Where to buy… RCA sculpture

The Week reviews an exhibition in a private gallery at Cowley Manor

Country hotels usually have little in the way of art beyond a row of sporting prints. But Jessica Sainsbury and her husband, Peter Frankopan, who own Cowley Manor hotel in Gloucestershire, realised they had space to display art properly, and that guests, marooned far from city entertainments, had time to look at it. So in 2012, they set up an art award, inviting students of the Royal College of Art’s sculpture school to create works for their 55-acre garden.

The third edition of the show has a wonderfully eclectic range of works that ambush you as you walk round the grounds. A greenhouse by Jacob Wolff, made up of panels that look like stained glass windows, sits in the middle of a lawn. By a lake, a surreal pair of plaits grows out of an urn (a work by Julia Frank). Here, too, is Laura O’neill’s

Hilarious – if he’d been writing about somebody else.

Happy Days by H.L. Mencken (Library of America £20.65). Contains an honest confession of the innermost feelings of a ten-year-old boy. Hearing his grandfather has died, Mencken thinks: “The day was a Thursday – and they’d certainly not bury the old man until Sunday. No school tomorrow!”

Inside the Third Reich

by Albert Speer (Phoenix £14.99). Forget Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”, which is so comforting to us, the un-banal. Here is the creativity and ambition of