Sir John Soane: The Royal Academy Lectures contains the full text of Soane's lectures, edited by David Watkin from the manuscripts at the Sir John Soane's Museum in London. It is a revised and abridged edition of his award-winning book Sir John Soane: Enlightenment Thought and the Royal Academy Lectures. In his introduction to this volume, Watkin explains the significance of Soane's approach to architectural history and theory, as expressed in the lectures delivered from 1810–1820 as Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy. Providing a key that enables the modern observer to understand the work of an architect who is widely regarded as the most inventive of his day, the lectures enable us to enter in Soane's private dialogue with an astonishing array of philosophers, architectural theorists, art historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists. They are accompanied by a selection of the beautiful watercolors that Soane prepared as illustrations.

"His book supplants most of the many books on Soane and exemplifies the essential significance of documentary and biographical study to architectural history." R.W. Liscombe, Choice

"A striking portrait of the last Enlightenment thinker. David Watkin's intellectual biography is graceful, scholarly, rewarding..." The Times (London)

"This is a neatly condensed version of Watkin's masterful intellectual and professional contextualization of Sir John Soane's lectures as professor of architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, 1810-20...it provides valuable insights on both the intellectual fabric of the Enlightenment and its arcitectural affects, as well as the design practices of Soane. The text is lucid in argument, and literary style, being further clarified by well-chosen illustrations, many from drawings by the architect. In this abridged form the book will prove especially useful to faculty, researchers, graduate students, and professionals." Choice