Name Max 2nd Role Biographer | Education University of Oxford | |
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Parents John Wyndham, 6th Baron Leconfield Books Forgotten Land: Journeys, Some Desperate Glory: Th, Siegfried Sassoon: A Life, Balfour: A Life of Arthur Ja, Second Spring | ||
John Max Henry Scawen Wyndham, 7th Baron Leconfield, 2nd Baron Egremont (born 21 April 1948) generally known simply as Max Egremont, is a British biographer and novelist.
Egremont is the eldest son of John Edward Reginald Wyndham, 6th Baron Leconfield and 1st Baron Egremont, and Pamela Wyndham-Quin, and succeeded his father in 1972. He is a direct descendant of Sir John Wyndham. He married Caroline Nelson, the garden designer, in 1978 and they have four children, three daughters and a son. He lives at the family seat of Petworth House in Sussex, which his family gave to the National Trust in 1947.
Egremont was educated at Eton College and studied modern history at Christ Church, Oxford. He worked for the American publishing firm Crowell Collier Macmillan and on the staff of U.S. Senator Hugh Scott in Washington.
After his father's death in 1972, Egremont moved to Petworth and became 2nd Baron Egremont and 7th Baron Leconfield.
He has written books about George Wyndham, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Arthur Balfour and Sir Edward Spears, as well as four novels, The Ladies' Man (1983), Dear Shadows (1986), Painted Lives (1989) and Second Spring (1993). His book The Cousins won the Yorkshire Post Award for the Best First Book of 1977. His Under Two Flags, The Life of Major General Sir Edward Spears (1997) was shortlisted for the Westminster Medal for Military History.
He was appointed to be the official biographer of Siegfried Sassoon by Sassoon's son George. Egremont's Siegfried Sassoon came out in 2005 and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2011 he published Forgotten Land, Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia. His most recent book, in 2014, is Some Desperate Glory, the First World War the Poets Knew.
He was a trustee of the Wallace Collection from 1988 to 2000, of the British Museum from 1990 to 2000, and a member of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts from 1989 to 2001.
He has been chairman of the Friends of the National Libraries since 1985 and of the National Manuscripts Conservation Trust since 1995.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2001.