The Lovely Liar

Author’s NoteThe beautiful county of Yorkshire has many great ancestral houses among its hills and dales and the most magnificent is Castle Howard. It was recently the background of a television film, ‘Brideshead Revisited’ and its magnificence when one first sees it is breathtaking. Horace Walpole describes it better than I can when he writes, “Nobody informed me that at one view I should see a Palace, a town, a fortified City, Temples on high places, woods being beech, and the meeting place of Druids.” Another house of the greatest importance where the Princess Royal wife of the Earl of Harewood, lived for many years, is Harewood House. I think that the most attractive room in the house is the Music Room, which I have described in this novel. Having lived in such exquisite surroundings, it is not surprising that the present seventh Earl is closely connected with the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and has directed both in the Leeds and the Edinburgh Festivals.