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Adrian Barlow, Kempe: The Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe Published by Lutterworth Press Most people who visit churches admire the stained glass, but how many of us know more than a smattering about the people who designed and made church windows? Stained glass certainly isn’t my own area of expertise, and like many others, my knowledge is limited mostly to those who are famous for doing something else – people like Edward Burne-Jones or John Piper. Many stained glass artists are shadowy figures, even if we know their names. One figure whose name is familiar (from countless church guidebooks, from Pevsner) but whose life is little known is the Victorian designer and maker of stained glass Charles Eamer Kempe. Adrian Barlow’s new biography is here to put us right. Kempe: The Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe tackles the life in the opening chapters . Barlow leads us through his subject’s upbringing: the unhappy prep school years of a shy and stammering boy, the ha...

Retrospective (2): A handful of fragments As my next short sequence of backward-glancing links to celebrate ten years of blogging , I'm concentrating on fragments – those broken bits and pieces that can tell us so much about history – or occasionally fox us – while also being so evocative. Whether it's bits of medieval stained glass or chunks of old masonry, such unregarded scraps have often surfaced on the English Buildings blog over the last ten years. Here are a few you may have missed... Tantalising bits of stained glass in Oxfordshire Old bits of pottery put to architectural use in Northamptonshire Traces of a mason's yard in Shrewsbury A revealing broken pinnacle in Somerset A whole wall of fragments in Gloucestershire .