Imagine someone uncertain, exactly, what a club was (in the sense that Thackeray or Lord Castlereagh would have used the term). Imagine this person leafing through this lavish volume. Even if they had no idea what or where the Travellers Club was, they would be immediately transported by Justin Paget?s photographs into what appears to be a palace, Italianate but unmistakably English. Charles Barry was the genius who designed it. Just look at the Library, one of the most beautiful rooms in Europe, adorned by C. R. Cockerell ? architect of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford ? with a frieze after that in the Temple at Bassae, and a coal fire burning reassuringly in the grate. Here is a resplendent dining room (called in the language of clubland a Coffee Room) glittering with gigantic chandeliers ? two are reproductions; one comes from Carlton House, the demolished residence of the Prince Regent. Here is a staircase up which tottered the old French ambassador, Charles Maurice, Prince de Talleyrand-Périgord.0Here is the Travellers Club, 106 Pall Mall. And here is its history, by John Martin Robinson, one of our finest architectural historians. It is, however, very much more than an architectural history. It takes us from the days after the Napoleonic wars, when a group of young aristocrats, who had travelled in the Mediterranean, wanted to start a club that was less political than the existing London clubs; through the high days of Victorian clubland, when four prime ministers, and nearly all the Dukes, royal and non-royal, belonged; to the era of the ?Foreign Office? members, i.e. spies, who included Donald Maclean, John Cairncross and Anthony Blunt, as well as the real Foreign Office membership, to its period of decline and near extinction in the 1970s.