Prophesying Peace
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
In the waning years of the Second World War, one man quietly crisscrossed England, not as a soldier or statesman, but as a custodian of beauty — recording in meticulous, elegant detail his efforts to preserve the great country houses of Britain for the newly formed National Trust. Prophesying Peace is the second volume of James Lees-Milne's celebrated wartime diaries, covering 1944–1945, and presents a vivid, intimate portrait of an England caught between destruction and the fragile hope of renewal. With characteristic wit and a sharp aristocratic eye, Lees-Milne chronicles his visits to crumbling ancestral piles, their eccentric owners, and the social world of a nation bracing itself for a future it could not yet fully imagine. A sequel to the acclaimed Ancestral Voices, this volume confirms Lees-Milne's standing as one of the great English diarists of the twentieth century, worthy of comparison with Pepys and Evelyn. His prose is at once gossip and elegy — sparkling with acerbic observations about the great and the good, yet suffused with a genuine, melancholic tenderness for a vanishing way of life. The diaries stand as an irreplaceable cultural document, capturing the texture of wartime Britain with a precision no historian of events alone could achieve — leaving the reader to wonder what, ultimately, was saved, and what was lost forever.
Author: James Lees-Milne
Format: Hardback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
In the waning years of the Second World War, one man quietly crisscrossed England, not as a soldier or statesman, but as a custodian of beauty — recording in meticulous, elegant detail his efforts to preserve the great country houses of Britain for the newly formed National Trust. Prophesying Peace is the second volume of James Lees-Milne's celebrated wartime diaries, covering 1944–1945, and presents a vivid, intimate portrait of an England caught between destruction and the fragile hope of renewal. With characteristic wit and a sharp aristocratic eye, Lees-Milne chronicles his visits to crumbling ancestral piles, their eccentric owners, and the social world of a nation bracing itself for a future it could not yet fully imagine. A sequel to the acclaimed Ancestral Voices, this volume confirms Lees-Milne's standing as one of the great English diarists of the twentieth century, worthy of comparison with Pepys and Evelyn. His prose is at once gossip and elegy — sparkling with acerbic observations about the great and the good, yet suffused with a genuine, melancholic tenderness for a vanishing way of life. The diaries stand as an irreplaceable cultural document, capturing the texture of wartime Britain with a precision no historian of events alone could achieve — leaving the reader to wonder what, ultimately, was saved, and what was lost forever.