The National Trust

It was just a tree, a beautiful tree, in a strikingly beautiful place. Yet when the two friends Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers were convicted of felling a much-loved sycamore on Hadrian’s Wall in September 2023, they were sentenced to four years and three months in prison. You can get less for rape. Andrew Hankinson is best known for his book about the murderer Raoul Moat, written entirely in the second person, a device that can be wearisome. In Felled, he reserves the second person for when he writes about himself. By page 11, he is describing his father’s death. After a few chapters, I made a note: ‘Part of me thinks I’d get on with Hankinson and part of me wants to shake him.

One of the facts that emerges from this detailed study of ‘modern British aristocracy’ is that the divorce rate among peers is roughly twice that of the rest of us, although the old unwritten adage that it didn’t much matter how you behaved provided discretion prevailed has long held good among many. Witness the 10th Duke of Beaufort, one of whose many mistresses, Lavinia, Duchess of Norfolk, would even boss the servants and change the menus when she stayed at Badminton. Most of these lady loves attended his funeral – but then, as Eleanor Doughty points out, the Duke’s relationship with the cuckolded husbands suggests ‘that embarrassment was not a word that figured in his dictionary’, since they were frequently invited to shoot at Badminton.