Renishaw Hall: The Story of the Sitwells

26 July, 2015
Author: Desmond Seward
Genre: Biography
Category: New Books

Recommended by Nancy Sladek, editor of Literary Review

"Fascinating, hugely readable and more than a little revisionist biography of the Sitwell family. The book takes in not only Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, the famous siblings who did so much to enliven the world of literature in the early twentieth century, but also their much-maligned father, Sir George, the real hero of the story – ‘Don Quixote with a dash of Machiavelli, as painted by Van Dyck’, as our reviewer, the art historian James Stourton, describes him. Sir George did more than anyone to turn the house and gardens of Renishaw Hall, the family home, into a stunning haven of Italophilia. Desmond Seward, in his exquisitely illustrated and meticulously researched book, uses the history of Renishaw as a cloak for his reassessment of this extravagant and remarkable family."

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