Author(s): Adam Nicolson

United Kingdom

A fascinating portrait from award-winning author, Adam Nicolson, of a family, a portrait, and a quarrel with a king that would tear that family apart. 'Et in Arcadia Ego--I too am in Arcadia' 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, which now seems both ideal and remote? In the Arcadian vision, tomorrow would always be the same as yesterday. This dream became ever more alluring as the changes of an approaching modernity-the growing power of the state; the disruption of the traditional bonds of society; the breaking of communities; the marginalisation of the great families who had once balanced the power of the crown--accelerated through 16th--and 17th--century England. It was the clash of a new mercantile, individualist world with the increasingly defended, communal and chivalric ideals of the old.To tell this story from the 1520s to the 1640s, Adam Nicolson 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 of change, nostalgia, ambition, resistance and war.