(George) James Henry Lees-Milne (6 August 1908 – 28 December 1997) was an English writer and expert on country houses, who worked for the National Trust from 1936 to 1973.

"[1] He was the second of three children and the elder son of a prosperous cotton manufacturer and farmer, George Crompton Lees-Milne (1880–1949), and his wife, Helen Christina (1884–1962), a daughter of Henry Bailey, JP and Deputy Lieutenant of Coates, Gloucestershire.

George Lees-Milne, once a lieutenant in the Cheshire Yeomanry, chaired the family business, A. and A. Crompton & Co. Ltd, deriving a fortune mainly from a Lancashire cotton mill.

[2][3] Lees-Milne's parents were a "curiously contrasting couple" – his father "shy but steady" and "conventional in outlook" with a "predilection for gambling and philandering", "obsessively punctual and constantly making plans".

Though the discovery of coal on their land increased their wealth, it "did not civilise them" – Lees-Milne's great-grandfather, Joseph Lees (1819-1890), was "one of three barely literate brothers... known, after their respective obsessions, as Nimrod, Ramrod and Fishing Rod".

[7][8] The name Milne was added by royal licence in 1890 by Lees-Milne's grandfather James (the first of the family to attend Eton) to comply with terms for inheriting the estate of a maternal relative.

[10][11][12][13] Lees-Milne attended Lockers Park School in Hertfordshire, Eton, and Magdalen College, Oxford,[14] from which he graduated with a third-class degree in history in 1931.

[17] Nicholas Birns notes that Lees-Milne spoke "so candidly about himself, his life, and his love of art and architecture that his authorial relationship with the reader becomes a privileged one, not to be readily or casually communicated, not to be flaunted or brandished.

Following Alvilde Lees-Milne's death, however, David Somerset, the 11th Duke of Beaufort and his wife (with whom he was on better terms) offered to let him to live at Essex House rent-free.

Lees-Milne was touched, but valued his independence, had the income to pay rent and did not accept the offer, nor that of his friends, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, to live as a permanent guest at Chatsworth.

A series of three plays inspired by Lees-Milne's diaries – Sometimes into the Arms of God, The Unending Battle and What England Owes – was broadcast by the BBC in July 2013.