Adrian Tinniswood Audiobooks

The Power and the Glory, English social history from inside the country house world

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.3/5 average

72 listener ratings

Who is Adrian Tinniswood?

Adrian Tinniswood, born in 1954, is an English writer and historian, currently Professor of English Social History at the University of Buckingham, where he is also a senior research fellow and directs the Country House Studies programme. He read English and philosophy at Southampton, took an MPhil at Leicester, and was appointed OBE in 2013 for services to heritage.

Few historians are as embedded in the fabric of British heritage. He has chaired a regional committee of the Heritage Lottery Fund, served on the National Trust’s council and acted as a consultant to the Trust, and held trustee roles from the Bishop’s Palace in Wells to the Leeds Castle Foundation, alongside lecturing at universities in Britain and America, Oxford and Berkeley among them. When Tinniswood writes about the great houses and institutions of England, he writes as someone who has spent decades helping to look after them.

Adrian Tinniswood in audiobooks

The Power and the Glory, Tinniswood’s title in our catalogue, delivers what he does best: English social history told with real authority and an insider’s understanding of how heritage actually works – the people, the property and the power behind the façades. His long association with the country house world gives the material a texture that archive-only historians rarely manage.

For UK listeners, this is heritage listening with substance: the ideal companion for anyone who loves a National Trust day out but wants the fuller, less varnished story behind the velvet ropes. History of this kind, rich in anecdote and personality, sits very comfortably in audio.