Robert Grant Irving is an author and lecturer specializing in the history of art and architecture of Britain and the British Empire. His book Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker, and Imperial Delhi (Yale University Press, 1981 and Oxford University Press, 1982) is the story of the creation of New Delhi from 1911 to 1931, the grandest architectural undertaking in the history of the British Empire. The principal architects were the two leading practitioners of the day, Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker. Irving's book won the British Council Prize in the Humanities as well as the highest honor of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award.