title: The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War, and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England
author:  Adrian Tinniswood 
description: Adrian Tinniswood is the author of <i>His Invention So Fertile: A Life of Christopher Wren and Visions of Power</i>: <i>Ambition and Architecture from Ancient Times to the Present</i>. He is a respected author, lecturer, and broadcaster in Britain and the United States.
zlib_text: **Blott**
  
   **on the**
  
   **Landscape**
  
    
  
   **by Tom Sharpe**  
  
   _ **To Geoff Millard**_
  
   **Chapter 1**  
  
  Sir Giles Lynchwood, Member of Parliament for South Worfordshire, sat in his
  study and lit a cigar. Outside his window tulips and primroses bloomed, a
  thrush pecked at the lawn and the sun shone down out of a cloudless sky. In
  the distance he could see the cliffs of the Cleene Gorge rising above the
  river.
  
  But Sir Giles had no thoughts for the beauties of the landscape. His mind was
  occupied with other things; with money and Mrs Forthby and the disparity
  between things as they were and things as they might have been. Not that the
  view from his window was one of uninterrupted beauty. It held Lady Maud, and
  whatever else she might be, nobody in his right mind would ever have described
  her as beautiful. She was large and ponderous and possessed a shape that
  someone had once aptly called Rodinesque - certainly Sir Giles, viewing her as
  dispassionately as six years of marriage allo