page_title: Cliveden
section_title: Literature
hierarchical_section_title: Cliveden / In popular culture / Literature
caption_attribution_description: Bavin's Gulls (aka Sloe Grove Islands) on the reach of the River Thames known as Cliveden Deep above Boulter's Lock. Taken looking upstream with Cliveden House in the background
context_page_description: Cliveden is an English country house and estate in the care of the National Trust in Buckinghamshire, on the border with Berkshire. The Italianate mansion, also known as Cliveden House, crowns an outlying ridge of the Chiltern Hills close to the South Bucks villages of Burnham and Taplow. The main house sits 40 metres above the banks of the River Thames, and its grounds slope down to the river. Cliveden has become one of the National Trust's most popular pay-for-entry visitor attractions, hosting 483,754 visitors in 2018.
  Cliveden has been the home to a Prince of Wales, two Dukes, an Earl, and finally the Viscounts Astor. As the home of Nancy Astor, wife of the 2nd Viscount Astor, Cliveden was the meeting place of the Cliveden Set of the 1920s and 30s—a group of political intellectuals. Later, during the early 1960s when it was the home of the 3rd Viscount Astor, it became the setting for key events of the notorious Profumo affair. After the Astor family stopped living there, by the 1970s it was leased to Stanford University, which used it as an overseas campus. Today the house is leased to a company that runs it as a five-star hotel.
context_section_description: In Chapter 12 of Three Men in a Boat (1889), Jerome K. Jerome describes Cliveden Reach as "unbroken loveliness this is, perhaps, the sweetest stretch of all the river…"
  In Boogie Up the River (1989) Mark Wallington retraces Jerome's journey to mark its centenary, with the Thames at Cliveden described in Chapter 5.
  The poet Alexander Pope wrote (c.1730) of the Duke of Buckingham's affair with Anna, Countess of Shrewsbury: "Gallant and gay in Cliveden's proud alcove/The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love."
  Daniel Defoe mentions the first house in A Tour Through England and Wales (1726).
  Gore Vidal in his 1948 novel The City and the Pillar: "The Cliveden-Churchill Set are too well entrenched and I shouldn't be in the least surprised if they created some sort of dictatorship that could never be thrown off without a revolution."
caption: Cliveden from the River Thames
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