Some Country Houses And Their Owners

During the 1930s and 1940s, a charming, clever and sharply observant young man named James Lees-Milne visited the owners of country houses all over England with a view to persuading them to hand over their properties for preservation by the National Trust. His famous diaries of these travels, first published in the 1970s, are both uproariously funny, as he describes the owners' eccentricities, and deeply poignant, as he depicts a world and way of life which are coming to an end.