Adrian Tinniswood

''Glamour, scholarship and superlative storytelling [...] an enthralling read.''LUCY WORSLEYAdrian Tinniswood opens the doors on the excess, intrigue and absurdities of life in the late Victorian and Edwardian country houseIn 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.''A wonderful book.''JUDITH FLANDERS''Scintillating and brilliant, from a master of the subject.''GARETH RUSSELL

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERVenture behind closed doors to uncover the secrets of life in the English country house between the wars – in all its splendour. During the 1920s and 1930s, as the sun set slowly on the British Empire, England's stately homes concealed worlds both opulent and ordinary, noble and viscious. This was a life draped in myth, hidden behind stiff upper lips and film-star smiles. Drawing on hundreds of memoirs, on unpublished letters and diaries, on the eye-witness testimonies of belted earls, unhappy heiresses and bullying butlers, The Long Weekend reveals how the image of the country house was carefully protected by its occupants above and below stairs, and how the reality was so much more interesting than the dream. 'A masterpiece of social history' Daily Mail‘A delicious cocktail of a book’ Country Life ‘A perfect piece of escapism’ Guardian

An entertaining new history of the Guinness family and their homes, told by our leading historian of the country house.In late 2025, the new Netflix epic ‘House of Guinness’, a saga of one of Europe’s most enduring dynasties, will sweep into households around the world. In The Houses of Guinness, bestselling author Adrian Tinniswood explores the histories of the legendary Guinness family – brewers, philanthropists, socialites – through their mansions and town houses. His tour opens the door to Irish palaces like Farmleigh (where the Edwardian ballroom is said to have a floor made from barrels brought from the brewery) and Luggala in the Wicklow Mountains, and to Biddesden, an exquisite William-and-Mary country house bought as a home for Bryan Guinness and his first wife Diana Mitford, and Robert Adam’s Kenwood on Hampstead Heath, which Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh saved from destruction and bequeathed to the British nation.Unravelling the stories of more than a dozen great Guinness houses, Tinniswood reveals what life was like for a dynasty that rose from ordinary beginnings in Georgian Dublin to become one of the most powerful families in the British Isles. This engaging history is abundantly illustrated with a selection of new and archival photographs and paintings.''Tinniswood … [is] an erudite historian of country-house life in all its anecdote-worthy vagaries'' Financial Times''We are in the company of a confident and skilled historian who understands the mores of his era and wears his learning lightly …'' Virginia Nicholson, The Times