Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty

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In the case of Black Diamonds, it was first son William (they're all William, the younger sons are all William Something), viscount Milton, who was a bit of an annoyance to the family as he married beneath his station, so to speak, so they sent him to Canada to keep him out of the way.

King coal | Books | The Guardian

In Black Diamond, Zakes Mda tackles every conceivable South African stereotype, skilfully (and with the lightest touch) turning them upside down and exposing their ironies, often hilariously. I loved reading about the rich and famous of the British aristocracy, anything with the worlds elite is always interesting since it’s out of the realm of everyday life. These diamonds may also have numerous cleavages or fractures that are stained black or have become black because of graphitization.But I love historical text and this work held much of that social mores, economics of changing industry, class conflict, and governmental parsing and perceptions far beyond it's title designation. Fast and very accessible, it was apparently based on a screenplay and in part, it reads like a screenplay. I probably don't need to illustrate my point any further, but the most glaring departure of the book takes place between pages 332 and 379, a span in which Bailey devotes nearly fifty pages to Kathleen Kennedy, sister of future president John F. I enjoyed the stories (truth can indeed be stranger than fiction) about the family itself but I struggled with the long stretches about the politics of socialism, unionism and the class system in Great Britain. How often is the story told of women placed in insane asylums for unjustified reasons, in truth for the convenience of relatives?

Black Diamonds Tour - Wentworth Woodhouse

Well, I've never seen Downton Abbey, but all the reviewers say that if you're a fan, you'll enjoy this book. A convoluted but enjoyable listen about the history of an aristocratic English family and its relationship to the land it owns and the people it, well, owns. When Bailey stops writing like a romantic novelist, Black Diamonds admirably reflects both the true nobility of the inter-war miners and the undoubted degradation of the aristocracy who exploited them.

A. I can vouch for its observations of a middle and upper class segment of the country that rarely gets mentioned in world press. The author attempts to tie together the beginning and end, seeming to forget that there's been over 400 pages in-between with no reminder of these points to the reader. But the class war of the twentieth century combined with the family's own follies, brought it all crashing down around them. Structurally, this book is a mess, goes off into tangents, and has an annoying way of setting up scenarios by telling the ending first and then trying to get you to wade through the narrative because you're supposed to be held in suspense.

Black Diamond by Zakes Mda | Goodreads Black Diamond by Zakes Mda | Goodreads

Black Diamonds tells of the Fitzwilliams' spectacular decline: of inheritance fights; rumours of a changeling and of lunacy; philandering earls; illicit love; war heroism; a tragic connection to the Kennedys; violent death; mining poverty and squalor; and a class war that literally ripped apart the local landscape. Catherine Bailey’s highly acclaimed book Black Diamonds brought the plight of Wentworth Woodhouse and its incredible story to worldwide attention.It is bad enough that the chapter on the doomed affair between Kennedy and the eighth Earl Fitzwilliam Wentworth is heralded by the single sentence, "The affair seemed madness from the start.