Englands Thousand Best Houses

A connoisseur's lavishly illustrated tour of England's most treasured countryhouses is expertly ranked, county by county. Color and b&w photos.

Simon Jenkins has travelled the length and breadth of England to select his thousand best churches. Organised by county, each church is described - often with delightful asides - and given a star-rating from one to five. All of the county sections are prefaced by a map locating each church, and lavishly illustrated with colour photos from the Country Life archive. Jenkins contends that these churches house a gallery of vernacular art without equal in the world. Here, he brings that museum to public attention.

England's views are remarkable for their beauty and variety. With his usual insight and authority, bestselling author Simon Jenkins picks 100 of the very best from the white cliffs of Dover to Hadrian's Wall - and explains the fascinating stories behind each. Jenkins' entertaining and erudite entries provide the rich historical, geographical, botanical and architectural background to breathtaking sights - all beautifully illustrated - both iconic and undiscovered. From Gold Hill, the Dorset village street so famously picturesque it was used in a Hovis advert, to the view of the City of London famously depicted by Canaletto and the wilds of the Yorkshire moors. This book will inspire you to discover the treasures of England's sea, city and landscapes for yourself. Filled with roman roads, cliff-tops, follies, mountains, ancient castles, rolling forests and heart-stopping moments, you'll soon wonder how you chose walks, mini-breaks or spontaneous diversions without it. The perfect guide to Britain's landscape - now available in paperback.

The heroes and villains, triumphs and disasters of English history are instantly familiar -- from the Norman Conquest to Henry VIII, Queen Victoria to the two World Wars. But to understand their full significance we need to know the whole story. A Short History of England sheds new light on all the key individuals and events in English history by bringing them together in an enlightening account of the country's birth, rise to global prominence, and then partial eclipse. Written with flair and authority by Guardian columnist and London Times former editor Simon Jenkins, this is the definitive narrative of how today's England came to be. Concise but comprehensive, with more than a hundred color illustrations, this beautiful single-volume history will be the standard work for years to come.

In this chronological selection of 32 of the most notable houses in England and Wales, Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd and Christopher Simon Sykes present a stunning visual history of the evolution of the 'great house', including Castle Howard, Chatsworth and Highclere Castle (familiar to television viewers as 'Downton Abbey'). It is also a history of great families, seen as part of the houses they created, where their descendants, in many cases, still live today. Full of memorable characters and anecdotal insight, this book is a glorious tribute to what Evelyn Waugh called 'our chief national artistic achievement'.The original photographs show the unexpected as well as the familiar - the private rooms and the servants' quarters as well as the grand exteriors and state rooms, the gardens and noble landscapes. They include some of the most splendid examples of English art and architecture, illustrating the work of Inigo Jones, John Vanbrugh, Thomas Chippendale, Robert Adam and Lancelot 'Capability' Brown.

From an acclaimed social and architectural historian, the tumultuous, scandalous, glitzy, and glamorous history of English country houses and high society during the interwar period As WWI drew to a close, change reverberated through the halls of England's country homes. As the sun set slowly on the British Empire, the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes. In The Long Weekend, historian Adrian Tinniswood introduces us to the tumultuous, scandalous and glamorous history of English country houses during the years between World Wars. As estate taxes and other challenges forced many of these venerable houses onto the market, new sectors of British and American society were seduced by the dream of owning a home in the English countryside. Drawing on thousands of memoirs, letters, and diaries, as well as the eye-witness testimonies of belted earls and bibulous butlers, Tinniswood brings the stately homes of England to life as never before, opening the door to a world by turns opulent and ordinary, noble and vicious, and forever wrapped in myth. We are drawn into the intrigues of legendary families such as the Astors, the Churchills and the Devonshires as they hosted hunting parties and balls that attracted the likes of Charlie Chaplin, T.E. Lawrence, and royals such as Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. We waltz through aristocratic soiré, and watch as the upper crust struggle to fend off rising taxes and underbred outsiders, property speculators and poultry farmers. We gain insight into the guilt and the gingerbread, and see how the image of the country house was carefully protected by its occupants above and below stairs. Through the glitz of estate parties, the social tensions between old money and new, the hunting parties, illicit trysts, and grand feasts, Tinniswood offers a glimpse behind the veil of these great estates -- and reveals a reality much more riveting than the dream.

This is the story of Sasha Abramsky's grandparents, Chimen and Miriam Abramsky, and of their unique home at 5 Hillway, around the corner from Hampstead Heath. In their semi-detached house, so deceptively ordinary from the outside, the Abramskys created a remarkable House of Books. It became the repository for Chimen's collection of thousands upon thousands of books, manuscripts and other printed, handwritten and painted documents, representing his journey through the great political, philosophical, religious and ethical debates that have shaped the western world. Chimen Abramsky was barely a teenager when his father, a famous rabbi, was arrested by Stalin's secret police and sentenced to five years hard labour in Siberia, and fifteen when his family was exiled to London. Lacking a university degree, he nevertheless became a polymath, always obsessed with collecting ideas, with capturing the meanderings of the human soul through the world of great thoughts and thinkers. Rejecting his father's Orthodoxy, he became a Communist, made his living as a book-dealer and amassed a huge, and astonishingly rare, library of socialist literature and memorabilia. Disillusioned with Communism and belatedly recognising the barbarity at the core of Stalin's project, he transformed himself once more, this time into a liberal and a humanist. To his socialist library was added a vastrove of Jewish history volumes. Chimen ended his career as Professor of Hebrew and Jewish studies at UCL, London and rare manuscripts expert for Sotheby's. With his wife Miriam, Chimen made their house a focal point for left-wing intellectual Jewish life: hundreds of the world's leading thinkers, from at their table. The House of Twenty Thousand Books brings alive this latter-day salon by telling the story of Chimen Abramsky's love affair with ideas and with the world of books and of Miriam's obsession with being a hostess and with entertaining. Room by room, book by book, idea by idea, the world of these politically engaged intellectuals, autodidacts and dreamers is lovingly resurrected. In this extraordinary elegy to a lost world, Sasha Abramsky's passionate narrative brings to life once more not just the Hillway salon, but the ideas, the conflicts, the personalities and the human yearnings that animated it. 'The sheer richness of this marvellous book - in terms of its style, think Borges, Perec - amply complements the wondrous complexity of the family - in terms of its subject-matter, think the Eitingons, the Ephrussi - about which Sasha Abramsky writes so lovingly. And as a portrait of London's left-wing Jewish intellectual life it is surely without equal.' Simon Winchester 'I loved this touching and heartfelt celebration of a scholar, teacher and bibliophile, a man whose profound learning was fine-tempered by humane wisdom and self-knowledge. We might all of us envy Sasha Abramsky in possessing such a remarkable grandfather, heroic in his integrity and evoked for us here with real eloquence and affection.' Jonathan Keates 'Sasha Abramsky has combined four kinds of history - familial, political, Jewish, and literary - into one brilliant and compelling book. With him as an erudite and sensitive guide, any reader will be grateful for the opportunity to be immersed into the house of twenty thousand books.' Samuel Freedman 'The House of Twenty Thousand Books is a grandson's elegy for the vanished world of his grandparents' house in London and the exuberant, passionate jostling of two traditions - Jewish and Marxist - that intertwined in his growing up. It is a fascinating memoir of the fatal encounter between Russian Jewish yearning for freedom and the Stalinist creed, a grandson's unsparing, but loving reckoning with a conflicted inheritance. In the digital age, it will also make you long for the smell of old books, the dust on shelves and the collector's passions, all on display in The House of Twenty Thousand Books.' Michael Ignatieff

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'Fascinating and timely. Required reading for every developer, planner or councillor who holds London in trust today' Griff Rhys Jones 'Accessible, clear and readable' Rowan Moore, The Observer ________________________ LONDON: a settlement founded by the Romans, occupied by the Saxons, conquered by the Danes and ruled by the Normans. This unremarkable place - not even included in the Domesday Book - became a medieval maze of alleys and courtyards, later to be chequered with grand estates of Georgian splendour. It swelled with industry and became the centre of the largest empire in history. And rising from the rubble of the Blitz, it is now one of the greatest cities in the world. From the prehistoric occupants of the Thames valley to the preoccupied commuters of today, Simon Jenkins brings together the key events, individuals and trends in London's history to create a matchless portrait of the capital. ________________________ 'A vivid and deeply well-informed account of London's history' Charles Saumarez Smith, Professor of Cultural History, Queen Mary University of London 'Extremely informative and witty' Roy Porter, author of London: A Social History on Landlords to London 'A short, invigorating gallop over two and a half thousand years' Scotsman on A Short History of Europe

From the great citadels of Caernarvon, Harlech, Powis and Beaumaris in the north, to the Victorian glories of Cardiff in the south, St David's cathedral ('the loveliest church in Wales') in the west to the exquisite little hill church of Patrishow in the east, from Plas Newydd above the Menai Straits to the romantic citadel of Carreg Cennan in the heart of the country, the buildings of Wales embody its history and are the equal of any in the British Isles. Simon Jenkins has travelled, it seems, every mile of the country to celebrate, and in some cases to find the very best of them, and irresistibly conveys in this book his enthusiasm for them. Cumulatively they amount to a cultural history of Wales by one of its most devoted sons. Anyone who is visiting Wales or who loves it will want to own this glorious book.