Elizabeth Bowen was forced to sell her ancestral home in 1959, partly for financial reasons and partly because her London literary life left her less and less time to spend there. It was quickly demolished, an act which caused fury at the time and was denounced in this newspaper as "outrageous vandalism". This book, originally published in 1942, is a kind of family and social history, tracing the fortunes of the Bowens from the time of their arrival in Ireland as Cromwellian settlers, down to her father's generation. It is, in effect, a chronicle of Anglo-Ireland in miniature, bringing in the Act of Union, the Famine, the privileges and trials of Irish landlordism, and the final descent into bourgeois careerism by her father, Henry Bowen, who became a lawyer. When Elizabeth and her husband, Alan Cameron, held court there it became a weekend resort for literary people from London and even America - including, on one occasion, Carson McCullers. Bowen's Court was not a beautiful house, but it represented a considerable chapter of Irish history, and its demolition is a lasting disgrace.