I have just read the admirable short biography by John Holden, late of Demos, of Ralph Dutton who owned and reconstructed his family’s Victorian house of Hinton Ampner, employing Gerald Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, as its architect, just before the Second World War. It’s a fascinating, but in some ways frustrating, story because although Dutton seems to have had a wide circle of friends, many of them writers, including L.P. Hartley, James Lees-Milne and James Pope-Hennessy, none of them seem to have much to say about him, other than complimenting him on his impeccable taste and enjoying his hospitality. The only alternative glimmer of him appears in a characteristically waspish letter from Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford about a review he had written of Dutton’s book on The Victorian Home: ‘I took the writer to be a bumptious young puppy. I hear he is an aged and wealthy pansy’. Anyway, it has particularly good information on the taste for what Osbert Lancaster described as ‘Vogue Regency’ and a generation of Old Etonians who ran the arts.

It can be ordered direct from its excellent publisher, Pallas Athene (https://pallasathene.co.uk/shop/ralph-dutton-of-hinton-ampner-a-man-and-his-home-by-john-holdenbrbrforthcoming).