Geoffrey Scott is a spectral figure in twentieth-century English literary culture. I have known people who have read Robert Skidelsky’s biography of John Maynard Keynes, Meryle Secrest’s biography of Bernard Berenson, and R. W. B. Lewis’s biography of Edith Wharton, in each of which Scott merits several mentions, yet who do not thereafter recall Scott’s name. It is in part that Scott was that type of mercurial belletrist whose body of work comprises diverse projects known principally to specialists in given areas. Thus, the expert on Johnson and Boswell will certainly know of Scott. The expert in the theory of classical architecture will know of Scott. The expert on eighteenth-century French literature is likely to have heard of Scott. But to the general fan of literary biographies Scott’s just another in the long list of people—hangers-on, adventurers, dilettantes—whom famous people slept with. It’s a pity, for Scott, who died frightfully young, produced not just an engaging but truly an enriching, if small, body of work. And as an architectural theorist he may have no English-language peer in the twentieth century.

Geoffrey Scott was born in Hampstead in 1884. He was two years the junior of Virginia Woolf, and one year the junior of John Maynard Keynes. Scott’s father was a flooring manufacturer who provided nicely for his wife and seven children, of whom Geoffrey was the youngest. His father’s brother, Charles Prestwich Scott, served as editor of the Manchester Guardianfor fifty-seven years. Geoffrey grew up in comfortable surroundings,