‘We failed,’ wrote Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday, ‘to see the writing on the wall in letters of fire.’ Looking back on the twilight of Habsburg Vienna, Zweig marvelled at how an entire civilisation could remain so certain of itself just as the ground began to give way beneath it. 

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The same sense of elegiac anxiety now drifts over Chipping Norton, although its prophets are chiefly property correspondents. According to a recent report in the Times, house prices in parts of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire are beginning to soften. This comes as a surprise. The Cotswolds has spent the past decade attracting the sort of wealth that normally regards gravity as an optional extra. 

Part of the appeal extends beyond the property itself. The Cotswolds has become one of the most recognisable versions of England, both at home and abroad, a sort of open-air ethnographic museum in which England continues to perform an idealised version of itself. 

Nowhere has that appeal proved stronger than in the United States. North American buyers accounted for 13 per cent of purchases above £1.5 million last year, according to Savills, nearly four times the long-term average.........

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