{"product_id":"2026200013601-secondhand-prophesying-peace","title":"Prophesying Peace","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Good\u003cbr\u003eJacket: Worn\/faded, no tears\u003cbr\u003ePages: Good\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\n\nA 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49203391234267,"sku":"2026200013601-SECONDHAND","price":20.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/a1da34f9-a0cc-41bc-8092-524df0466389.png?v=1788148329","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026200013601-secondhand-prophesying-peace","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}