Robert Sackville-west – författare

The Sackvilles have inhabited Knole, one of Britain’s greatest houses, for more than four hundred years. Robert Sackville-West, the thirteenth generation of the family, takes the reader on a personal tour of this “calendar house,” with its legendary 365 rooms, fifty-two staircases, and seven courtyards.Sumptuous photographs by designer Ashley Hicks—who recently photographed the interiors of Buckingham Palace—capture the smoldering spirit of Knole, from the state rooms, which house possibly the finest collection of royal Stuart furniture in the world, to the private apartments and gardens to the behind-the-scenes labyrinth of cellars and attics. Knole provides a window onto English history. The characters who populate the pages—the grave Elizabethan statesman, the good-for-nothing gadabout at the seedy court of James I, the dashing cavalier, the Restoration rake, the 3rd Duke of the ancien régime—are all representative of their eras (members of a family described by Vita Sackville-West as “a race too prodigal, too amorous, too weak, too indolent, and too melancholy”). Vita's own disinheritance from Knole prompted her dear friend Virginia Woolf to pen Orlando, furthering the place’s fame and glamorous luster. Similarly, the architectural and decorative features of the house illustrate the different tastes of successive ages, from Thomas Sackville’s seventeenth-century makeover of a ramshackle medieval mansion to an early twentieth-century suite of rooms designed in the Bloomsbury style. Knole has never been illuminated in this way before.

Since its purchase in 1604 by Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, the house at Knole, Kent, has been inhabited by thirteen generations of a single aristocratic family, the Sackvilles. Here, drawing on a wealth of unpublished letters, archives and images, the current incumbent of the seat, Robert Sackville-West, paints a vivid and intimate portrait of the vast, labyrinthine house and the close relationships his colourful ancestors formed with it.Inheritance is the story of a house and its inhabitants, a family described by Vita Sackville-West as ‘a race too prodigal, too amorous, too weak, too indolent and too melancholy; a rotten lot, and nearly all stark staring mad'. Where some revelled in the hedonism of aristocratic life, others rebelled against a house which, in time, would disinherit them, shutting its doors to them forever. It's a drama in which the house itself is a principal character, it's fortunes often mirroring those of the family. Every detail holds a story: the portraits, and and all the junk which the subjects of those portraits left behind, point to pivotal moments in history; all the rooms, and the objects that fill them, are freighted with an emotional significance that has been handed down from generation to generation. Now owned by the National Trust, Knole is today one of the largest houses in England, visited by thousands annually and housing one of the country's finest collections of second-hand Royal furniture. It's a pleasure to follow Robert Sackville-West, as he unravels the private life of a public place on a fascinating, masterful, four-hundred-year tour through the memories and memorabilia, political, financial and domestic, of his extraordinary family.

Since its purchase in 1604 by Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, the house at Knole, Kent, has been inhabited by thirteen generations of a single aristocratic family, the Sackvilles. Here, drawing on a wealth of unpublished letters, archives and images, the current incumbent of the seat, Robert Sackville-West, paints a vivid and intimate portrait of the vast, labyrinthine house and the close relationships his colourful ancestors formed with it.Inheritance is the story of a house and its inhabitants, a family described by Vita Sackville-West as ''a race too prodigal, too amorous, too weak, too indolent and too melancholy; a rotten lot, and nearly all stark staring mad''. Where some revelled in the hedonism of aristocratic life, others rebelled against a house which, in time, would disinherit them, shutting its doors to them forever. It''s a drama in which the house itself is a principal character, it''s fortunes often mirroring those of the family. Every detail holds a story: the portraits, and and all the junk which the subjects of those portraits left behind, point to pivotal moments in history; all the rooms, and the objects that fill them, are freighted with an emotional significance that has been handed down from generation to generation. Now owned by the National Trust, Knole is today one of the largest houses in England, visited by thousands annually and housing one of the country''s finest collections of second-hand Royal furniture. It''s a pleasure to follow Robert Sackville-West, as he unravels the private life of a public place on a fascinating, masterful, four-hundred-year tour through the memories and memorabilia, political, financial and domestic, of his extraordinary family.

'Stranger than fiction, but twice as fascinating' Lucy Worsley On the morning of 3 June 1914, Henry Sackville-West, driven to despair by his failed claim to be the legitimate heir to one of the largest and stateliest houses in England, shot himself. His father, Lord Sackville of Knole, had had five children from an affair with a beautiful Spanish dancer. While the oldest became mistress of Knole, the other illegitimate children were erased from the historical record. The Disinherited tells how these siblings struggled for their father's love and against the 'stain' of illegitimacy which condemned them to lives of poverty and disappointment. An absorbing and moving tale of sibling rivalry, it reveals the secrets and lies that lay at the heart of an English dynasty.

In the small hours of the morning of 3 June 1914, a woman and her husband were found dead in a sparsely furnished apartment in Paris. It was only when the identity of the couple was revealed in the English press a fortnight later that the full story emerged. The man, Henry Sackville-West, had shot himself minutes after the death of his wife from cancer; but Henry''s suicidal despair had been driven equally by the failure of his claim to be the legitimate son of Lord Sackville and heir to Knole. The Disinherited reveals the secrets and lies at the heart of an English dynasty, unravelling the parallel lives of Henri''s four illegitimate siblings: in particular his older sister, Victoria, who on becoming Lady Sackville and mistress of Knole, by marriage, consigned her brothers and sisters to lives of poverty and disappointment.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE HISTORICAL WRITERS'' ASSOCIATION CROWN AWARDS 2022''Compelling and often horrifying'' THE TIMES Best Paperbacks of 2022The epic, moving stories of Britain''s search to recover, identify and honour the missing soldiers of the First World WarBy the end of the First World War, the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers were unknown. Most were presumed dead, lost forever under the battlefields of northern France and Flanders.In The Searchers, Robert Sackville-West brings together the extraordinary, moving accounts of those who dedicated their lives to the search for the missing. These stories reveal the remarkable lengths to which people will go to give meaning to their loss: Rudyard Kipling''s quest for his son''s grave; E.M. Forster''s conversations with traumatised soldiers in hospital in Alexandria; desperate attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead; the campaign to establish the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior; and the exhumation and reburial in military cemeteries of hundreds of thousands of bodies. It was a search that would span a century: from the department set up to investigate the fate of missing comrades in the war''s aftermath to the present day, when DNA profiling continues to aid efforts to recover, identify and honour these men. As the rest of the country found ways to repair and move on, countless families were consumed by this mission, undertaking arduous, often hopeless, journeys to discover what happened to their husbands, brothers and sons. Giving prominence to the personal battles of those left behind, The Searchers brings the legacy of war vividly to life in a testament to the bravery, compassion and resilience of the human spirit.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE HISTORICAL WRITERS' ASSOCIATION CROWN AWARDS 2022‘Compelling and often horrifying’ THE TIMES Best Paperbacks of 2022The epic, moving stories of Britain's search to recover, identify and honour the missing soldiers of the First World WarBy the end of the First World War, the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers were unknown. Most were presumed dead, lost forever under the battlefields of northern France and Flanders.In The Searchers, Robert Sackville-West brings together the extraordinary, moving accounts of those who dedicated their lives to the search for the missing. These stories reveal the remarkable lengths to which people will go to give meaning to their loss: Rudyard Kipling's quest for his son's grave; E.M. Forster’s conversations with traumatised soldiers in hospital in Alexandria; desperate attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead; the campaign to establish the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior; and the exhumation and reburial in military cemeteries of hundreds of thousands of bodies. It was a search that would span a century: from the department set up to investigate the fate of missing comrades in the war’s aftermath to the present day, when DNA profiling continues to aid efforts to recover, identify and honour these men. As the rest of the country found ways to repair and move on, countless families were consumed by this mission, undertaking arduous, often hopeless, journeys to discover what happened to their husbands, brothers and sons.Giving prominence to the personal battles of those left behind, The Searchers brings the legacy of war vividly to life in a testament to the bravery, compassion and resilience of the human spirit.