I started out really enjoying Juliet Nicolson's biography of seven generations of the women in her family, not least for the lovely cover design by Cressida Bell. (If your respective grandmother and great-aunt were lovers, then I guess there's a book jacket in it somewhere down the line.)
It starts in 1830 with Juliet's great-great-grandmother Pepita, a Spanish flamenco dancer who caught the eye of (Old) Lionel Sackville-West, as opposed to his cousin (Young) Lionel who married Pepita's beautiful illegitimate daughter and inherited Knole. Then it flags a bit ... Famous Vita is disposed of quite quickly, as if to say heigh-ho, we've all been here before. It's impossible to care much about Juliet's spoiled, snobbish, alcoholic mother Philippa; she's simply a blow-in by marriage into this famous family - that was half her trouble. And by the last 100 pages, I'm afraid I was thinking, that's quite enough, thank you. But it did make me wonder about what it must be like living with this weight of too much ancestral information. I mean, which of us really wants to know about our parents' and grandparents' dysfunctional sex lives ...? Still, I admit that when I read my great-grandfather's diary it was a crushing disappointment to discover that he mostly wrote about Mass times and the weather.