'Gloomth'

The beauty of empty rooms: a lovely gallery of photos at the Telegraph of Horace Walpole's newly renovated Strawberry Hill (whose rooms were never so beautifully empty when he was in residence).

(More at the Sunday Times on an associated exhibit at the Victoria and Albert, now concluded:

It is a fraction of his extraordinary collection, not seen together since everything was auctioned off after Walpole's death. Dr Dee's mirror will be there, King Francis I's golden armour, Walpole's huge collection of portrait miniatures, as well as his oddities, such as a lock of Mary Tudor's hair and Cardinal Wolsey's crimson hat, all in settings that recreate Strawberry Hill's fabulous interior. “You simply cannot separate Walpole's collection from the building he created to contain it,” says Michael Snodin, the exhibition's curator and chair of the Strawberry Hill Trust.

As a graduate student, I was lucky enough to spend a bit of time at the extraordinary Lewis Walpole Library in Connecticut - worthwhile to arrange a stop if you are passing through that part of the state...