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The Big House - The Story of a Country House and Its Family (Hardcover, illustrated edition)
Loot Price: R376
Discovery Miles 3 760
You Save: R94
(20%)
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The Big House - The Story of a Country House and Its Family (Hardcover, illustrated edition)
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List price R470
Loot Price R376
Discovery Miles 3 760
You Save R94 (20%)
Supplier out of stock. If you add this item to your wish list we will let you know when it becomes available.
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The Big House is the biography of an archetypal great house and the
lives of the family who lived there for over 250 years. On 17 June,
1751 Richard Sykes, 'laid the first stone of the new house at
Sledmere, in a God-forsaken spot high up on the Yorkshire Wolds,
where wolves had roamed freely less than fifty years before'. The
Big House is the biography of a great country house and the lives
of the Sykes family who lived there, with varying fates, for the
next 250 years. It is a fascinating social history set against the
backdrop of a changing England, with a highly individual,
pugnacious and self-determining cast, including: 'Old Tat' Sykes,
said to be one of the great sights of Yorkshire (the author's
great, great, great grandfather), who wore eighteenth-century dress
to the day of his death at 91 in 1861. His son was similarly
eccentric, wearing eight coats that he discarded gradually
throughout the day in order to keep his body temperature at a
constant. He was forced to marry, aged 48, 18-year-old Jessica
Cavendish-Bentick -- a lively and highly intelligent woman who
relieved the boredom of her marriage by acquiring a string of
lovers, writing novels and throwing extravagant parties (her
nickname became 'Lady Satin Tights'), all the while accumulating
debts that ended in a scandalous court case. Their son, Mark, died
suddenly whilst brokering the peace settlement at the Paris Peace
Conference at the end of the First World War; Sledmere was
destroyed by fire shortly afterwards. But the rebuilt Sledmere rose
from the flames to resound again with colourful, brilliant
characters in the 1920s and '30s including the author's
grandmother, Lily, who had been a celebrated bohemian in Paris. The
Big House is vividly written and meticulously researched using the
Sykes own family's papers and photographs. In this splendid
biography of place and time, Christopher Simon Sykes has
resuscitated the lives of his ancestors and their glorious home
from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries.
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