Adrian Tinniswood – författare

Brought to you by Penguin. As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation''s stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the weight of rising taxes and a growing sense that they had no place in twentieth-century Britain, hundreds of ancestral piles were dismantled and demolished. Perhaps even more surprising was the fact that so many of these great houses survived, as dukes and duchesses clung desperately to their ancestral seats and tenants'' balls gave way to rock concerts, safari parks and day trippers.From the Rolling Stones rocking Longleat to Christine Keeler rocking Cliveden, Noble Ambitions takes us on a lively tour of these crumbling halls of power, as a rakish, raffish, aristocratic Swinging London collided with traditional rural values. Capturing the spirit of the age, Adrian Tinniswood proves that the country house is not only an iconic symbol, but a lens through which to understand the shifting fortunes of Britain in an era of monumental social change.© Adrian Tinniswood 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Brought to you by Penguin.Adrian Tinniswood opens the doors on the excess, intrigue and absurdities of life in the late Victorian and Edwardian country houseIn the decades before the First World War, the owners of the nation’s stately homes revelled in a golden age of glory and glamour. Nothing lay beyond their reach in a world where privilege and hedonism went hand-in-hand with duty and honour.This was a time when the ancestral seats of ancient nobility stood side-by-side with the fabulous palaces of Jewish bankers and Indian princes, when dukes and duchesses mixed with aristocratic society hostesses who had learned to dance in the chorus line and self-made millionaires who had been raised in the slums of Manchester and Birmingham.The Power and the Glory explores the country house during this golden age, when Britain ruled over a quarter of the world’s population, when its stately homes were at their most opulent and when, for the privileged few, life in the country house was the best life of all.''Glamour, scholarship and superlative storytelling [...] an enthralling read.''LUCY WORSLEY''A wonderful book.''JUDITH FLANDERS''Scintillating and brilliant, from a master of the subject.''GARETH RUSSELL© Adrian Tinniswood 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024