So Jenkins seems to have closed down the possibilities of this book, to have discounted most of the available ways to make it much different or better from the other available guides to historic homes - which at least have the merit of telling you when they are open. His unique selling point, of course, is that "1,000 best". This is a ranking, like a wine guide. But it doesn't really help much to learn, say, that Windsor Castle is ranked alongside Holkham Hall with five stars in a Top Twenty. All of his "Top 100" are five or four stars anyway, and he admits that they "more or less nominated themselves". Things get more interesting further down the list. If you trust Jenkins' judgment - which I do, on anything pre-modern - it might well be worth heading for a three-star house rather than a two-star one, but it's all horribly subjective.

Jenkins rightly applauds a famous earlier book, "The English House" by Herman Muthesius, published a century ago. Muthesius was a highly cultured German diplomat who became fascinated by the English and their homes. But Muthesius did not write only about the past. He wrote about houses that were being built around him at the time. He was a progressive when it came to domestic design. What "England's 1000 Best Houses" did for me was make me realize how badly we now need a new Muthesius to take stock.

And here's one that is quite simply my favourite architecture/design book of the moment:

, 343 pages, colour and monochrome photos and drawings, Yale, £30. This is my kind of book. Wonderfully fascinating, detailed and knowledgable, clear-eyed, written in plain English, every illustration relevant. It tells you things you did not know. It describes a previously under-researched area where architecture and sociology meet, where we all go, where we spend inordinate amounts of time, yet which we scarcely stop to consider. Shops. How did they originate? What are they turning into? How do they shape our lives?

Kathryn Morrison's labour of what looks like love started with the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, now part of English Heritage where she is described as "senior investigator." It is only comparatively recently that anyone would have thought to speak of "shops" and "historical monuments" in the same breath. True, we all mourn when the lovely old shop on the street corner sells up and has its windows and interiors ripped out to make yet another cappuchino emporium or pizza parlour, but we know that this is how it is in retail: a permanent state of churn. Shop architecture - especially the interiors which are most of what we see - is the most ephemeral of all. As soon as you've noticed it, it's gone.