Brideshead Revered

David Cannadine

• The Country House by James Lees-Milne
  Oxford, 110 pp, £4.50, November 1982, ISBN 0 19 214139 2
• English Country Houses and Landed Estates by Heather Clemenson
  Croom Helm, 244 pp, £15.95, July 1982, ISBN 0 85664 987 2
• The Last Country Houses by Clive Aslet
  Yale, 344 pp, £15.00, October 1982, ISBN 0 03 302904 0

‘One of the many contradictory qualities of the British,’ James Lees-Milne rightly notes in his attractive if angry anthology in piam memoriam Bladesover, ‘is to revere, and even lament, the things they are in the process of destroying.’ You cannot, he seems to be saying, have conservation without destruction, or a stay of execution without a sentence. This is not, of course, a universally valid dictum. Even the combined and mellifluous resources of Mark Girouard and Yale University Press have yet to unfurl the full panoply of best-selling nostalgia on behalf of such doomed and dodoed delights as education before the comprehensive (Life in the English Secondary Mod?), arithmetic before the pocket calculator (The Victorian Counting House?), American politics before Watergate (The Return to Camelot?) or British politics before Thatcher (Sweetness and Light?). Many such lost causes pass unlamented – more likely to be powdered into dry-as-dust dissertations than instant coffee-table books. We know too much about them to regard their passing with unequivocal regret.