About the Book: 

Sumptuous photographs by designer Ashley Hicks (who recently photographed the interiors of Buckingham Palace) capture the smouldering spirit of the place: from the state rooms, which house possibly the finest collection of royal Stuart furniture in the world, to the private apartments and gardens, to the behind-the-scenes labyrinth of cellars and attics. Knole provides a window onto English history. The characters who people the pages of the book the grave Elizabethan statesman, the good-for-nothing gadabout at the seedy Court of King James I, the dashing Cavalier, the Restoration rake, the 3rd Duke, that magnificent and melancholy representative of the ancien regime, the whiskery and dark-hearted Mortimer who caused three nights of rioting in 1884 by closing the park to visitors are all representative of their age (members of a family described by Vita Sackville-West as a race too prodigal, too amorous, too weak, too indolent, and too melancholy : in short, a rotten lot, and nearly all stark staring mad. Of course, Vita s torn legacy with the property prompted her dear friend Virginia Woolf to pen Orlando, furthering the place s fame and glamorous lustre. Similarly, the architectural and decorative features of the house, so splendidly revealed by Ashley s photographs, illustrate the different tastes of successive ages, from Thomas Sackville s seventeenth-century makeover of a ramshackle medieval mansion to an early twentieth-century suite of rooms designed in the Bohemian style. Knole has never been illuminated in this way before.

About the Author: 

Robert Sackville-West (7th Baron Sackville) studied History at Oxford University and went on to work in publishing. He now chairs Knole Estates, the property and investment company that-in parallel with the National Trust-runs the Sackville family's interests at Knole, the house in Kent where his family have lived for the past 400 years. Sackville-West is the author of two critically acclaimed books about Knole: Inheritance: The Story of Knole and the Sackvilles (2010) and The Disinherited (2014). Ashley Hicks is a British author, architect, interior and furniture designer, and photographer. He is the son of Lady Pamela Hicks and the legendary decorator David Hicks. He is the author two previous Rizzoli books: Buckingham Palace (2108) and Rooms with a History (2019).