Max Egremont

England, South East, West Sussex

John Max Henry Scawen Wyndham, 2nd Baron Egremont, is a British biographer and novelist, born on 21 April 1948. He was educated at Heatherdown School near Ascot, then at Eton College and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he read modern history. His biography of the poet Siegfried Sassoon was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Autobiography in 2005, and he’s been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 2001. He lives at Petworth House in West Sussex, England.

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Max Egremont Bio

Max Egremont lives inside one of Britain’s great houses, manages a historic estate, and writes carefully researched books about First World War poets, Prussian aristocrats and the shifting borders of eastern Europe. That combination has shaped everything about how he writes. Petworth House, his 17th-century ancestral home in West Sussex, passed to the National Trust in 1947 under an arrangement his family made, and J. M. W. Turner immortalised it in landscape and interior paintings, having been a regular guest under the patronage of the third Earl of Egremont through the 1820s and 1830s. The tension between that inherited world and the vocation he chose as a writer runs through everything he’s produced.

Early biographies and fiction

Egremont read modern history at Christ Church, Oxford. He succeeded to the barony, and to a second barony, that of Leconfield, when his father died in 1972, at the age of twenty-four. He’d already decided that writing was the work he wanted, and he’s produced books ever since.

His first, The Cousins: The Friendship, Opinions and Activities of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and George Wyndham, appeared in 1977. It won the Yorkshire Post Prize for the best first book of that year and came runner-up for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Balfour: A Life of Arthur James Balfour followed in 1980. Both books showed an instinct for subjects with deep roots in British political and cultural life and an eye for the private texture underneath the public record, qualities that stayed with him across everything that followed.

He then wrote four novels: The Ladies’ Man (1983), Dear Shadows (1986), Painted Lives (1989) and Second Spring (1993). He’s named Painted Lives as one of his personal favourites, placing it alongside his biographies of Siegfried Sassoon and Edward Spears. The novels engage with British society, memory and the aftermath of war with the same understated precision that marks his non-fiction, though they’ve drawn less sustained critical attention than the biographical work.

His non-fiction returned with Under Two Flags, a life of Major-General Sir Edward Spears, the liaison officer and politician who held a pivotal position in Anglo-French relations across both world wars. Published in 1997 and shortlisted for the Westminster Medal for Military History, it remains one of the more searching accounts of that complicated bilateral relationship during the first half of the twentieth century.

Sassoon

The biography that made his wider reputation came in 2005. Sassoon’s son George appointed Egremont as the poet’s official biographer and gave him access to private papers researchers hadn’t been able to see before. His account drew immediate praise from leading critics: D. J. Taylor in the Independent called it “unmistakably the best thing anybody has ever written about Sassoon,” and Max Hastings in the Daily Telegraph described it as “an outstanding and original biography.” It was shortlisted for the 2005 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Autobiography. The fuller story of the poet’s life is set out in the FAQ below.

The eastern European books

The second phase of Egremont’s career began with a language course. Around the age of forty he enrolled at the Goethe Institute to learn German, a decision he’s described in interview as the thing that unlocked central and eastern Europe for him as a subject, and that choice opened a sequence of books rooted in regions where history has been most violent and most thoroughly erased.

In 2011 he published Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia, which traces the history and eventual destruction of a German-speaking province on the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea. The territory stopped existing as a coherent entity after 1945, divided between Poland and the Soviet Union, with the city of Königsberg renamed Kaliningrad and administered as a Russian exclave. The book moves between Egremont’s own travels through the contemporary landscape, with its renamed towns, altered churches and surviving manor houses, and the stories of families whose lives were shattered by evacuation, displacement and occupation. The Spectator called it “a work of consummate artistry,” the New Statesman “a story for our time,” the Sunday Times “remarkable, fascinating reading,” the Wall Street Journal “beautifully written,” and the Mail on Sunday “the very best form of travel writing.”

In 2014 he published Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew, which traces the war through the lives and words of the men who wrote about it while they lived through it: Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, the composer and poet Ivor Gurney, Robert Graves, Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and the shell-shocked Robert Nichols. The Sassoon biography had already required years of close reading of the poetry and the correspondence, and all he’d learned there shows in the confidence with which he moves between biographical narrative and close literary analysis.

The Glass Wall: Lives on the Baltic Frontier, published in 2021, extended the eastern European project to the Baltic states themselves, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, along with the Finnish and Polish communities of the wider coastal region. Part travelogue and part history, it explores how centuries of competing imperial ambition, Swedish, German, Polish, Russian and Soviet, have shaped the landscape, architecture, literature and cuisine of the Baltic peoples, and how aware they remain of that layered past. The Times praised it as “a rich, nuanced account of life on the Baltic frontier,” the Daily Mail rated it “Excellent,” the Literary Review “Extraordinary,” and the Economist “Exemplary.” It was named a Best Book of the Year by The Times (UK).

Throughout his career, Egremont has contributed to the Spectator, the Daily Telegraph, the Times Literary Supplement and the Literary Review, and he’s reviewed regularly for the Financial Times. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2001.

What holds his work together across several decades is a preference for subjects where public history meets private feeling: the soldier-poet tormented by war and his own desires; the landowning families of East Prussia watching their world dissolve; the Baltic peoples absorbing centuries of other people’s imperial ambitions. Egremont writes about historical loss with directness and without sentimentality, and he’s consistently followed his curiosity into places that most English historians leave alone.

Max Egremont FAQs

Who is Max Egremont?

Max Egremont, whose full name is John Max Henry Scawen Wyndham, 2nd Baron Egremont, is a British biographer and novelist born on 21 April 1948. He read modern history at Christ Church, Oxford, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2001, and lives at Petworth House in Sussex. He’s best known for his official biography of the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon and for a sequence of books about the lost worlds of central and eastern Europe, including Forgotten Land and The Glass Wall.

What books has Max Egremont written?

As well as four novels, The Ladies’ Man (1983), Dear Shadows (1986), Painted Lives (1989) and Second Spring (1993), he’s written biographies of Arthur James Balfour, Major-General Sir Edward Spears and Siegfried Sassoon, along with Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew (2014). His most widely read non-fiction titles also include Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia (2011) and The Glass Wall: Lives on the Baltic Frontier (2021). His debut, The Cousins, was published in 1977 and won the Yorkshire Post Prize for the best first book of that year.

What is Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography about?

Sassoon was a First World War soldier-poet who received the Military Cross for carrying a wounded soldier back under fire, and whose 1917 statement refusing to return to the front was read out in the House of Commons. He was a friend to Robert Graves and a mentor to the young Wilfred Owen during their time together at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh.

His private life was equally dramatic, taking in a long and turbulent relationship with the aristocratic aesthete Stephen Tennant, an abrupt marriage to Hester Gatty in 1933, years of estrangement and isolation, and a late conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1957, three years before he died. Sassoon’s son George appointed Egremont as the official biographer and gave him access to private papers researchers hadn’t seen before, and the book that resulted was shortlisted for the 2005 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Autobiography.

What is Forgotten Land about?

Until the end of the Second World War, East Prussia was the German empire’s farthest eastern redoubt, a thriving German-speaking province on the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea. Since 1945 the territory has been divided between Poland and Russia, and the city of Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad and administered as a Russian exclave.

In Forgotten Land, Max Egremont gives a vivid account of the region and its people through the stories of individuals intimately involved in and transformed by its tumultuous history, combined with accounts of his own travels and the interviews he conducted along the way. The book was widely praised across British and American publications when it appeared in 2011.

What genre does Max Egremont write in?

His non-fiction moves between literary biography, narrative history and travel writing, and it often blurs those categories deliberately. He’s best known as a biographer, particularly for his life of the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon. His books on East Prussia and the Baltic combine travelogue and history, exploring how the past infuses the landscape, buildings, art, literature and lived experience of the people he meets. He’s also written four novels dealing with British society and the legacies of war.

Has Max Egremont won any literary awards?

His first book, The Cousins, won the Yorkshire Post Prize for the best first book of 1977 and came runner-up for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Under Two Flags was shortlisted for the Westminster Medal for Military History, and Siegfried Sassoon was shortlisted for the 2005 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Autobiography. The Glass Wall was named a Best Book of the Year by The Times (UK) when it came out in 2021. He’s been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 2001.

Where does Max Egremont live?

He lives at Petworth House in West Sussex, a late-seventeenth-century mansion his family transferred to the National Trust in 1947. The house is particularly associated with J. M. W. Turner, who was a frequent guest under the patronage of the third Earl of Egremont and who painted the house, its park and its interiors extensively during the 1820s and 1830s.