Noble Ambitions

About the book

From the bestselling author of The Long Weekend: a wild, sad and sometimes hilarious tour of the English country house after the Second World War, when Swinging London collided with aristocratic values.

'Preposterously entertaining' Observer
'Brilliant' Daily Telegraph
'Rollicking' Sunday Times

As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation's stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the weight of rising taxes and a growing sense that they had no place in twentieth-century Britain, hundreds of ancestral piles were dismantled and demolished.

Yet - perhaps surprisingly - many of these great houses survived, as dukes and duchesses clung...