The Long Weekend : Life in the English Country House

Tinniswood, Adrian

ISBN 10: 0224099450 / ISBN 13: 9780224099455

Published by Jonathan Cape,, 2016

About this Item

Hardback. 406pp. first edition. Illustrated throughout, occasionally in colour. A study of the country house 1918-1939. Chapters are both chronological and thematic including the field sports weekend, the political house, etc. Famous houses such as Clivden and architects such as Lutyens as covered in detail. Ragged tear of about 1.5 inches to lower edge of dust jacket else book and jacket are clean, bright and neat. Near fine, bright copy in fair dust jacket Near fine, bright copy in fair dust jacket.

Seller Inventory # 26869

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Long Weekend : Life in the English Country House
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape,
• Publication Date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0224099450
• ISBN 13: 9780224099455
• Binding: Hardback
• Edition: First Edition.
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

‘[A] fantastically readable and endlessly fascinating book… Delicious, occasionally fantastical, revealing in ways that Downtown Abbey never was.’ Rachel Cooke, Observer

A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year

There is nothing quite as beautiful as an English country house in summer. And there has never been a summer quite like that Indian summer between the two world wars, a period of gentle decline in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes.

Real life in the country house during the 1920s and 1930s was not always so sunny. By turns opulent and ordinary, noble and vicious, its shadows were darker. In The Long Weekend, Adrian Tinniswood uncovers the truth about a world half-forgotten, draped in myth and hidden behind stiff upper lips and film-star smiles. Drawing on hundreds of memoirs, on unpublished letters and diaries, on the eye-witness testimonies of belted earls and unhappy heiresses and bullying butlers, The Long Weekend gives a voice to the people who inhabited this world. In a definitive social history which combines anecdote and narrative with scholarship, it brings the stately homes of England to life, giving readers an insight into the guilt and the gingerbread, and showing how the image of the country house was carefully protected by its occupants above and below stairs, and how the reality was so much more interesting than the dream.

About the Author

Adrian Tinniswood is a Senior Research Fellow in History at the University of Buckingham and the author of many books, including The Rainborowes. He lives in Bath, England.