Ancient and modern unite

Once, when Adam Nicolson was asked the question ‘will you be writing a family memoir?’, he answered, ‘I think my family is the most memoired family in the history of the universe. It’s like a disease. “No” is definitely the answer to that.’ But Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History is at least a quarter family memoir. After ‘a whispering gallery of family meanings, lasting more than a century’, the son and grandson of those most written-about writers has spoken out loud, in a voice of truth and tenderness.

When he was 12, his mother left his father, and ‘the warmth left Sissinghurst that day’.  Before the arrival of a family ice age, Nigel Nicolson used to encourage his son to explore the Kentish country around Sissinghurst, to look for places that he made precious and important to Adam. The boy would set off on his bike with a map, to find Roman roads and fords, on a quest for the places reverberating with the past that he now so lyrically and compellingly captures in every book he writes.