Bøger af Adrian Tinniswood

The House Party explores privilege and leisure from the viewpoint of the guest and the host, showing us what it was really like to spend a weekend with the Jazz Age industrialist, the bibulous belted earl, and the bright young thing.

A spirited history of the English country house in its golden age For generations, the great palaces of Britain were home to living histories, noble families that had reigned for centuries. But by the end of the nineteenth century, members of elite society found themselves, for the first time, in the company of arrivistes. Their new neighbors--from chorus girls to millionaire greengrocers to guano impresarios--lacked lineage and were unencumbered by the weight of tradition. In The Power and the Glory, historian Adrian Tinniswood reconstructs life in the country house during its golden age before the Great War, when Britain ruled over a quarter of the earth's population and its stately homes were at their most opulent. But change was on the horizon: the landed classes were being forced to grapple not only with new neighbors, but also with new social norms and expectations. An exuberant story, The Power and the Glory offers a delicious, captivating, and often scandalous history of the British country house.

Adrian Tinniswood's magnificent account of the Great Fire of London explores the history of a cataclysm and its consequences.A dynamic recounting of the horror that gripped London in 1666 after a small baker's fire erupted and spread, destroying 13,200 homes, 93 churches, St. Paul's Cathedral, and every administrative building in the capital. Looting, savage violence, panic, and chaos reigned, but what happened in the fire's wake was even more extraordinary.

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. 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. The Power and the Glory explores the country house during this golden age, when Britain ruled over a quarter of the world's population, when its stately homes were at their most opulent and when, for the privileged few, life in the country house was the best life of all.

"It's long been accepted that the 1950s and 1960s were a period of steady decline for the British stately country home. In Noble Ambitions, celebrated historian Adrian Tinniswood shows that the postwar history of family seats and great houses is much more nuanced. Tinniswood proves that the country house is not only an iconic symbol, but a lens through which to understand the shifting fortunes of the British âelite. Twinned with the orthodox narrative of demolition and decline is a parallel story of creativity and dynamic social activity"--

A sweeping historical narrative about a remarkable family that bridged the Atlantic in the mid-17th century, linking the English Civil War to the colonial cause in the New World.

Behind the Throne uncovers the reality of five centuries of life at the English court, taking the reader on a remarkable journey from one Queen Elizabeth to another and exploring life as it was lived by clerks and courtiers and clowns and crowned heads: the power struggles and petty rivalries, the tension between duty and desire;

'[A] fantastically readable and endlessly fascinating book... Delicious, occasionally fantastical, revealing in ways that Downtown Abbey never was.' Rachel Cooke, ObserverA Daily Telegraph Book of the YearThere is nothing quite as beautiful as an English country house in summer.

2 SEPTEMBER 1666: 350 YEARS SINCE THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON In the early hours of 2 September 1666 a small fire broke out in a bakery in Pudding Lane.

Bridges two generations and two worlds, weaving together the lives of the Rainborowe clan as they struggle to forge a better life for themselves and a better future for humankind in the New World.

Drawing on material, from furious royal proclamations to the private letters of pirates and their victims, as well as Islamic accounts, this title provides perspectives of the corsairs and an insight into what it meant to sacrifice all you have for a life so violent, so uncertain and so alien that it sets you apart from the rest of mankind.

Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. In this extraordinary saga, Adrian Tinniswood draws on tens of thousands of letters, which survived by chance in an attic, to reveal the remarkable world of the Verneys, a family of Buckinghamshire gentry in the seventeenth century.

There had, of course, been other fires, Four Hundred and fifty years before, the city had almost burned to the ground. In five days that small fire would devastate the third largest city in the Western world. Adrian Tinniswood's magnificent new account of the Great Fire of London explores the history of a cataclysm and its consequences.

it brings to life the petty jealousies that formed an integral part of both the building world and scientific milieu of the Royal Society. Above all, His Invention So Fertile makes clear to the general reader and the art historian just why Wren remains a cultural icon - both a creation and a creator of the world he lived in.