A nice read that could have been a great one if the author had put more effort in it.

A lovely article about the civilized and literary charms of ravaged panoramas with collapsed roofs, crumbling walls, and lush overgrown vegetation by Lewis Dartnell inThe Morning News:

Demolish Me

"The present-day lust for ruins is nothing new. In fact, it’s nearly as old as any ruins themselves. From a flattened Louvre to Percy Bysshe Shelley, a journey to the dawn of ruin porn . . .

Ruin lust grew with fervor from the 18th century: the soft, pastel hues of J.M.W Turner’s Tintern Abbey, Hubert Robert’s “Imaginary view of the Gallery of the Louvre as a Ruin,” the ruined cathedrals and shipwrecks of Caspar David Friedrich, and Gustave Doré’s “The New Zealander.” Eighteenth-century English aristocrats even went to the extent of constructing fresh ruins on their estates—follies—for exhibiting their wealth and sophistication whilst picnicking in the shade of the contrived remnants.

It is within this zeitgeist that one of the earliest examples of post-apocalyptic fiction was born, Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man, published eight years after Frankenstein. The Victorians in particular were obsessed with the decline and fall of Rome and conscious that their mighty, globe-spanning British Empire could also succumb to chaos and disintegrate . . ."

Vue imaginaire de la galerie du Louvre en ruine, 1796, Hubert Robert

Link 

You know how I hate almost all the Jack the Ripper fiction I read?

I really enjoyed this one. Read why on Bibliodaze