What is it about ruins that is so alluring, so puzzling, that they can hold us in endless wonder over the half-erased story they tell? This elegant book explores the captivating hold these remains and broken pieces – from architecture to art and literature – have on us. Why are we suspicious of things that are too smooth, too continuous? What makes us feel, when we look at a fragment, that its very incompletion has a kind of meaning in itself?

Looking at ancient fragments, Robert Harbison probes the ways we have recovered, restored and exhibited them. He moves on to modernist architecture and its own pursuit of fragmentary form, examining modern projects inserted into existing ruins, from Castelvecchio in Verona to the Neues Museum in Berlin. T. S. Eliot, Montaigne, Coleridge, Sterne and Joyce have all used fragments as the foundation for creating new work, as have visual artists, from Ruskin to Schwitters, as well as film-makers like Eisenstein and contemporary artists from Gordon Matta-Clark onwards.

From ancient to modern times and across every imaginable form of art, Ruins and Fragments takes a poetic look at how ruins have offered us a way of understanding history and have enabled us to create the new.