The Devonshires by Roy Hattersley, review Once, years ago, the archivist took me with him to look for something in a large walk-in safe. While he was rummaging around, he pointed to an object partly wrapped in cotton wool and asked me to guess what it was. It was the size of a cricket ball, but roughly hexagonal, and seemed to be made of dark green glass. I gave up. "That," he said, "is the Devonshire Emerald, a present from the Emperor of Brazil." Scott Fitzgerald's remark to Hemingway floated into my mind: "The rich are not like us." No, I thought, and their emeralds aren't like ours either. But there were also positively painstaking ways of making one's wealth evaporate. The seventh duke, an earnest Victorian whose idea of fun was reading Wesley's sermons with his wife, poured money into two giant investment schemes: the creation of Barrow-in-Furness as an industrial town, and the development of Eastbourne as a residential one. Both cost decades of effort, and left him owing £2million - perhaps £170million in today's money. As Hemingway didn't quite say in reply to Scott Fitzgerald: "No, they have more debts." The accumulation of land and money is not the only theme of this book. What Hattersley has written is essentially a sequence of mini-biographies, tracing the family line from the 16th century to the beginning of the 20th. And just as any ordinary biography usually revolves around love, work and money, so this sequence also pays due attention to love and work, or at least to their aristocratic equivalents: sexual liaisons and high politics. Sex rears its head above all in the 18th century, when it was normal for noblemen to have publicly acknowledged mistresses, and ménages à trois were not uncommon. Rather less common, perhaps, was the sort of three-way relationship enjoyed by Georgiana, her husband the fifth duke, and Lady Elizabeth Foster, who was both the duke's lover and Georgiana's intimate friend. Hattersley is discreetly non-committal on the question of Georgiana's lesbian inclinations. As for high politics: Hattersley gives good summaries of a range of complicated issues, from the tricky questions in which Bess of Hardwick became involved (she was employed as quasi-jailer of Mary, Queen of Scots, and later tried to promote her granddaughter, Lady Arbella Stuart, as a possible successor to Elizabeth) to the grand bust-up in the Liberal Party between the eighth duke and William Gladstone. The eighth duke represented the "Whig" tradition, which had worked as an alternative to Toryism for roughly two centuries, until it was overtaken by something much more radical. Indeed, if this book has a single overarching theme, it is aristocratic Whiggery's rise and fall. Although Hattersley has spent some time in the Chatsworth archives, one would not call this a work of cutting-edge research. The standard biographies have been intelligently exploited, but many works of modern scholarship have sailed past this author like ships in the night. What the reader gets is an engaging account of a gallery of historical figures; and, to be fair, this socialist turned baron (whom I liked to think of, until his recent divorce, as Lady Hattersley's Lover) has managed to tell it in a way that is neither censorious nor sycophantic. The Devonshires: The Story of a Family and a Nation Roy Hattersley Chatto & Windus, £25, 477pp 1 Bess of Hardwick by Mary Lovell (2005). 2 Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman (1998). 3 Chatsworth: The House by The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire and Simon Upton (2002).