Robert Sackville-West Livres

Knole, a historic English house, has been home to the Sackville family for over four centuries. Robert Sackville-West offers a personal tour of this remarkable "calendar house," featuring 365 rooms and exquisite interiors captured in lavish photographs by Ashley Hicks. The narrative intertwines the family's rich history with notable figures from various eras, revealing their influence on English culture. Architectural transformations highlight evolving tastes, while Vita Sackville-West's disinheritance inspired Virginia Woolf's "Orlando," enhancing Knole's legacy.

"By the end of the First World War, the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers were unknown. Most were presumed dead, lost forever under the battlefields of northern France and Flanders. In The Searchers, Robert Sackville-West brings together the extraordinary, moving accounts of those who dedicated their lives to the search for the missing. These stories reveal the remarkable lengths to which people will go to give meaning to their loss: Rudyard Kipling's quest for his son's grave; E.M. Forster's conversations with traumatised soldiers in hospital in Alexandria; desperate attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead; the campaign to establish the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior; and the exhumation and reburial in military cemeteries of hundreds of thousands of bodies. It was a search that would span a century: from the department set up to investigate the fate of missing comrades in the war's aftermath, to the present day, when DNA profiling continues to aid efforts to recover, identify and honour these men. As the rest of the country found ways to repair and move on, countless families were consumed by this mission, undertaking arduous, often hopeless, journeys to discover what happened to their husbands, brothers and sons. Giving prominence to the deep, personal battles of those left behind, The Searchers brings the legacy of war vividly to life in a testament to the bravery, compassion and resilience of the human spirit"--Publisher's description

In the wee hours of the morning of June 3, 1914, a woman and her husband were found dead in a sparsely furnished apartment in Paris. Only when the identity of the couple was revealed in the English press a fortnight later did the full story emerge. The man, Henry Sackville-West, had shot himself minutes after the death of his wife; but Henry's suicidal despair had been driven equally by the failure of his claim to be the legitimate heir to Knole, one of England's largest and stateliest private homes. Henry's father, Lord Sackville, had been introduced to Pepita de Oliva, a beautiful Spanish dancer born in the backstreets of Málaga, in 1852. Their affair was to last until Pepita's death in 1871 and would produce five children, of whom Henry was the youngest. One of his older sisters, Victoria, would eventually become mistress of Knole through a judicious marriage. But Henry and the other illegitimate members of the family, Max, Flora, and Amalia, were gradually erased from the historical record. The Disinherited rescues them from the shadows to which they had been consigned, revealing the secrets and lies at the heart of an English dynasty. It is an absorbing and moving tale of sibling rivalry as the brothers and sisters struggle for their father's love and against the "stain" of illegitimacy that had condemned them to lives of poverty and disappointment.

Brave New World tells what became of the high hopes and noble dreams of the generation that came through the horrible experience of World War II, and who vowed to make a better world. Some topics, fully illustrated are Second Printing, First Aid To Europe, The Cold War, Brave New Britain, France-The Road Back, The German Miracle, When Empires Vanish, New Nations From Old, New Winds in Africa, European Union, Middle East in Turmoil, Inside America, Vietnam Quicksands, Red Dawn in the East, Changing Times, The Youth Explosion, A New Deal for Women,and much more. Time Chart included. 12 x 9 inches. 160 pages with index. Readers Digest Association, London, England, 2001.