Robert Sackville tells the story of a house which saw thirteen generations of the same aristocratic family : the Sackvilles. From 1604 to the present days, the author retraces the real history of his extraordinary family, and takes us on a journey through time. A very interresting book where the Knole house is almost a real character of its own, a «very old woman, who has always been beautiful, who has had many lovers and seen many generations come and go» as Vita Sackville-West would say.

Hancox is the Tudor hall house in rural Sussex where Charlotte Moore grew up, and where she lives today. It's a time warp where little has changed since her family took it on in 1888. They were a diverse family of doctors and soldiers, liberal politicians and educational pioneers. What they all had in common though was a habit of writing everything down and never throwing anything away. Told with a novelist's vigour, Hancox offers a richly detailed portrait of a vanished way of life: an English country house at the turn of the twentieth century, just before the tragedy of the First World War, with its presiding family, its servants, its farm and its local village.