great-fire-snippet.jpg

Extracts

How the Great Fire of London started

The Fall and Rise of the Post-War Country House

Noble Ambitions

[A] preposterously entertaining history of the postwar country house... reading it is rather like leafing through an old leather-bound Smythson address book whose well-connected owner has helpfully added waspish notes, gossip and the odd family tree. In other words, it's heaven.

Adrian Tinniswood's rollicking study perfectly captures the combination of decadence, pathos and brazen cheek that kept the English country house alive when it faced disaster.

[A] brilliant new history of the country house since 1945... Tinniswood tells...[the] story superbly, his racy anecdotes mined not just from the usual memoirs, but from a studious trawl of endless local papers.

Beautifully orchestrated... a compulsive read, deliciously voyeuristic and yet a triumph of meticulous social and cultural scholarship.

A vastly entertaining account of the crisis that befell England's stately homes in the decades immediately after the war.

Tinniswood...[is] an erudite historian of country-house life in all its anecdote-worthy vagaries.

As this beautifully illustrated volume shows, the 1950s and the 1960s saw a renaissance as rock concerts replaced hunt balls and the doors of ancient family seats were thrown open to paying customers. Tinniswood chronicles it all in lively detail.

By turns warm, sympathetic, sly and analytical, Tinniswood examines the complex history of the post-war country house with skill, grace, clarity - and charity. A triumph.

Tinniswood's meticulously researched and entertaining study...provides a brilliant insight into a much overlooked period. Few authors can combine serious social history with the sometimes sad and often hilarious narratives of country-house life in the way that Tinniswood can.

[A] highly enjoyable, gossipy read with a gasp on every page; a must for the bedside tables of every guest bedroom, and every stately home gift shop.

Nobody is better qualified to tell this tale of loss and transformation, in all its human complexity, than Adrian Tinniswood. A master of the sources, he brings the past to life through his vivid writing and seemingly bottomless fund of stories.

Tinniswood's springy prose is clear-eyed when it comes to analysing the self-interest that lies at the heart of the country house life... [and his] eye for a juicy anecdote provides the raw material for the book's 20 chapters.

It is a joy to know that so many of these wonderful buildings have been saved, and to learn about them through this book.

From the Beatles to lions in safari parks, stately homes were saved by some unlikely samaritans, as Tinniswood charts in this brilliant social history of great houses after the Second World War

From the bestselling author of The Long Weekend: a wild, sad and sometimes hilarious tour of the English country house after the Second World War, when Swinging London collided with aristocratic values. 
 
'Preposterously entertaining' Observer 
'Brilliant' Daily Telegraph 
'Rollicking' Sunday Times 
 
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. 
 
Yet - perhaps surprisingly - 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. 
 
* A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year * 
* Longlisted for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History *

A Domestic History of the Royal Household

Behind the Throne

From the first Elizabethan age to the second, Britain's monarchs seen through the eyes of those who keep their secrets

Behind the Throne is, above all, a history of family life. 
 
They ate, entertained their friends and worried about money. Henry VIII kept tripping over his dogs. George II threw his son out of the house. James I had to cut back on the drink bills. 
 
The great difference is that royal families had more help with their lives than most. 
 
Charles I maintained a household of 2,000. Victoria's medical establishment alone consisted of thirty doctors, three dentists and a chiropodist. Even today, Elizabeth II keeps a full-time staff of 1,200. 
 
A royal household was a community, a vast machine. Everyone, from James I's Master of the Horse down to William IV's Assistant Table Decker, was there to smooth the sovereign's path through life while simultaneously confirming their status. 
 
Here, Adrian Tinniswood uncovers the reality of five centuries of life at the English court, taking you on a remarkable journey, exploring life as it was lived by clerks and courtiers and clowns and crowned heads. 
 
Behind the Throne is a true domestic history of the royal household, a reconstruction of life behind the throne. 
 
'The most interesting and informative book on British royalty for many years' Literary Review

This is the most interesting and informative book on British royalty for many years.

Behind the Throne, erudite and amusing, bulges with colourful scenes… glorious… a fun, elegant narrative.

This book is a cracking read, packed full of stories which Tinniswood relates with verve and wit… Buy this book for Christmas and give it to all your non-republican friends.

Entertaining… superb… history needs anecdote to make us relate to it, something Tinniswood [does] brilliantly.

Adrian Tinniswood’s handsomely produced Behind the Throne is full of such pleasing details, as it takes us on a fascinating snoop into the studies, kitchens and bedrooms of various monarchs from Elizabeth I to the present queen… Tinniswood gets [the tone] just right, never overly deferential, but humorous and distantly respectful… Behind the Throne is a wonderfully entertaining account of life through five centuries of royal households.

Adrian Tinniswood's juicy new domestic history of the royal household… [is] delicious – as piquant as the green salad with which Edward VIII liked to eat his cold grouse.

Devoted watchers of The Crown will especially enjoy the nimble analysis of both the narcissistic Edward VIII’s brief reign and Princess Margaret’s doomed romance… this enlightening narrative allows the royal family mystique to disappear just a little.

An intimate and entertaining look at the private lives of monarchs from Elizabeth I to the current occupants of Buckingham Palace… Deft, zesty social history.

If Downton Abbey showcases a well-oiled machine of domestic efficiency in an English estate, you might think the servants surrounding British monarchs would be held to an even higher standard of discretion and excellence. And, as historian Tinniswood warns, you’d be entirely wrong. The reality, as he explores in this diverting book covering the domestic life at court from Elizabeth to Elizabeth, is both much messier and incredibly interesting… This rare glimpse into royal households reveals the priorities and peculiarities of kings and queens.

Tinniswood retells some of the best-known and best-loved episodes in British royal history… with elegance and wit… [and] based on extensive research.

Tinniswood tells us… What is revealed by this history of regal domesticity is that, in many respects, nothing has altered.

This book will be greatly enjoyed… [Behind the Throne] has plenty…splendid nuggets.

Entertaining… Behind the Throne…contains gems

Tinniswood is one of our finest historians and he brings to life the reality of royal life behind the scenes in stunning detail. If you want to know about the private lives of monarchs, this brilliant, beautifully illustrated account will more than satisfy.

BBC History Magazine, **Books of the Year**

Penetrating and enjoyable. It is very fluently written, spiced with wit, and always judicious.

Behind the Throne is a history of family life. 
 
The families concerned were royal families. But they still had to get up in the morning. They ate and entertained their friends and worried about money. Henry VIII kept tripping over his dogs. George II threw his son out of the house. James I had to cut back on the drink bills. 
 
The great difference is that royal families had more help with their lives than most. Charles I maintained a household of 2,000 people. Victoria’s medical establishment alone consisted of thirty doctors, three dentists and a chiropodist. Even in today’s more democratic climate, Elizabeth II keeps a full-time staff of 1,200. A royal household was a community, a vast machine. Everyone, from James I’s Master of the Horse down to William IV’s Assistant Table Decker, was there to smooth the sovereign’s path through life while simultaneously confirming his or her status. 
 
Behind the Throne uncovers the reality of five centuries of life at the English court, taking the reader on a remarkable journey from one Queen Elizabeth to another and exploring life as it was lived by clerks and courtiers and clowns and crowned heads: the power struggles and petty rivalries, the tension between duty and desire; the practicalities of cooking dinner for thousands, or ensuring the king always won when he played a game of tennis. 
 
Behind the Throne is nothing less than a domestic history of the royal household, a reconstruction of life behind the throne. Readers go on progress with Elizabeth I as she takes her court and her majesty to her subjects. They dance the conga round the state rooms of Buckingham Palace with George VI. 
 
They find out what it was like to dine with queens, and walk with kings.

Life in the English Country House Between the Wars

The Long Weekend

The Sunday Times bestseller - a beautifully illustrated, evocative history of the English country house in the 20s and 30s

[A] fantastically readable and endlessly fascinating book… Delicious, occasionally fantastical, revealing in ways that Downton Abbey never was. It is as if Tinniswood is at the biggest, wildest, most luxuriantly decadent party ever thrown, and he knows everyone.

Tinniswood and his publishers should be congratulated for issuing this elegant, encyclopedic and entertaining history… We are in the company of a confident and skilled historian who understands the mores of his era and wears his learning lightly… This is a handsomely illustrated pick’n’mix of mansions, manors, castles and palaces…. Tinniswood expands our Sunday evening viewing with the kind of detail you can’t invent… Deserves to be on every costume drama producer’s bookshelf.

He has produced a luscious, summery book, full of amiable anecdotes and photographs of striking interiors, celebrating headstrong optimists who defied the defeatism of the times. The Long Weekend resembles a well-kept hothouse festooned with fruit ripe for the plucking.

Wonderfully opulent, richly textured… The opening chapters of The Long Weekend paint an evocative picture… In telling us how the English country house changed, he is, of course, telling us how England changed too.

[A] masterpiece of social history.

Many of Tinniswood’s anecdotes are extraordinary… Painstakingly researched detail that makes The Long Weekend so entertaining… A rich, multilayered and well-illustrated account of a style of live that disappeared with the Second World War. Lovers of…Brideshead Revisited will relish it.

[A] deliciously jaunty and wonderfully knowledgeable book… Tinniswood displays a terrific insider’s grasp of gossip, while cramming his text with the stories of sport, sex, food, royalty, design, ruination and joy that defined these mansions… Meticulous, irresistible story.

This delicious book achieves completely what it sets out to do.

Tinniswood gives us many entertaining stories about the whimsical extravagances of the new country-housers… The Long Weekend is a celebration of fantasy and yearning cunningly wrapped up in pragmatism and practicality: about ancient castles with top-notch plumbing.

Almost indecently enjoyable… Splendidly contrary book… [Tinniswood has a] sharp pen and a squirrel’s eye for detail… Erudite, funny and oddly poignant.

A perfect piece of escapism…but also intelligent and scholarly social history.

Immaculately produced… Tinniswood is a wonderfully clear writer, lively and curious, and with a jaunty point of view.

A definitive social history that combines anecdote and narrative with scholarship.

A splendidly enjoyable summer-weekend read.

[It] provides rich detail from all corners, uncovering plenty of angst, but also much optimism.

Brimming with both architectural detail and social insight… [A] highly enjoyable book… This is a delicious cocktail of a book, combining many ingredients and presenting an informed survey of the interwar years as seductively as that period…demands.

Enchanting. However, while poignant, it’s also not without its robust historical points… Beautifully written.

[A] Detailed and fascinating study.

[It] promises rich tales of decadence, scandal and extravagant water features.

The rise, fall and transformation of English country houses between the two world wars…has seldom sounded so interesting. Meticulously researched.

[A} fascinating text… The book is a great read and a window on a lost world.

Beautifully illustrated… [It] overflows with entertaining detail.

Tinniswood uses lively local detail.

[It] combines a panoramic view of life and architecture in the interwar years with pin-sharp detail and the sort of springy prose that comes with complete command of the material.

This is a lively and hugely entertaining history… It’s packed with very funny anecdotes… A delight.

Tinniswood paints a vivid portrait of the period

A detailed and appreciated look at the phenomenon [of country houses]… Tinniswood writes elegantly, in complete charge of his material. The book is a joy to hold in your hand.

Wittily written and beautifully illustrated, Tinniswood’s book recreates a world far more peculiar, but at times rather more enviable, than any fictional version.

[A] compelling volume of social history.

[A] brilliant book about life in the English country house.

A scandal-packed glimpse into the glamourous Downton Abbey-esque world of English country houses… ****

'A masterpiece of social history' Daily Mail 
 
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 and shows 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.

The Essential Guide

The Great Fire of London

On the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London read this essential companion to the gripping story of one of London's worst disasters

2 SEPTEMBER 1666: 350 YEARS SINCE THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON 
 
In the early hours of 2 September 1666 a small fire broke out in a bakery in Pudding Lane. In the five days that followed it grew into a conflagration that would devastate the third largest city in the Western world. 
 
This short edition is the essential guide to the Great Fire of London and includes first-hand descriptions from the diaries of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, as well as a gripping account from renowned historian Adrian Tinniswood.

The Rainborowes

The enthralling history of one English family who changed the world through the turbulent years of the Civil War and birth of the New World

This absorbing book brings us as close as we can get to [Thomas Rainborowe] and to the sturdy, courageous colonists that formed his astounding views.

Adrian Tinniswood, so gifted and spirited a communicator of serious history to a wide readership, here brings a number of themes from his previous books together… Tinniswood is 'not even sure' that he 'likes' the Rainborowes…but he could hardly have done more to bring them to life or to capture their part in the convulsions of their time.

Remarkable and enthralling… Adrian Tinniswood has an eye for a good tale.

An engrossing study of two brothers' ferocious commitment to Cromwell and the Puritan mission to colonise the New World… In this well researched history of the family and their influence, Tinniswood conjures an England of holy-rolling, anti-rational sectarians and Cromwellites of every stripe.

Fascinating… Tinniswood’s main aim here is not, in the end, to prove an abstract argument, but to tell some very good stories – something he does extremely well, with a command of atmospheric detail and a fund of human sympathy.

Globalisation comes to mind when reading The Rainborowes.

Tinniswood’s exceptional account succeeds in bringing the idealistic, God-fearing and often violent Rainborowes to life, while at the same time exploring the perils involved in trying to build a new state in two very different but intimately connected societies.

A fascinating truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story.

A masterful history of Olde and New England during the turbulent years of the Civil War.

So impressive… Tinniswood writes in a fluent, engaging style, and has an impressive ability to recount a telling detail that simultaneously provides a larger historical perspective. The Rainborowes will appeal to a broad range of readers.

[Tinniswood] adopts many techniques of a historical novelist to give a vivid urgency to portraits of events and a richness and colour to descriptions of places... The book has a commendable honesty as well as high literary quality.

This is a gripping account of an extraordinary period

The Rainborowes bridges two generations and two worlds, weaving together the lives of the Rainborowe clan as they struggle to forge a better life for themselves and a better future for humankind in the New World. 
 
Starting with William Rainborowe, a prominent merchant-mariner and shipmaster, and his equally formidable sons and daughters between 1630 and 1660, we follow their astonishing story through the Civil War, the Putney debates, and settling in America. The Rainborowes explains America and mourns England’s failed revolution. It spans oceans and ideologies and encompasses personal tragedies and triumphs, the death of kings and the birth of nations. 
 
Using rare printed material from the period and unpublished manuscripts from collections in Britain and America The Rainborowes recreates day-to-day life on both sides of the Atlantic during one of the most tumultuous periods in Western history. In their efforts to build a paradise on earth, the Rainborowes and their friends encounter pirates and witches, prophets and princes, Muslem militants and Mohican Indians. They build new societies. They are ordinary men and women, and they do an extraordinary thing. 
 
They change the world.

Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in the 17th-Century Mediterranean

Pirates Of Barbary

The incredible, action-packed secret history of Barbary Coast piracy in the 17th century, by the author of the acclaimed The Verneys

Tinniswood's absorbing book is packed with bad characters, big fights and breathless chases

Tinniswood narrates this story with brio and bravura, displaying an excellent eye for the theatrical detail and juicy episode

Adrian Tinniswood is a masterly writer of history with a gift for slamming his readers into the thick of the action

This rollicking book unpicks a confusion of names, dates and places to produce a fascinating history of seabourne conflict.

This exciting book proves that such obscurity is both surprising and undeserved

Skilfully evokes the dread that corsairs aroused

Tinniswood's artful blend of narrative and analysis brings the pirates' society to life. Beneath the vivid surface of this book there lie, sometimes obscured by the vividness, the careful investigation and astute judgement of one of the most incisive of our popular historians.

North African pirates were the scourge of the 17th century, and plundered as far as Cornwall. Tinniswood tells their story with verve

The author's style is an absolute joy and his stories of attacks, based in eyewitness accounts, make rather more thrilling than many fictional thrillers are... He also proves an even-handed judge. While there's no attempt to whitewash the privateers here, there are explanations of what caused men to turn their hand to conquering the seas.

This well-researched history of piracy presents brutal seafaring extortionists instead of eye-patched rascals.

Tinniswood unearths colourful characters and historical oddities while pointing out that the West's inability to deal with Somali pirates show how little we've learned in 400 years

Meticulously researched history of unrestrained murder, robbery and kidnapping on the high seas... This is a brisk, entertaining story, with royal proclamations, letters, maps and lavishness illuminating Tinniswood's vivid tales.

[He] has unearthed many colourful characters and historical oddities and uses eyewitness accounts to weave a fascinating tale

From the coast of Southern Europe to Morocco and the Ottoman states of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, Christian and Muslim seafarers met in bustling ports to swap religions, to battle and to trade goods and sales - raiding as far as Ireland and Iceland in search of their human currency.Studying the origins of these men, their culture and practices, Adrian Tinniswood expertly recreates the twilight world of the corsairs and uncovers a truly remarkable clash of civilisations 
 
Drawing on a wealth of material, from furious royal proclamations to the private letters of pirates and their victims, as well as recent Islamic accounts, Pirates of Barbary provides a new perspectives of the corsairs and a fascinating insight into what it meant to sacrifice all you have for a life so violent, so uncertain and so alien that it sets you apart from the rest of mankind.

Adrian Tinniswood

Adrian Tinniswood has done it again. His trademark blend of glamour, scholarship and superlative storytelling makes this an enthralling read.

A wonderful book. There is no one better than Adrian Tinniswood to explore the dichotomy of the great country houses of Britain in the long prewar period, as he shows us ancestral hangings mixed with new telephone exchanges, coronation robes with marble swimming baths that doubled as ballrooms.

Scintillating and brilliant, from a master of the subject. The book is like sitting down to dinner with a fascinating companion - it is deeply learned but also erudite, conversational, and interesting. A beautiful portrait of the Victorian and the Edwardian country house, full of analysis and anecdotes.

Entertaining... One of the most enjoyable aspects of this book is the palpable excitement felt by late 19th-century owners about their houses’ newfangled features

Shot through with Prof Tinniswood's signature sardonic wit and delicious one-liners... Anyone who wielded cultural clout is here. The range and scope of his book is breathtaking.

Entertaining... Illuminating... A pleasure to read

A whirling, waltzing panorama through the last carefree age of British nobility...[Tinniswood has] a terrific eye for detail and anecdote, all the better to show the country house in its most extreme age of pomp, profligacy and exuberance

[Tinniswood] welcomes the reader into a world of glamour and mad extravagance… Whichever stately home door he opens, he has an enjoyable story about the residents… what a wonderful bird’s eye view Tinniswood give us

Tinniswood covers hundreds of fascinating houses from the famous to the under-sung that we really should know about... The tone is wry; the excesses on display sometimes jaw - dropping.

A significant part of social history, led by Adrian Tinniswood.

The Country House Before the Great War

'Glamour, scholarship and superlative storytelling [...] an enthralling read.' 
LUCY WORSLEY 
 
Adrian Tinniswood opens the doors on the excess, intrigue and absurdities of life in the late Victorian and Edwardian country house 
 
In 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. 
 
'A wonderful book.' 
JUDITH FLANDERS 
 
'Scintillating and brilliant, from a master of the subject.' 
GARETH RUSSELL 
 
**A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR**

Adrian Tinniswood

Praise for The Power and the Glory

Adrian Tinniswood has done it again. His trademark blend of glamour, scholarship and superlative storytelling makes this an enthralling read.

A wonderful book. There is no one better than Adrian Tinniswood to explore the dichotomy of the great country houses of Britain in the long prewar period, as he shows us ancestral hangings mixed with new tele ...

Scintillating and brilliant, from a master of the subject. The book is like sitting down to dinner with a fascinating companion - it is deeply learned but also erudite, conversational, and interesting. A beau ...

Adrian Tinniswood has done it again. His trademark blend of glamour, scholarship and superlative storytelling makes this an enthralling read.

A wonderful book. There is no one better than Adrian Tinniswood to explore the dichotomy of the great country houses of Britain in the long prewar period, as he shows us ancestral hangings mixed with new tele ...

Scintillating and brilliant, from a master of the subject. The book is like sitting down to dinner with a fascinating companion - it is deeply learned but also erudite, conversational, and interesting. A beau ...

Adrian Tinniswood has done it again. His trademark blend of glamour, scholarship and superlative storytelling makes this an enthralling read.

A wonderful book. There is no one better than Adrian Tinniswood to explore the dichotomy of the great country houses of Britain in the long prewar period, as he shows us ancestral hangings mixed with new tele ...

Scintillating and brilliant, from a master of the subject. The book is like sitting down to dinner with a fascinating companion - it is deeply learned but also erudite, conversational, and interesting. A beau ...

Books by Adrian Tinniswood

Articles featuring Adrian Tinniswood

How the Great Fire of London started

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter