- Quondam Fellow, All Souls College (from 2011)
- Two-Year Fellow, All Souls College (from 2009 to 2011)
- Visiting Fellow (Michaelmas and Hilary Terms), All Souls College (from 2004 to 2005)
- Contributing Editor, Crafts and occasional advisor to the Crafts Council Collection; independent scholar (from 1987 to 2006)
- Writer/Sub-Editor, Country Life; also Freelance Writer/Journalist, specialising in applied and decorative arts for The Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times (from 1982 to 1987)
- Editorial Work, Quarto (literary magazine), Vole (ecological monthly) and freelance journalism (from 1979 to 1981)
- Undergraduate, Newnham College, Cambridge (from 1976 to 1979)
- Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism
- Stonehenge (Profile Books and Harvard University Press, 2008)
Winner of the Historians of British Art Prize, 2010, for a book on a subject before 1800
- God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (London and Yale, New Haven: Allen Lane, 2009)
- ‘Pugin’s Churches’, Architectural History, 49 (2006)
- ‘Pugin’s Small Houses’, Architectural History, 46 (2003)
- ‘Scarisbrick Hall, Lancashire, revisited’, Country Life, 8 and 15 August (2002)
- Editorial Board, Journal of Modern Craft (Berg) (from 2008)
- Co-Editor, Studies in Victorian Architecture and Design (from 2005)
- Visiting Fellow, All Souls College (from 2004 to 2005)
- Trustee, Victorian Society (from 2003)
- Editorial Board, London Review of Books (from 2000)
- Trustee, Camberwell Residential and Academic Fellowship, Camberwell College of Art (from 2000)
- Trustee, London Library (from 1999 to 2002)
- Marsh Biography Award (2009).
- Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography (2008).
- Wolfson History Prize (2007).
- James Tait Black Biography Prize (2007).
- Society of Authors Award (British Literature Prize) (1993).