Until reading this stimulating and sumptuous study from the archives of Country Life I had only associated the name Edward Knoblock, an American-born dramatist, with one of the best-known anecdotes about John Gielgud’s gaffes. You remember the scene: Gielgud and Knoblock are lunching at the Ivy when Johnny absent-mindedly describes someone as ‘nearly as boring as Eddie Knoblock . . . no, no, not you, of course, I mean the other Eddie Knoblock’. Now I learn from the far from boring John Martin Robinson that poor old Eddie was actually a key figure in the Regency Revival (affectionately mocked by Osbert Lancaster as ‘Vogue Regency’) and rediscovered the significance of Thomas Hope of The Deepdene, nicknamed ‘the gentleman of sofas’ by Sydney Smith. (Unless of course there really was another Eddie Knoblock.)
Knoblock’s Sussex retreat, the first Regency Revival country house, was written up by Christopher Hussey in a pioneering article of 1921 published in Country Life — which, as this book celebrates, went on to cover many of the major Regency country houses.
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