Jewish Country Houses
Edited by Juliet Carey and Abigail Green (Profile, £45)
THIS is a hefty volume masquerading as a coffee-table book, but which is, in fact, a series of scholarly, yet engagingly readable chapters illustrated with superb photography by Hélène Binet, who consciously avoids mugshots and photo-cropping for precisely framed images. It is pan-European in its scope, covering the usual English suspects, such as the Rothschilds’ Waddesdon Manor and Benjamin Disraeli’s Hughenden Manor, both in Buckinghamshire, but also featuring houses in France, Italy, Greece, the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany.
In England, there are some striking revelations, as at Strawberry Hill, London TW1. It is usually associated with Horace Walpole, but book contributor Nino Strachey has discovered that two subsequent owners, Lady Frances Waldegrave and Geraldine Stern, had Jewish…