The Power and the Glory

Adrian Tinniswood has done it again. His trademark blend of glamour, scholarship and superlative storytelling makes this an enthralling read.

Lucy Worsley

A wonderful book. There is no one better than Adrian Tinniswood to explore the dichotomy of the great country houses of Britain in the long prewar period, as he shows us ancestral hangings mixed with new telephone exchanges, coronation robes with marble swimming baths that doubled as ballrooms.

Judith Flanders

Scintillating and brilliant, from a master of the subject. The book is like sitting down to dinner with a fascinating companion - it is deeply learned but also erudite, conversational, and interesting. A beautiful portrait of the Victorian and the Edwardian country house, full of analysis and anecdotes.

Gareth Russell

One of the most enjoyable aspects of this book is the palpable excitement felt by late 19th-century owners about their houses’ newfangled features

The Times

Shot through with Prof Tinniswood's signature sardonic wit and delicious one-liners... Anyone who wielded cultural clout is here. The range and scope of his book is breathtaking.

Timothy Mowl, Country Life

Entertaining... Illuminating... A pleasure to read

Jane Ridley, Literary Review

[Tinniswood has] a terrific eye for detail and anecdote, all the better to show the country house in its most extreme age of pomp, profligacy and exuberance

New Statesman

The most ingenious, inventive and exciting of our novelists, rich in exactly etched and moving portraits of real human beings

V. S. Pritchett

The Power Tnd The Glory's nameless whisky priest blends seamlessly with his tropical, crooked, anticlerical Mexico. Roman Catholicism is intrinsic to the character and terrain both; Greene's imaginative immersion in both is triumphant

John Updike