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?