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    The Gentry: Stories of the English
    Unavailable
    The Gentry: Stories of the English
    Unavailable
    The Gentry: Stories of the English
    Audiobook16 hours

    The Gentry: Stories of the English

    Written by Adam Nicolson

    Narrated by David Fleeshman

    5/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    Prize-winning author Adam Nicolson tells the story he was born to write – the real story of England. It is the gentry that has made England what it was and, to a degree, still is. In this vivid, lively book, history has never been more readable.

    We may well be ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, but for generations England was a country dominated by its middling families, rooted on their land, in their locality, with a healthy interest in turning a profit from their property and a deep distrust of the centralised state. The virtues we may all believe to be part of the English culture – honesty, affability, courtesy, liberality – each of these has their source in gentry life cultivated over five hundred years. These folk were the backbone of England.

    Adam Nicolson’s riveting new book concentrates on fourteen families with a time-span from 1400 to the present day. From the medieval gung-ho of the Plumpton family to the high-seas adventures of the Lascelles in the 18th-century, to more modern examples, the book provides a chronological picture of the English, seen through these intimate, passionate, powerful stories of family saga. The families have been selected from all over the country and range from the famous to the unknown. Some families are divided by politics , such as the family that took different sides in the Reformation; others destroy their inheritance through reckless gambling or investments . All of them are vivid depictions of the life and code of the gentry, and have left deep archives of family papers which the author has been able to use, often for the very first time.

    THE GENTRY is first and foremost a wonderful sweep of English history. It presents a convincing argument on what has created the distinctive English character but with the sheer readability of an epic novel.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateOct 27, 2011
    ISBN9780007449750
    Unavailable
    The Gentry: Stories of the English
    Author

    Adam Nicolson

    Adam Nicolson is the author of many books on history, travel and the environment. He is winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and lives at Sissinghust Castle in Kent.

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    Reviews for The Gentry

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    • 5/5
      Quite thrilling. Given me by my sister, it sat only shelf for quite a while, as I thought it might be a bit low-key. Really a history of England itself from a particular angle. Packed with personal portraits, power struggles, economic booms and busts, heroes, villains, nostalgia and fine turns of prose. Interesting point that the aristocracy have survived the 20th century's disasters (including democracy!) and still own most of England (the Duke of Westminster who always gets mentioned doesn't appear on Nicolson's list) but the gentry have almost disappeared, while the yeoman farmer has come up. A real case of the squeezed middle.
    • 5/5
      (22 Nov 2012)A spectacular and amazing book that did not deserve to be in the remaindered bookshop. What were people thinking, not buying this? I see that there is a paperback edition now, but I’m glad that I’ve got the hardback, as it’s definitely one to keep.Nicolson takes the stories of various gentry families (the gentry being defined, loosely, as the squire and MP class, below the aristocrats with their safe money, just above but dipping into the professional class, and clinging to this often precarious position) that have been active during various times from the 1410s to the present day and uses a combination of meticulous research, beautiful writing and the ability to tell a jolly good story to bring their lives, relationships and concerns vividly to life, capturing small details and personal testimonies and seeming to revel in the process himself.Some of the 17th century stories were told in his TV series, “The Century that Wrote Itself”, but it’s so nice to have them written down on paper, although with fewer images, obviously (more of these can be found on the book’s website), and without Nicolson’s energetic stile-leaping and bicycle riding. That took a slightly different angle: while the written documents are still highlighted as an amazing source of information, perfectly preserved in all its details, the families are placed much more within their context and social history. The book as a whole is moving, honest, not extrapolating past the sources into “must have felt” this and “should have done that”, and letting the voices of the subject shine through – the best kind of history writing, in my opinion. Flexible like the families about notions of gentry, but also looking at how that term has been defined over the centuries. It brings us right up to date in the last chapters, skillfully weaving the experiences of the modern-day gentry into their context and history. Magnificent.There is a good website to back up the book and provide more information on its contents – what a good idea!