cover image The Fate of the English Country House

The Fate of the English Country House

David Littlejohn. Oxford University Press, USA, $74 (360pp) ISBN 978-0-19-508876-2

Are American readers so enthralled by stately English homes that they will want to pore over minute accountings (in pounds and dollars) of, say, how much the sixth marquess of Lansdowne got for some antique marbles in 1930, or the Historic Houses Association's fee scale for location shoots? Evidently Littlejohn (The Ultimate Art: Essays Around and About Opera) and his editors think so, for he never resorts to generalities when mind-numbing details will do. The masses of barely sifted and frequently redundant information include trivia about British history, politics and planning commissions, as well as interviews with country-house owners and quotes from such sources as the diary of a former National Trust secretary (by far the liveliest passages in the book). Readers who aren't accountants, real estate developers or solicitors may just want to look at the pictures and skip to the appendix, where a note on the last chapter finally comes to the point: ""to be demolished, sold to another family, converted into multiple units, or turned into a school or hospital has been the most common and natural fate of the English country house for the last hundred years."" Photos not seen by PW. (Mar.)