If ever a stately home had an exuberant history, it is this, poised on a cliff high above the Thames. Home to an earl, three countesses (one the cause of a fatal duel), two dukes, a Prince of Wales (killed by a cricket ball on the terrace) and the Viscounts Astor, the present Italianate pleasure palace, built by Charles Barry in the 1850s, was the milieu of the Cliveden set of the Twenties and Thirties and the Profumo Affair of the Sixties.
As a hotel, leased from the N… (View original article)