Boughton House in Northamptonshire is a house of contrasts. Its magnificent, and at the same time, formal exterior in the French style gives little hint of the rambling Tudor manor house embedded within. Involvement with the law and politics at the highest level generated the wealth of its founders and builders, but enlightened artistic patronage and a strong aesthetic sense have been characteristic of many generations of the Dukes of Montagu and of Buccleuch since the 17th century. This book looks at the house and its furnishings.

The second volume of a massive, illustrated survey of the greater houses of medieval England and Wales, first published in 1996.

Records thirty-two of the most important estates in words and photographs.

Boughton, the Duke of Buccleuch's Northamptonshire home, was transformed from a Tudor manor into 'the English Versailles' by Ralph, 1st Duke of Montagu, Charles II's envoy to Louis XIV. It houses splendid portraits of Elizabeth I, Charles II's son the Duke of Monmouth, another Buccleuch ancestor, and Shakespeare's muse, the Countess of Southampton.

This eight-volume set, published 1817-58 by the Nichols family, is a sequel to John Nichols' Literary Anecdotes (1812-15), and provides a useful source of biographical material on authors and publishers at a time when many of the literary genres we now take for granted were first being developed.