The stately homes of England continue to reel in tourists by the millions. We know they were built to project power, hierarchy and privilege, yet visitors line up to buy the guidebooks, photograph the staircases, and take their children there on Sundays.

Blending social history, cultural criticism, memoir and polemic, Susannah Walker explores England’s enduring fascination with inherited grandeur. She argues that these grand manors are ideological machines that still teach class hierarchy; the stately home is thus a vehicle for a much larger argument about class, heritage, inequality, and architecture as propaganda.

Walker writes in a distinctive, conversational and frequently very funny voice, building her case through visits, conversations and unexpected encounters: a television in a drawing room, a drinks trolley, a controversial painting, the thoughts of room guides, the National Trust’s own slavery report contradicting its displays, the forgotten story of the National Land Fund.

Unapologetically argumentative yet underpinned by serious research, Stately Homes is a book about the English, and about who gets to narrate the story of England. Readers are unlikely ever to walk through a stately home in quite the same way again.