Prof Adrian Tinniswood
About
Professor Adrian Tinniswood OBE FSA is the author of eighteen books on social and architectural history, including The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House Between the Wars (2016), which became a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller; and its sequel, Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the Post-war Country House (2021), a Daily Telegraph Book of the Year.
He is also the author of an important biography of the architect and polymath, Christopher Wren: His Invention So Fertile: A Life of Christopher Wren, and of a social history of a major gentry family, The Verneys: a True Story of Love, War and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. He has worked closely with a number of British heritage organisations including the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the National Trust, and is currently Professorial Research Fellow in History at the Humanities Research Institute, University of Buckingham, Director of Buckingham’s graduate programmes in Country House Studies, and Adjunct Professor of History at Maynooth University.
Professor Tinniswood’s current research interests involve late-Victorian and Edwardian country houses in Britain and Ireland, and the diverse backgrounds of their owners: a complex social milieu in which the ancestral seats of ancient nobility stood side by side with the palaces of Jewish bankers and Indian princes, a world in which dukes and duchesses mixed with society hostesses who had learned to dance in the chorus line and self-made millionaires who had been raised in the slums of Manchester and Birmingham.