Product Description
The Long Weekend
Author: Adrian Tinniswood
Format: Paperback
Life in the English Country House Between the Wars
'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Drawing on hundreds of memoirs, on unpublished letters and diaries, on the eye-witness testimonies of belted earls and unhappy heiresses and bullying butlers, The Long Weekend gives a voice to the people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.
About the Author
Adrian Tinniswood is professorial research fellow in history at the University of Buckingham, adjunct professor of history at Maynooth University and the author of many books on British history, including the Sunday Times bestseller The Long Weekend. He was awarded an OBE for services to heritage, and lives in the west of Ireland.
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