A collection of extravagant stories about artists, miners, princes, chancers, criminals - and above all collectors . . . a real cabinet of curiosities Delightful . . . a charming book, full of surprising insight A storybook, and a delightful one . . . The essays are shaped with great skill and Judah finds curious and pleasing symmetry and coincidences in the varied stories she tells . . . a portrait of our whole world created from the contents of the ground A beautifully illustrated collection of insightful essays . . . This clever outing fascinates A gem of a collection . . . a highly accessible guide delivered in a light, informative tone. Quietly authoritative, the author sustains our attention through the pithiness of her essays and the verve of her storytelling .

Lapidarium sifts through the quarry spoil of history and uncovers gems. Judah's pages are filled with eccentrics and inventors, with the obsessive pursuit of beauty, the hopeful constructions of belief and the thirst for progress and improvement. Her stories also bear out the tragic pattern of so much engagement with the natural world - what begins in wonder leads to greed andrapacious extraction. Behind the glitter of jewellers' windows lies the shadowy back-rooms of polluted water sources, conflict diamonds and the mercury poisoning of artisanal goldworkers.