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The Big House - The Story of a Country House and its Family (Paperback)
Loot Price: R249
Discovery Miles 2 490
You Save: R84
(25%)
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The Big House - The Story of a Country House and its Family (Paperback)
(2 ratings, sign in to rate)
List price R333
Loot Price R249
Discovery Miles 2 490
You Save R84 (25%)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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The highly praised biography of an archetypal great house and the
family who lived there for over 250 years. '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 two
hundred and fifty 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 18th-century
dress to the day of his death at ninety-one 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 forty-eight,
eighteen-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 World War I;
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 1930s 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 18th- through to the 20th-century.
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