Check the excellent review (see below) of my sister Ruth Binney‘s (above) new book ‘Wise Words And Country House Ways’ in no less than the UK Spectator magazine! No wonder Julian Fellowes wrote the foreword – firstly he and Ruth were virtually neighbours when she lived in West Stafford, just outside Dorchester, and secondly the book is clearly a great read!

Ruth recently moved back to our home county of Devon, and has just taken up golf! We look forward to news of her handicap. It’s been a big year for Ruth one way and another, with the birth of her first grand-daughter Molly and a new relationship with partner Mark.

We wish her ‘best of sales’ for the new book and I look forward to receiving my ‘comp’ copy!! Here’s the review:

“Finally, a simple idea, brilliantly done. Ruth Binney’s Wise Words & Country House Ways (David & Charles, £9.99) is aimed directly at the Downton Abbey audience, even to the extent of having a foreword by Julian Fellowes. It is a guide to what it was really like to live in a country house, whether you were a lord, lady, maid or cook. It has the rules of etiquette, the servants’ daily routines, the housekeeping maxims, the texture of people’s lives. How much to tip a footman? I had always wondered. Put it this way: my ten-year-old daughter wants this for Christmas, and so does my mother. This is a sentence no book reviewer ever wishes to write, but the way things are going, I may actually be compelled to go out and buy one. A copy of the book, that is, not a country house.”