A Country House Companion

Girouard has compiled an anthology of personal anecdote and reminiscence that offers a wonderfully entertaining glimpse of life on both sides of the green baize door. Chosen from contemporary letters, diaries and books, these voices - funny, anecdotal, awed, sometimes petulant, always revealing - speak to us directly across the centuries, evoking the past as no history book can ever do. Here are the imperious tones of Lady Compton demanding her rights, the scabrous wit of John Aubrey, the displeasure of Queen Victoria,,the blase Mr Balfour, the malice of Virginia Woolf and the bewilderment of Cecil Beaton. Here, too are accounts of birth and death, of elopement, gossip and scandal, and drinking and amusenment, and all the time-consuming rituals of eatingm drinking and amusement that filled the hours at such houses as Knole, Chatsworth and Castle Howard, recorded with the freshness and intimacy of first-hand witnesses. Illustrated throughout...