Speaker: Adrian Tinniswood
Topic: The Power and the Glory: the Golden Age of the Country House
Venue: Vinson Building
Time: 15.30-16.30 Saturday 14 September
Talk Summary:
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. It 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 Birmingham and Manchester.
Adrian Tinniswood OBE is Professor of English Social History at the University of Buckingham. His many, highly acclaimed publications include The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War, and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England, The Rainborowes: Pirates, Puritans and a Family’s Quest for the Promised Land, and ‘Noble Ambitions’: The Fall and Rise of the Post-War Country House. His latest book is The Power and the Glory: The Country House Before the Great War (Vintage).
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