I'd suggest reading them anyway, because they're entertaining. But there's one memorable scene where he's looking at a wall of water coming down one of his interior walls during a storm and thinking 'I really can't afford to fix this.'

It's true that it's hard to be sympathetic when people are - by most people's standards - really very rich.

But the original argument was that land is inherently a source of power. And while there's some legacy traditional value associated with it, my point is that if you have £x million to spend and want to make a good return on it, buying a big country house may possibly not be the best way to do it.