Adrian Tinniswood is the author of fourteen books of social and architectural history. A Senior Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham and a Visiting Fellow in Heritage and History at Bath Spa University, he has worked for and with the National Trust at local, regional and national level for more than thirty years. In 2013 he was awarded an OBE for services to heritage.
Tinniswood and his publishers should be congratulated for issuing this elegant, encyclopedic and entertaining history... We are in the company of a confident and skilled historian who understands the mores of his era and wears his learning lightly... This is a handsomely illustrated pick'n'mix of mansions, manors, castles and palaces.... Tinniswood expands our Sunday evening viewing with the kind of detail you can't invent... Deserves to be on every costume drama producer's bookshelf. -- Virginia Nicholson * The Times * He has produced a luscious, summery book, full of amiable anecdotes and photographs of striking interiors, celebrating headstrong optimists who defied the defeatism of the times. The Long Weekend resembles a well-kept hothouse festooned with fruit ripe for the plucking. -- Richard Davenport-Hines * Sunday Times * Wonderfully opulent, richly textured... The opening chapters of The Long Weekend paint an evocative picture... In telling us how the English country house changed, he is, of course, telling us how England changed too. -- Xan Brooks * Sunday Telegraph * [A] masterpiece of social history. -- Roger Lewis * Daily Mail * Many of Tinniswood's anecdotes are extraordinary... Painstakingly researched detail that makes The Long Weekend so entertaining... A rich, multilayered and well-illustrated account of a style of live that disappeared with the Second World War. Lovers of...Brideshead Revisited will relish it. -- Charlotte Heathcote * Sunday Express *