The Disinherited: A Story of Family, Love and Betrayal - Tapa dura

Sackville-West has done his best with this tangled and unedifying tale. He writes elegantly and has been able to draw on Victoria's diaries and the copious documentation thrown up by her uncle Henry's court case (Sunday Times)

Brilliantly exposes the shadowy side of the Victorian aristocracy and the horrors of life on the wrong side of the blanket . . . A marvellous book - a gripping story, superbly researched and related with grace and humour in elegant, enjoyable prose. (Literary Review)

Poignant (Daily Telegraph)

His extraordinary research uncovers a world of shadows lying within inches of his family's official history, and he enters into it with sympathy and understanding (Economist)

Immaculately written ... A fascinating picture of a forgotten underside of English aristocratic and public life (Lucy Lethbridge, Observer)

Entertaining (Evening Standard)

Meticulous (Country Life)

A romping read (Tatler)

A deliciously gossipy tale of family secrets and lies, but it's also a sad story of children at war with one another (Independent on Sunday Best Biographies of the Summer)

Investigates, in elegant prose, the other side of the family tapestry, so to speak: the tangled skeins of lives tainted by illegitimacy . Gripping (Ronald Frame, Herald Books of the Year)

In the small hours of the morning of 3 June 1914, a woman and her husband were found dead in a sparsely furnished apartment in Paris. It was only when the identity of the couple was revealed in the English press a fortnight later that the full story emerged. The man, Henry Sackville-West, had shot himself minutes after the death of his wife from cancer; but Henry's suicidal despair had been driven equally by the failure of his claim to be the legitimate son of Lord Sackville and heir to Knole. The Disinherited reveals the secrets and lies at the heart of an English dynasty, unravelling the parallel lives of Henri's four illegitimate siblings: in particular his older sister, Victoria, who on becoming Lady Sackville and mistress of Knole, by marriage, consigned her brothers and sisters to lives of poverty and disappointment.