramsgate, on the Kent coast.

Clive loves all the arts. He also likes gardening. He sometimes cooks — not very well but he enjoys the pleasures of the table. He travels quite a lot. 'I am lucky,' he says. 'My working life is organised around all the things I adore.' He wrote A Horse in the Country about his (once) budding equestrian life but is now safely back on two feet. In another existence he would like to be an opera singer, a competent chef or William Cobbett.