17th and 18th Century historian Adrian Tinniswood talks to us about his latest book, 'The Power and the Glory' which explores country houses before the Great War, and shares some book recommendations.
Adrian Tinniswood is one of the leading historians of culture and society in 17th and 18th century England. He is the author of several books on social and architectural history. Among his books are The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House Between the Wars (2016), which was a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller; a biography of England’s greatest architect, His Invention So Fertile: A Life of Christopher Wren (2002); and a study of one of the seventeenth-century’s best documented families, The Verneys: a True Story of Love, War and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for History.
He has worked with a number of heritage organisations including the Heritage Lottery Fund and the National Trust and is currently Senior Research Fellow in History at the University of Buckingham and Visiting Fellow in Heritage and History at Bath Spa University. Adrian's latest book is The Power and the Glory: The Country House Before the Great War (Jonathan Cape, October 2024). You can find The Power and the Glory and Adrian's other books on the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
I've always had an interest in the past, but it really kicked in after I left university and went to work in a National Trust house, Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire. Sudbury opened my eyes to the possibilities. Begun in the 1660s, it was also responsible for my love affair with the seventeenth century – and with the English country house.
I feel at home writing about whichever period excites me at the moment. Knowing about a moment in history is great. But learning about a moment in history is even better.
I’ll usually spend up to a year researching. But even when I start to write, I have a habit of disappearing down unfamiliar byeways and trying to find out more. Which I suppose is to say that research is a continuing process.
Without doubt, the Verneys of Claydon in Buckinghamshire were the most fun to write about. By the time I’d finished my book about their lives in the seventeenth century, I knew them better than I knew my own family!
That’s a hard one. The success of The Long Weekend took me by surprise, but I think that the fact that it deals with the country house between the two world wars tapped into an ongoing fascination with Art Deco, perhaps. Think Poirot!
The Power and the Glory is about life in the country house in the decades before the First World War, when 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.
Plenty. But I think the biggest surprise was the diverse nature of country house owners in the period. 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.
Early days, but I’m hoping to write about country house life during the Regency. It’s a period that’s quite new to me, but it produced some of the most fabulous buildings ever seen, from the Marine Pavilion at Brighton to Belvoir Castle and Fonthill Abbey.
I’m just starting Jewish Country Houses, edited by Juliet Carey and Abigail Green. It’s fascinating, going into detail about a subject I wrote about in The Power and the Glory.
I spent a summer working as a bus conductor. I wasn’t very good at it.
