Madresfield: The Real Brideshead

by Jane Mulvagh; Doubleday 400pp; £20
"Although it covers 1,000 years or so of country house history, and comes crammed with eccentric earls and fanatic lawsuits," Madresfield's chief selling point is its subtitle, said DJ Taylor in the Independent.

The most famous regular visitor to Madresfield Court, a moated manor below the Malvern Hills, was Evelyn Waugh, "a middle-class publisher's son", fascinated by the house and the Lygon family that had lived in it continuously since the 11th century. He based Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited on Hugh Lygon, whom he knew at Oxford and who, like Flyte, drank himself to an early death. Waugh also took one of its "central plot-lines", that of the exiled nobleman, from the fate of Hugh's father, the seventh Earl of Beauchamp, "a public-spirited bisexual" forced to spend much of his life abroad.

In June 1931, alerted to Beauchamp's liaisons with his valet, George V despatched three Garter Knights to Madresfield to demand that he leave England by midnight; the effect on the family was devastating.

Jane Mulvagh has written a "high-class guidebook" which is "attractively set out, despite tendencies towards the repetitive and novelettish". Mulvagh's technique "is to take a painting, an artefact, or a treasure and let it reveal the story of the family and their connections," said Paula Byrne in the Spectator: so 'The Tuning Fork' is about Elgar, who allegedly composed one of his Enigma Variations as an unspoken tribute to one of the Lygon hostesses, while 'The Portrait' recounts a plot to overthrow Queen Mary in favour of Elizabeth.

Mulvagh is "a tactful tour guide", said Nicholas Shakespeare in the Daily Telegraph, "with a convincing appreciation of the periods and materials that have enriched the place".

FIRST POSTED JUNE 26, 2008