This is a history of a great English house, from its conception and building in the opening decade of the 18th century, to the burial of Winston Churchill in the early 1960s. Using the vast Blenheim papers (now in the British Library), together with local Oxfordshire documents and archives, the author has been able to trace the history, not just of its famous inhabitants, but also of the building itself and the thousands of servants and workmen who have kept it functioning over the years. The four main chapters each take a specific event at Blenheim - the first centres on a performance of a Dryden play, put on by the grandchildren of the almost senile first Duke of Marlborough and moving out from that, to a general description of the place and its inhabitants at that time.