Is Blenheim Palace primarily a private home or a public monument to a national hero? That is a question that dogged its architect, Sir John Vanbrugh, and was at the root of his quarrel with Sarah, the first Duchess of Marlborough.

The magnificent new coffee-table book Sir John Vanbrugh, Storyteller in Stone by Vaughan Hart (Yale University Press £35) certainly makes it clear that the playwright-cum-architect considered the Palace (a gift from a grateful nation) to be a memorial to the "deed - the Duke's defeat of the French in 1704 - and not to the doer".

In a letter to Robert Harley, later Earl of Oxford, Vanbrugh wrote that he saw the building more as "an intended Monument to the Queen's Glory, than a private Habitation for the Duke of Marlborough".

The book is well named. Vanbrugh (1664-1726), the son of a London merchant of Flemish descent called Giles Vanbrook, and of Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Dudley Carleton, really was a storyteller who, late in life, turned to architecture in order to express his grand ideas.

Vanbrugh won the commission for Blenheim thanks, in part at least, to his membership of the influential intellectual group called the Kit-Cat Club, named after Christopher Kit, a London piemaker.

The Kit-Cat Club, by Ophelia Field (Harper Press £25), describes how Marlborough chose a Kit-Cat member in recognition of the fact that members had pushed the Army Supply Bill through Parliament in the run-up to the Battle of Blenheim.

Among the many disagreements between architect and duchess was a bitter row about the bridge at Blenheim. Vanbrugh intended it to be "theatrical" in the extreme, incorporating an arcade and even rooms.

In the end the rooms - some now drowned in the lake which was later created by Capability Brown - were indeed built, but the arcade never materialised.

Whether primararily a monument or a home, few in the 18th century would have predicted that Blenheim would ever become the tourist magnet it is today.

But there were plenty, even then, to make fun of Vanbrugh's grandiloquent style of building. Alexander Pope, who lived nearby at Stanton Harcourt, wrote a mock epitaph: "Lie Heavy on him, Earth, For he laid many heavy loads on thee."