BLENHEIM: Biography of a Palace by...

BLENHEIM: Biography of a Palace by Marian Fowler (Penguin: $14.95, illustrated). A Gargantuan monument to military prowess and personal vanity, Blenheim Palace is even bigger than Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead--and Castle Howard, where the Masterpiece Theatre series was filmed. Ordered by Queen Anne as a reward for the first Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill, the victorious general of the War of the Spanish Succession and an ancestor of Winston Churchill, Blenheim has been the subject of controversy since its foundation stone was laid in 1705. Fowler’s anecdotal, gossipy history treats the greatest of all English country houses as if it were a living presence--and a voracious, arrogant, importunate one. By focusing on the lives of some of the later dukes and their families, she highlights the demands of maintaining the outsized estate. It was hardly a random whim that lead the ninth duke to propose to the American heiress, Consuelo Vanderbilt: He spent an estimated $15 million of her family’s money restoring the splendors of Blenheim. Not all observers have shared Fowler’s enthusiasm for the Palace: Voltaire described it as “A great heap of stone, devoid of charm or taste,” and many members of the Churchill-Spencer family regarded it as unlivable. But her fulsome prose captures the overscaled attractions of a structure that draws more than 350,000 tourists annually.