ADAM NICOLSON - Earls of Paradise. England and the Dream of Perfection

London England, Harper Press, 2008. First Edition, Binding: Cloth, Fine/Near Fine. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" Tall Octavo 9780007240524 Hardback Hardback. First Edition. Earls of Paradise. Was our country once a better place? Has modernisation destroyed as much as it has improved? And can we see in an earlier Britain a way of living, an Arcadia? In the Arcadian vision, tomorrow would always be the same as yesterday. This dream became ever more alluring as the changes of approaching modernity - the growing power of the state; the disruption of the traditional bonds of society; the marginalisation of the great families who had once balanced the power of the crown - accelerated through 16th- and 17th-century England. To tell this story from the 1520s to the 1640s, the author takes a single great family, the Earls of Pembroke, their wives, children, estates, tenants and allies, and follows their high and glamorous trajectory across three generations. In this wide-ranging book the author explores a world in transition, an England caught up in its first taste of modernity split between the old and the new, the moment at which the world we have lost turned into the world it has now become. Illustrated. 298 pp.