As a would-be fogeyish young clubman in the late Sixties, I took a shine to a still raven-haired Twenties dandy called Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh, Lancastrian squire, pioneering figure in the Georgian Group and Victorian Society, and friend of John Betjeman, whom he had briefly succeeded as architectural critic of The Daily Telegraph. (The arrangement came to an abrupt end after Fleetwood-Hesketh’s dinner was interrupted by a telephone call from the news desk informing him that Le Corbusier had handed in his dinner pail. Would he ‘file’ some copy, pronto? His urbane response – ‘I’ll endeavour to pop a little something in the post in a couple of days’ – did not find favour in Fleet Street.) While ploughing through Peter Mandler’s scholarly study of changing views about the ‘National Heritage’ of Stately Homes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I kept on hearing Fleetwood-Hesketh’s fluting drawl: ‘My dear, all this rot about national heritage! What has the nation ever done? Country houses were created by the Landed Gentry.’

The title of Mandler’s book raised hopes that this might be a much-needed corrective to dear old Dave Cannadine’s notoriously chippy and error-filled gloat over The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy from the same stable, but this would be too much to expect from Yale, who seem to