William Kent: architect, designer, opportunist by Timothy Mowl

An English Michelangelo - damn him!

After the storied lives of Horace Walpole and William Beckford, the two previous figures to feel the lash of Mowl's biographical talents, William Kent is an intriguing choice. Very little is known of his private life, and the surviving letters are both semi-literate and dull. To tease out the charm, energy and cunning that plucked Kent from the house of a provincial joiner and made him eminent in the eyes of Queens and prime ministers, a biographer needs more than a scattering of those talents himself.

Mowl has energy and cunning in spades, and he wisely takes the course of making the book more an assessment of Kent's work and times than an attempt on his life. The chapters in which he describes Kent's work on Stowe, Esher Place and Rousham House, thrum with a witty and passionate delight in the arrangement of space and form that makes the reader want to hop in the car at once, book in hand. It is a pity that so many concessions must be made elsewhere to the author's peculiar prejudices and preferences.

The first of these is Mowl's unconcealed detestation for the Palladian revival and the culture that spawned it. It is not much of a surprise, after chapter after chapter of virulent condemnation ("unenterprising... ridiculous... settled like a blight...") to find Mowl comparing Kent's designs for Burlington to Albert Speer's for Hitler. His contention is that Palladianism was first researched on the run by Burlington himself during a whistle-stop tour of Italy, then sold on the cheap to an English aristocracy so critically embarrassed at being ruled by a German that it needed to console itself by playing at Roman senators; but this interesting theory is eclipsed by its presentation, which camouflages the assiduity of Mowl's research and makes his points seem partisan, spluttering and trivial.

It isn't just Palladianism, though: a whole host of Georgian horrors present themselves to Mowl's shocked gaze, and in Alexander Pope, Kent's good friend and companion at Twickenham, he finds a human form for them. Mowl bitterly resents Pope's fame; for him it is another index of the culturally bankrupt Zeitgeist that did its best to mock and smother Kent's true genius. So at every opportunity he turns his cannons on Pope's verse ("for readers who are themselves naturally vengeful, unforgiving and point-scoring"); his letters ("disenchanting"); his heroic couplets ("ridiculous... vapid") and his character ("a virulent homophobe... the most appalling scrounger and ingratiating creep").

Another preoccupation, homosexuality, entraps him into some highly peculiar phrasings. Walpole and Beckford both had colourful gay subplots to their lives, and one senses some disappointment that Kent remained so tiresomely cryptic about his appetites: the early chapters are nonetheless stuffed with authorial winks and nudges. But when Mowl gets on to the construction of Horace Walpole's famous house at Strawberry Hill, the style becomes a tug-of-war between Roy Strong and Dafydd from Little Britain: whereas Kent, we are told, invented Gothick-with-a-k, "a compromise style for 18th-century builders", Walpole, who had "gathered a whole gang of like-minded homosexuals about him", went all the way to 19th-century Gothic-with-a-C. Kent "had no lively, camp friends", so he clearly didn't have a prayer. Elsewhere Mowl hilariously contends that it is the "gratuitous male nudity which brings the Sistine its permanent fascinated throngs".

Perhaps the reason for these narrative hijacks is that Mowl cannot make up his mind about Kent. Occasionally he simply apostrophises his reader - was Kent ever serious enough to be a great designer, a great architect or a great artist? - and does not stay for an answer; at other times he alternates between vicious disparagement of Kent's work and paeans to him as an "English Michelangelo". Animated by such Manichean rage, it is no wonder if he feels tempted to take refuge in his own opinions. At the end of this glittering knockabout of a book, though, the reader may well be as much in the dark about Kent as he was at the beginning.