The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (1997). Brilliant survey, full of sharp insights.

Hugh Trevor-Roper,

The Plunder of the Arts in the Seventeenth Century (1970).

Amanda Vickery,

The Gentleman’s Daughter: Womens’ Lives in Georgian England (1999). Challenges the view that elite women were marginalized.

Martin Wiener,

English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (1981). A tract for Thatcher’s times that has perhaps not outlasted her. (8) الأصوات الأرستقراطية

Most of the Roman historians wrote with aristocratic prejudices, but Cicero’s

Letters to Atticus

give a clear sense of what was at stake for the ruling orders in the republic’s last century. All well-educated nobles in later centuries knew them. A vivid picture of chivalric values in action is the epic of

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