Sumptuous photographs by designer Ashley Hicks – who recently photographed the interiors of Buckingham Palace – capture the smouldering spirit of Knole, from the state rooms, which house possibly the finest collection of royal Stuart furniture in the world, to the private apartments and gardens to the behind-the-scenes labyrinth of cellars and attics.   Knole provides a window onto English history. The characters who populate the pages – the grave Elizabethan statesman, the good-for-nothing gadabout at the seedy court of James I, the dashing cavalier, the Restoration rake, the 3rd Duke of the ancien régime – are all representative of their eras (members of a family described by Vita Sackville-West as 'a race too prodigal, too amorous, too weak, too indolent, and too melancholy'). Vita's own disinheritance from Knole prompted her dear friend Virginia Woolf to pen Orlando, furthering the place’s fame and glamorous lustre.   Similarly, the architectural and decorative features of the house illustrate the different tastes of successive ages, from Thomas Sackville’s seventeenth-century makeover of a ramshackle medieval mansion to an early twentieth-century suite of rooms designed in the Bloomsbury style. Knole has never been illuminated in this way before.