I nearly got cross with Edward Hollis's delightful book, on page 141 to be exact, because I had the feeling the author was being a bit of a tease. In the fifth of the 13 "secret" lives of buildings he relates, that of Gloucester cathedral, Hollis raises the strange case of the death and burial of Edward II. Had the deposed Plantagenet king of England been cruelly put to death with a red-hot poker at Berkeley Castle and then buried in the filigree gothic tomb erected in his memory in the cathedral? Or had he escaped over the Alps to Lombardy, where he lies buried in "a simple tomb in the mountain hermitage at Cecima, a quiet place where nothing has changed for centuries"?

Jonathan Glancey enjoys tracing the stories written in the stones of the world's great edifices.