What do you think?
Rate this book
Restoration Heart: A Memoir
'Breathtaking untold story . . . riotously colourful' Mail on Sunday
'I read most of it in one exciting sitting. It is brilliant, gripping and sad' Harry Mount
Restoration Heart is a story of love, double divorce and redemption. It is a biography of the heart, and of a house. When William Cash suffers a post-divorce, mid-life breakdown, aged 43, life seemed bleak - but things were about to change. Like William himself, his old Shropshire family house Upton Cressett was in as much in need of being rescued and 'fixed up' as its owner. As William embarks on re-building his life and ruin of a country house, he starts looking again for love. But money, patience and the likelihood of ever finding family happiness soon start to run out.
Drawing on his haul of letters written to various wives, fiancées and girlfriends - all potential third wives - the book follows Cash's search for a chatelaine for Upton Cressett. Restoration Heart is a tempestuous, Gulliver-like voyage of the heart with a colourful cast of figures including Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney, Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth Hurley, David Hockney, Piers Morgan, an American singer legend cousin and, most dramatically, future prime minister Boris Johnson. Hilarious and poignant, this 'restore-a-wreck' memoir is an account of how an Englishman is rescued by love, architecture and beauty. The memoir also holds up a dark lens to the Bonfire of the Vanities generation that Cash was a member of at Cambridge.
The story reveals how a broken man can become completely transformed - both emotionally and imaginatively - by a building and its surrounding landscape. During the four year refurbishment, the house's reclamation becomes inexorably linked with his own re-birth and salvation before he finally marries for the third time and gets to live in his family house. This is not a misery-memoir; it is an uplifting - albeit tempestuous - Gulliver-like biography of the heart with an ancient Elizabethan house as the writer's Arcadian safe house and source of salvation.
416 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 10, 2019
4 people are currently reading
17 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 22, 2021
Restoration Heart reads like a hilarious romantic comedy and had plenty of publicity when it came out in the UK as it involved a love triangle with prime minister Boris Johnson and a series of other love adventures. I thought it might be a 'kiss and tell' but actually it turns out to be an elegiac, brilliantly written and sad biography of the heart. It is based on 1500 love letters and has a serious literary flavour. Brutally honest and unforgiving, its also witty and poignant.
I wasn't surprised to see it has had over 20 acclaimed book reviews in both US ad Uk. Its coming out in US in Feb, presumably for Valentine's Day. Theres a chapter called Valentines Day Massacre which is straight out a Billy Wilder movie. It had me choking with laughter.
I wasn't surprised to see it has had over 20 acclaimed book reviews in both US ad Uk. Its coming out in US in Feb, presumably for Valentine's Day. Theres a chapter called Valentines Day Massacre which is straight out a Billy Wilder movie. It had me choking with laughter.
January 2, 2022
My first book of 2022 and a very disappointing one, barely scraping 2 stars.
On paper it sounds right up my street. But it falls firmly into the category 'how can such a potentially interesting subject become so tedious to read about'.
The repetition didn't help, and nor did the syrupy lurve flights of fancy around his first two very short lived marriages. Think on.
I quickly tired of beautiful women with 'dark poetic souls' for crying out loud.
But the biggest issue was the excessive name dropping which reached ridiculous heights.
My 2022 reading can only get better!
On paper it sounds right up my street. But it falls firmly into the category 'how can such a potentially interesting subject become so tedious to read about'.
The repetition didn't help, and nor did the syrupy lurve flights of fancy around his first two very short lived marriages. Think on.
I quickly tired of beautiful women with 'dark poetic souls' for crying out loud.
But the biggest issue was the excessive name dropping which reached ridiculous heights.
My 2022 reading can only get better!
July 8, 2021
This review appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books.
By Daniel de Visé
William Cash is an ambitious and talented writer who has labored to escape the shadow of his father, a prominent British politician who shares his name. That quest animates Restoration Heart, his midlife memoir. By the end of the book, first published in Britain in 2019, the younger Cash may not have earned the currency he craves, but he has found something better: love and contentment.
Cash, 54, is the son of Bill Cash, a longtime Conservative Member of Parliament and noted “Eurosceptic,” one who favors Britain’s exit from the European Union. Blessed with both pedigree and ability, the younger Cash landed a sweet assignment as Hollywood correspondent for the Times of London in 1991, not long after his graduation from Cambridge. He wrote about the rich and famous and published a twentysomething memoir titled Educating William: Memoirs of a Hollywood Correspondent.
Returning home in 1999, Cash penned a biography of Graham Greene, one of his heroes. He yearned to break out as a bestselling novelist along the lines of John le Carré. But the Greene biography drew mixed notices, and Cash settled into the life of a country squire. In 2006, he launched Spear’s magazine, a publication offered by invitation to well-heeled Britons.
Romantic unions with prominent socialites kept Cash in the British society columns through the 2000s. In 2003, he married Ilaria Bulgari, a jewelry heiress. They divorced three years later, following tabloid reports of Cash’s fling with a secretary. In 2008, he married Vanessa Neumann, a stylish Venezuelan American intellectual and diplomat who had dated Mick Jagger. That pairing ended after 15 months amid financial crisis: Cash had overextended himself on money-pit renovations of a West London flat and a sprawling country home.
That brings us to the other central character in Restoration Heart: Upton Cressett, a 16th-century manor in the central England county of Shropshire that the Cash family purchased as a fixer-upper in 1969. The property brought Cash and his parents into a peculiarly British “Cult of Restoration — restoring an old manor farmhouse, mill or ruined abbey until we are driven into the financial grave,” Cash writes.
By the time of his second divorce, Cash was dividing his time between the small West London apartment and Upton Cressett. To call the dwelling “remote” puts it mildly: The Cash family themselves “had no idea where Shropshire was.” Upton Cressett lies 150 miles northwest of London, much nearer to Birmingham, England’s unsung second city. Shropshire’s rugged beauty inspired J.R.R. Tolkien.
Despite being unable to find it on a map, Cash nonetheless dreamed of raising a family in Shropshire: “having twins, writing bestselling thrillers, buying two borzoi puppies, importing wild boar to roam around the medieval wood and peacocks for the garden.”
But he struggled to persuade a succession of romantic partners to join him there. Upton Cressett lay in disrepair. When oversight passed to Cash from his parents in 2007, he set out to gut and renovate the structure, but the scale of the project quickly overwhelmed him, and the palatial residence was never quite habitable.
“In my parents’ day, the main guest bathroom was almost fifty yards from some bedrooms,” he writes, an admission that reveals both the hardship and palatial scale of life in a derelict “Downton Abbey.”
The low point arrived in the summer of 2010. Cash was deep in love with Helen Macintyre, an arts consultant with a baby daughter revealed as the love child of Boris Johnson, the future prime minister. The romantic triangle sparked a “Notting Hill-style siege” of the couple’s lives by the British tabloids. The mother halted the relationship.
At 45, Cash was twice divorced, loveless, and childless. “In the weeks that followed,” he writes, “I fell apart as a human being. I was finished. Dead. Spiked.”
Cash found direction in completing his restoration of Upton Cressett, “the closest thing I have to something that I can always rely on to be there.” He finished the work in August 2010, shortly after splitting with Helen, the last in a long line of paramours who had lost patience in his project.
Over the following decade, Cash reinvented himself as a one-man Village Green Preservation Society, leading his rural community into battle against those who would plant unsightly wind turbines and hog farms in the Shropshire hills. The contest grew heated: At one point in Restoration Heart, Cash dismisses a pro-development neighbor with a terse, “We shall see,” the British equivalent of an unspeakable expletive.
Both the renovation and the Save Our Shropshire Hills campaign ended in smashing success. Cash emerges in the book’s final act as a vaguely mercenary West Midlands aristocrat, leading prickly Townswomen’s Guilds on tours past bedrooms where his parents had once hosted Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson, and where Cash himself had lodged longtime friend Elizabeth Hurley.
In one Downton-esque scene, Cash and his house staff heroically conjure tea and cakes for several dozen visitors. Just when things seem safely sorted, a grumpy tourist inadvertently locks Cash out of his home, plunging the household into “Fawlty Towers” chaos.
His house in order, Cash finally finds enduring love: In 2014, he married Laura Cathcart, daughter of the seventh Earl of Cathcart. At last, he was able to bring a new bride home to Upton Cressett. Half a decade later, they remain happily married, with two children and a menagerie of peacocks and pugs.
It’s hard to pull the whole truth from a memoir, but Cash attacks Restoration Heart with admirable journalistic remove. He quotes verbatim from letters to paramours rather than attempt to recall his feelings a decade or two later. He crafts vivid, cinematic scenes. He guesses at the motivations behind his own fateful decisions but does not presume to know them for certain. His writing is elegant and self-effacing, sometimes to the point of false modesty. (If Upton Cressett doesn’t qualify as a mansion, as Cash asserts in chapter two, then I’d like to know what does.)
A few reviewers have accused Cash of name-dropping, but if Elizabeth Hurley or Boris Johnson had slept in my guest bedroom, I would drop away.
Restoration Heart celebrates the redemptive power of love and renovation. It’s a good read for a certain breed of Anglophilic American, those of us who still remember the Reagan-era PBS spectacle of “Brideshead Revisited” and who treasure our dogeared The Lord of the Rings paperbacks and our dusty “Four Weddings and a Funeral” DVD.
Daniel de Visé is author of Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show and The Comeback: Greg LeMond, the True King of American Cycling, and a Legendary Tour de France.
By Daniel de Visé
William Cash is an ambitious and talented writer who has labored to escape the shadow of his father, a prominent British politician who shares his name. That quest animates Restoration Heart, his midlife memoir. By the end of the book, first published in Britain in 2019, the younger Cash may not have earned the currency he craves, but he has found something better: love and contentment.
Cash, 54, is the son of Bill Cash, a longtime Conservative Member of Parliament and noted “Eurosceptic,” one who favors Britain’s exit from the European Union. Blessed with both pedigree and ability, the younger Cash landed a sweet assignment as Hollywood correspondent for the Times of London in 1991, not long after his graduation from Cambridge. He wrote about the rich and famous and published a twentysomething memoir titled Educating William: Memoirs of a Hollywood Correspondent.
Returning home in 1999, Cash penned a biography of Graham Greene, one of his heroes. He yearned to break out as a bestselling novelist along the lines of John le Carré. But the Greene biography drew mixed notices, and Cash settled into the life of a country squire. In 2006, he launched Spear’s magazine, a publication offered by invitation to well-heeled Britons.
Romantic unions with prominent socialites kept Cash in the British society columns through the 2000s. In 2003, he married Ilaria Bulgari, a jewelry heiress. They divorced three years later, following tabloid reports of Cash’s fling with a secretary. In 2008, he married Vanessa Neumann, a stylish Venezuelan American intellectual and diplomat who had dated Mick Jagger. That pairing ended after 15 months amid financial crisis: Cash had overextended himself on money-pit renovations of a West London flat and a sprawling country home.
That brings us to the other central character in Restoration Heart: Upton Cressett, a 16th-century manor in the central England county of Shropshire that the Cash family purchased as a fixer-upper in 1969. The property brought Cash and his parents into a peculiarly British “Cult of Restoration — restoring an old manor farmhouse, mill or ruined abbey until we are driven into the financial grave,” Cash writes.
By the time of his second divorce, Cash was dividing his time between the small West London apartment and Upton Cressett. To call the dwelling “remote” puts it mildly: The Cash family themselves “had no idea where Shropshire was.” Upton Cressett lies 150 miles northwest of London, much nearer to Birmingham, England’s unsung second city. Shropshire’s rugged beauty inspired J.R.R. Tolkien.
Despite being unable to find it on a map, Cash nonetheless dreamed of raising a family in Shropshire: “having twins, writing bestselling thrillers, buying two borzoi puppies, importing wild boar to roam around the medieval wood and peacocks for the garden.”
But he struggled to persuade a succession of romantic partners to join him there. Upton Cressett lay in disrepair. When oversight passed to Cash from his parents in 2007, he set out to gut and renovate the structure, but the scale of the project quickly overwhelmed him, and the palatial residence was never quite habitable.
“In my parents’ day, the main guest bathroom was almost fifty yards from some bedrooms,” he writes, an admission that reveals both the hardship and palatial scale of life in a derelict “Downton Abbey.”
The low point arrived in the summer of 2010. Cash was deep in love with Helen Macintyre, an arts consultant with a baby daughter revealed as the love child of Boris Johnson, the future prime minister. The romantic triangle sparked a “Notting Hill-style siege” of the couple’s lives by the British tabloids. The mother halted the relationship.
At 45, Cash was twice divorced, loveless, and childless. “In the weeks that followed,” he writes, “I fell apart as a human being. I was finished. Dead. Spiked.”
Cash found direction in completing his restoration of Upton Cressett, “the closest thing I have to something that I can always rely on to be there.” He finished the work in August 2010, shortly after splitting with Helen, the last in a long line of paramours who had lost patience in his project.
Over the following decade, Cash reinvented himself as a one-man Village Green Preservation Society, leading his rural community into battle against those who would plant unsightly wind turbines and hog farms in the Shropshire hills. The contest grew heated: At one point in Restoration Heart, Cash dismisses a pro-development neighbor with a terse, “We shall see,” the British equivalent of an unspeakable expletive.
Both the renovation and the Save Our Shropshire Hills campaign ended in smashing success. Cash emerges in the book’s final act as a vaguely mercenary West Midlands aristocrat, leading prickly Townswomen’s Guilds on tours past bedrooms where his parents had once hosted Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson, and where Cash himself had lodged longtime friend Elizabeth Hurley.
In one Downton-esque scene, Cash and his house staff heroically conjure tea and cakes for several dozen visitors. Just when things seem safely sorted, a grumpy tourist inadvertently locks Cash out of his home, plunging the household into “Fawlty Towers” chaos.
His house in order, Cash finally finds enduring love: In 2014, he married Laura Cathcart, daughter of the seventh Earl of Cathcart. At last, he was able to bring a new bride home to Upton Cressett. Half a decade later, they remain happily married, with two children and a menagerie of peacocks and pugs.
It’s hard to pull the whole truth from a memoir, but Cash attacks Restoration Heart with admirable journalistic remove. He quotes verbatim from letters to paramours rather than attempt to recall his feelings a decade or two later. He crafts vivid, cinematic scenes. He guesses at the motivations behind his own fateful decisions but does not presume to know them for certain. His writing is elegant and self-effacing, sometimes to the point of false modesty. (If Upton Cressett doesn’t qualify as a mansion, as Cash asserts in chapter two, then I’d like to know what does.)
A few reviewers have accused Cash of name-dropping, but if Elizabeth Hurley or Boris Johnson had slept in my guest bedroom, I would drop away.
Restoration Heart celebrates the redemptive power of love and renovation. It’s a good read for a certain breed of Anglophilic American, those of us who still remember the Reagan-era PBS spectacle of “Brideshead Revisited” and who treasure our dogeared The Lord of the Rings paperbacks and our dusty “Four Weddings and a Funeral” DVD.
Daniel de Visé is author of Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show and The Comeback: Greg LeMond, the True King of American Cycling, and a Legendary Tour de France.
January 24, 2021
Read over Christmas and loved it. This by the same author as the book about Graham Greene's relationship with Catherine Walston that inspired the End of the Affair. It doesn't disappoint on any level - although it is more literary and intellectual than the sort of hopeless Englishman romantic comedy I was expecting. Actually very witty and poignant and I can't wait to read more by the author who is an award winning editor in the UK. Saved and rescued by architecture, love and beauty. A real literary sleeper and has already been well reviewed for US realise in Feb. A likely sleeper hit and I look forward to the film.
January 15, 2021
emotionally stunted British male that turns every woman he meets into his next fiancé.
This guy is a relationship train wreck & has no idea how to project manage not one but two home renovations.
Wanted to shake this guy.
Not sure why I pushed through & finished the book as it was painful & frustrating.
Don’t bother
This guy is a relationship train wreck & has no idea how to project manage not one but two home renovations.
Wanted to shake this guy.
Not sure why I pushed through & finished the book as it was painful & frustrating.
Don’t bother
January 29, 2021
I was given this book as a present and initially wasn't sure whether it would be my kind of read. However I thoroughly enjoyed it and can wholeheartedly recommend it to others. It is the story of one man's love for his house and his battle to restore it to its former glory running in parallel with his own journey to find true love and give the house the family it deserves and that he longs for.
It is both funny and sad, filled with historical detail and fascinating gossip as the author moves between his various and diverse worlds - rural Shropshire, Los Angeles and London society to name but three.
He shows a self deprecating humour and awareness of his own failings which is refreshing to read. I finished the book in record time and then regretted that I had read it so quickly and wished I had prolonged the pleasure.
A thoroughly good read.
It is both funny and sad, filled with historical detail and fascinating gossip as the author moves between his various and diverse worlds - rural Shropshire, Los Angeles and London society to name but three.
He shows a self deprecating humour and awareness of his own failings which is refreshing to read. I finished the book in record time and then regretted that I had read it so quickly and wished I had prolonged the pleasure.
A thoroughly good read.
January 22, 2021
I saw some reviews of this on this website and was curious to read the book for myself. Ive only got through the first few chapters but it is certainly a very funny book. It reminds me of Under the Tuscan Sun when the author uses restoring a house as a metaphor for change.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews