Bleinhem

This is where the Duke of Marlborough lives - in this small pavilion at one extremity of his very grand palace - Blenheim where famously Winston Churchill, nephew of the 8th Duke, was born. The palace still belongs to the family. Only in England.

Gardens

The variety, the beauty but also the precision of english gardens are astounding. The walled garden, the flower garden, the vegetable garden, the formal garden - no english country house is complete without its garden. Beyond the garden, the park. Beyond the park the countryside.

Knole

In the town of Sevenoaks, in the midst of a deer park, sits Knole, with its 365 rooms, home of the Sackville-West family. In olden times, their nickname was Fillsack: the house, chockful of family portraits and royal furniture, reeks of rapacity. Pile on the riches, for the greater glory of the family, it screams. Wood-paneled room after room, in dim daylight, the rain outside, the heavy steps of the ancestors echoing through the halls. Vita Sackville-West, the dispossessed heiress, loved it. I am more in sympathy with Eddie, the 5th Lord Sackville, novelist, critic, musician, confirmed bachelor and aesthete, who moved to Ireland in 1956: he told the Daily Mail: "Ireland suits my temperament. I prefer it to that big house in Kent".

Sissinghurst

Vita Sackville-West would have inherited Knole were it not for a "technical accident": the fact that she had been born a woman, a piece of bad luck that she tried hard to compensate for. Both she and her husband, Harold Nicolson, were homosexual.  Vita was a novelist, great friend of Virginia Wolf, the inspiration for her novel Orlando, but her passion was gardening. Harold was a minor diplomat, a minor politician and a minor writer but he survives, thanks to his discipline. Every day, before adjourning, no matter how late it was or how much he had had to drink, he sat at his typewriter and accounted for his day. His diaries, spanning decades, are a priceless record of english history, disguised as gossip. Together they bought Sissinghurst, an old Tudor Castle and made it their home. Nigel Nicolson, their son, disclosed their secrets in "Portrait of a Marriage".

Literary families

I am sitting at Gatwick airport, waiting to catch my flight to Dublin, reading "The Hated Wife", a short biography of Rudyard Kipling's wife. I picked it up, on a whim, at the end of a visit to Bateman's house, Kipling's residence, in the village of Burwash, in Sussex, at the end of a week roaming the english countryside. The weather had been glorious, but today it had been raining, steadily. The house was gloomy and sad: perhaps a reflection of Kipling's plunge from the height of fame to a sort of crepuscular existence as the discredited, quaint champion of British imperialism. Add to that his sorry domestic circumstances: the death of his favorite daughter, and then his son, sacrificial victim to his patriotism, whom he had enlisted, by force of connections, in the Irish Regiment, to see him predictably perish and disappear in the battle of the Somme. And his dour wife, watching over him, crushed by sorrow and by the burdens of running his grand household. I have no interest in Kipling, but I was attracted by the book. I liked the first sentence, and I was interested in the author, Adam Nicolson, 5th Baron Carnock, son of Nigel Nicolson and grandson of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. So I read on, carried forward by Nicolson's tight, knowing prose. Is he, perhaps, the best writer of that literary family?