This monograph provides an insight into English country house fiction by twentieth and twenty-first century authors, with a focus on the works of E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, Alan Hollinghurst, and Sarah Waters. The country house is explored within the wider social and cultural contexts of the period, including contemporary architectural development. The variety of literary depictions of the country house reflects the physical diversification of buildings which can be classified as such, from smaller variants to formerly grand residences on the brink of physical collapse. Within the scope of contemporary fiction, architecture and poetics of space, the country house, given its uniquely integrating and exceptionally evocative qualities, accentuates different conceptions of dwelling. Consequently, literary portrayals of the country house can be seen as both prefiguring and reflecting the contemporary practice of living.

A gazetteer of the many fine Shropshire country houses, which covers the architecture, the owners' family history, and the social and economic circumstances that affected them.

It's rural England, just after the turn of the last century. Charlotte married Edward Shift after the sudden death of her first husband, Horace Torrington. They live at Sterne, the home they are in danger of losing due to a financial crisis, with Charlotte's 3 children: Emerald, Clovis and Smudge. On the day of Emerald's birthday party, a terrible train wreck occurs on a branch line and the stranded passengers seek refuge at Sterne. Among these passengers is Charlie Traversham-Beechers, a sketchy figure from Charlotte's past. This unusual guest list makes for an unforgettable birthday celebration for Emerald and an evening of the past literally coming back to haunt Charlotte.

'A masterpiece of social history' Daily Mail There is nothing quite as beautiful as an English country house in summer. And there has never been a summer quite like that Indian summer between the two world wars, a period of gentle decline in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes. Real life in the country house during the 1920s and 1930s was not always so sunny. By turns opulent and ordinary, noble and vicious, its shadows were darker. In The Long Weekend, Adrian Tinniswood uncovers the truth about a world half-forgotten, draped in myth and 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 and unhappy heiresses and bullying butlers, The Long Weekend gives a voice to the people who inhabited this world and shows 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.

Illustrated here are the Castle's Spanish ceilings and other architectural fragments, medieval tapestries, Renissance furniture, nineteenth-century sculpture, and wide-ranging examples of European decorative arts, including ceramics, metalworks, textiles, and more."--BOOK JACKET.

A half century after the Fair Housing Act, despite ongoing transformations of the geography of privilege and poverty, residential segregation by race and income continues to shape urban and suburban neighborhoods in the United States. Why do people live where they do? What explains segregation’s persistence? And why is addressing segregation so complicated? The Dream Revisited brings together a range of expert viewpoints on the causes and consequences of the nation’s separate and unequal living patterns. Leading scholars and practitioners, including civil rights advocates, affordable housing developers, elected officials, and fair housing lawyers, discuss the nature of and policy responses to residential segregation. Essays scrutinize the factors that sustain segregation, including persistent barriers to mobility and complex neighborhood preferences, and its consequences from health to home finance and from policing to politics. They debate how actively and in what ways the government should intervene in housing markets to foster integration. The book features timely analyses of issues such as school integration, mixed income housing, and responses to gentrification from a diversity of viewpoints. A probing examination of a deeply rooted problem, The Dream Revisited offers pressing insights into the changing face of urban inequality.

Two stranded couples find shelter in an inn but find themselves trapped in a game with rules setting up a life-or-death situation.

A Kirkus Best Book of 2018 "Unlike anything I’ve read. With its broad scope and its intimacy and exactness, it cuts through the apparatus of life to the vivid moment. Haunting and huge, and funny and sensuous. It’s wonderful."—Tessa Hadley The Costa Award-winning author of The Pike makes her literary fiction debut with an extraordinary historical novel in the spirit of Wolf Hall and Atonement—a great English country house novel, spanning three centuries, that explores surprisingly timely themes of immigration and exclusion. It is the seventeenth century and a wall is being raised around Wychwood, transforming the great house and its park into a private realm of ornamental lakes, grandiose gardens, and majestic avenues designed by Mr. Norris, a visionary landscaper. In this enclosed world everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war. Dissenters shelter in the woods, lovers rendezvous in secret enclaves, and outsiders—migrants fleeing the plague—find no mercy. Three centuries later, far away in Berlin, another wall is raised, while at Wychwood, an erotic entanglement over one sticky, languorous weekend in 1961 is overshadowed by news of historic change. Young Nell, whose father manages the estate, grows up amid dramatic upheavals as the great house is invaded: a pop festival by the lake, a television crew in the dining room, a Great Storm brewing. In 1989, as the Cold War peters out, a threat from a different kind of conflict reaches Wychwood’s walls. Lucy Hughes-Hallett conjures an intricately structured, captivating story that explores the lives of game keepers and witches, agitators and aristocrats; the exuberance of young love and the pathos of aging; and the way those who try to wall others out risk finding themselves walled in. With poignancy and grace, she illuminates a place where past and present are inextricably linked by stories, legends, and history—and by one patch of peculiar ground.

The magnificent country houses built in Britain between 1890 and 1939 were the last monuments to a vanishing age. Many of these great mammoths of domestic architecture were unsuited to the changes in economic and social priorities that followed the two world wars, and rapidly became extinct. Those that survive, however, provide tangible evidence of the life and death of an extraordinarily prosperous age.The fascinating world, so vividly depicted in Evelyn Waughs Brideshead Revisited, can now be viewed from a new perspective. The Last Country Houses will enlighten all those interested in glimpsing the lost life style of another age.

• Rich, warm, relaxed, natural—Adirondack camps, Western lodges, much more • Glowing photos of dozens of unique rustic homes from across North America • Spotlights craftspeople and creative forces in construction and deacute;cor • Great idea book for anyone looking to design or decorate a primary or second home Used to be that “rustic” meant a dusty, dumpy cabin in the woods. No more!Rustic Revisitedreveals today's rustic—contemporary design that celebrates the honesty of all-natural, local materials such as wood, twig, stone, and bark. Rustic structures often have the same finish on the exterior and the interior—for example, rough-hewn timber on the outside and rough-hewn timber on the inside. The projects inRustic Revisitedembrace the hand-crafted philosophy of rustic and show how to take that philosophy to new heights in a variety of styles, from the Adirondack camp to the Western lodge to the classic log cabin. Thirty unique homes, most planned by architects or interior designers, are showcased here, each lavishly photographed to allow readers exclusive access to interiors, exteriors, and noteworthy details in unusual rustic houses from New York to California, from Montana to Ontario, from North Carolina to Minnesota. These spotlighted projects, plus photos of dozens of additional homes, cover the full spectrum of rustic—renovations and new construction, traditional and cutting edge. A bonus chapter on decoration spotlights the craftspeople who are the creative forces of the movement.