THE POWER AND THE GLORY

Picture books on English country houses are an ongoing genre, but this is a genuine work of history.

Mixing research and gossip, historian Tinniswood has written three volumes on his favorite subject. Although this first volume summarizes its long history, the author concentrates on the golden age of the country house between 1870 and 1914, when hundreds were built or drastically remodeled and a great deal of new money was invested in what was widely if not universally believed to be “a supremely attractive, if mythic, vision of the past.” British media and magazines such as Country Life glamorized the country, persuading successful businessmen from around the world to live in titanic mansions surrounded by vast estates. Tinniswood knows his subject, but readers may be surprised to discover that there are no illustrations. A coffee-table book such as The Country House by David Cannadine might help readers as an additional reference when Tinniswood delves into architectural, interior decorating, and landscaping details. There are the expected topics—gardens, hunting, servants, royal visits, foreign villas, the arrival of the automobile, and modern conveniences. Readers with a taste for action will welcome accounts of country house fires, country house crimes, and owners’ often spectacular sexual peccadilloes and divorces. Imported, mostly American plutocrats make their mark, and readers will receive an education in upper-class antisemitism, traditional but not universal and less vicious than the Continental version.

An entertaining mélange of scholarship and scandal.