ANCESTRAL VOICES
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975. First Edition. Hardcover with Dust Jacket. First American Edition, printed in Great Britain, First Printing with complete number line. Sewn binding in green cloth. x, 302pp. B/W portrait frontispiece. FINE copy, exceedingly clean and sharp; DJ with a very trivial nick to spine tail, else FINE with price intact. 'After being invalided out of the British Army in 1941, James Lees-Milne rejoined the Headquarters Staff of the National Trust and dedicated himself to preserving Britain's architectural heritage. Over the next two years he visited countless stately homes and historic buildings whose owners wished, for a variety of reasons, to hand them over to the Trust. These journeys, made usually in the acute discomfort of wartime travel and frequently on foot, took him from Northumberland to Cornwall and from Kent to Cumbria. And all too often the putative gift, when he got there, turned out to be totally unacceptable. Mr. Lees-Milne bore the resultant arguments and upbraidings with stoical good humor but permitted himself the indulgence of writing up his experiences in his diary in a quite uninhibited way. The result, now to be published with the minimum excision necessary to avoid causing pain, gives us a vivid firsthand account of country house life in wartime England as well as sketches of eccentric owners and the author's friends in literary and social circles, including Cecil Beaton, Kenneth Clark, Nancy Mitford, Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, Stephen Spender, the Pope-Hennessys (Una, James, and John), and Ivy Compton-Burnett.' (From the DJ flap). FINE / FINE. Item #510464
ISBN: 0684156474
Price: $75.00