Автор: Christopher Sykes Simon

Please note that some images were unavailable for the electronic edition.The highly praised biography of an archetypal great house and the family who lived there for over 250 years.‘The Big House’ is the biography of a great country house and the lives of the Sykes family who lived there, with varying fates, for the next two hundred and fifty years. It is a fascinating social history set against the backdrop of a changing England, with a highly individual, pugnacious and self-determining cast, including: ‘Old Tat’ Sykes, said to be one of the great sights of Yorkshire (the author’s…

At the age of only 36, Sir Mark Sykes was signatory to the Sykes-Picot agreement, one of the most reviled treaties of modern times. A century later, Christopher Sykes’ lively biography of his grandfather reassesses his life and work, and the political instability and violence in the Middle East attributed to it.The Sykes-Picot agreement was a secret pact drawn up in May 1916 between the French and the British, to divide the collapsing Ottoman Empire in the event of an allied victory in the First World War. Agreed without any Arab involvement, it negated an earlier guarantee of independence…