What is your favourite word? As a writer, one hopes to answer something suitably grand; or, better yet, something out of use. My own shortlist skews both ways (‘stentorian’, ‘svelte’, ‘sybaritic’...) until one checks how often these appear in text and finds they are not, in fact, in danger of dying.

According to Google Books Ngram Viewer, which tracks word frequency from 1500 to 2022, use of ‘stentorian’ has more than doubled since 1980, that of ‘svelte’ is at a near-record high and that of ‘sybaritic’ remains above 1982 levels, when a buoyant economy meant we had more reason to use the term. Against the moral panic surrounding a decline in reading and written abilities, a growing respect for vocabulary appears to have emerged.

‘A surprising outcome of the internet age,’ says Susie Dent, who has adjudicated words on Channel 4’s Countdown since 1992, ‘has been an increase in the variety of words we use rather than the opposite.’ Her claim that ‘online tribes’ rely on ‘highly specific vocabulary often unintelligible to outsiders’ — and often is lifted from the archives — echoes a view from Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, professor of English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford. ‘It boils down to speech communities,’ he tells me: groups that form through shared adaptations of language (‘to read’, in drag culture, means to pick apart an individual rather than dive into a book) and thereby cementing affinities.

The newfound popularity of complicated language can be traced back to YouTube and podcast hosts, whose loyal audiences reward the niche and the specific against the wider landscape’s tendency to dumb down. Articulacy has become a key differentiator in an age where intellect and communication are more highly prized than ever. Gillian Tett, provost of King’s College, Cambridge, wrote in the FT last May that financial firms are now hiring Humanities graduates over those in STEM as they attempt to fill roles that require greater literacy and critical thinking.

Yet another reason to speak so well that it becomes idiosyncratic is because it is funny. One is reminded of Moira Rose, the eccentric matriarch from Canadian sitcom Schitt’s Creek, who uses such words as ‘pettifogging’ and ‘peregrination’ as casually as one might hail a cab (or, as she might say herself, ‘summon a hired conveyance’). That words are comedy extends to those we avoid. Last week, New York Magazine revived its ‘Queries’ newsletter, a series by copy chief Carl Rosen about the publication’s list of ‘banned’ terms, namely ‘nondescript’, ‘unhinged’ and the suffix ‘-maxxing’, gently ribbing those guilty of such clichés.

The best vocabulary, Dent concludes, is that which is borrowed from the past. We used to have a word for the warmth of the sun on a winter’s day: ‘apricity’. It is high time we reclaimed it.

This feature originally appeared in the October 28, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

If you have gut problems and/or middle-class parents over the age of 50 living in one of the home counties, chances are you have heard of Tim Spector. I have both and, as such, am a bit of a superfan. The British doctor and Professor of Epidemiology at King’s College London was awarded an OBE for his scientific contributions during coronavirus. In the past, his arguments against low-fat and fad diets may have fallen on deaf ears, but now his advocating for high-fibre, plant-heavy diets which limit ultra-processed foods is gaining a lot of attention.

The bestselling author and co-founder of the gut-health company Zoe has written a new book, Good Mood Food. It comprises all Tim has learned about achieving a better mood, more energy and long-term brain health through eating. He has written this alongside Dr Federica Amati and Kathryn Bruton, who compiled the recipes which are focused on being both easy to make and delicious to eat.

Did he learn anything new about gut health and our relationship with food in the writing process? ‘Yes, a lot of it was new. That’s why I like writing books, because I discover lots of new things and am perpetually curious,’ Tim says. ‘I discovered a lot about the brain. I knew there was a gut-brain connection before, but I didn’t quite realise how much the gut controls the brain rather than the other way round.’

The book, Tim says, is an important introduction into how crucial our food is for our brains. ‘I realised that our brains are not separate from the rest of our body… I want everybody to try changing their diet through whatever way, whether it's following five of the recipes [in Good Mood Food], whether it's signing up for the Zoe app for two weeks, whether it's buying some prebiotics…’

Tim has been researching gut health for a long time, yet it is only now that his findings are hitting home and even becoming ‘trendy’. Kefir, kimchi and kombucha have been popping up in supermarkets all over the country. ‘I think people are now realising that with fermented foods, for example, they are no longer just seen as quackery or marketing. Five years ago we weren’t really talking about ultra-processed foods as being particularly bad, and now we are, so I think there's definitely a big movement.’ Although he adds, somewhat bitterly: ‘It’s not coming from the government or the NHS, that’s for sure… but they're not calling me a nutter anymore. It’s quite refreshing’.

For Tim, real change is ‘not about a six-week diet, it’s about fundamentally altering the way you see food and how you want to live the rest of your life’. This is something he has done himself. When he first met his wife Veronique Bataille, who is French-Belgian, the pair ‘ended up fully eating her kind of food’.

‘I wasn’t a particularly healthy eater at the time, anyway. She was doing most of the cooking, and she’s a very good cook, but it was rather rich — butter and butter and cream.’ These days you’re more likely to find Tim chowing down on some Mediterranean Baked Eggs (Good Mood Food, page 72) or a Mackerel and Grapefruit Caesar Salad (page 110).

He has had a huge impact on how we eat today and has shaped the mainstream narrative about health foods perhaps more than any other scientist in recent history. During my research of Tim, however, I found that some were less easy to win over to his way of life than others. When speaking to The Times earlier this year, he confessed that his wife ‘doesn’t go along with my whims and thinks my research plans are crazy,’ adding, ‘when I’m away she eats steak and chips’. It’s as they say: you really can’t win them all.

Your aesthetic hero

I am a great admirer of Michael Palin. I’ve met him a couple of times and he’s a lovely guy. Fame hasn’t got to him, he has lived in the same house for 50 years. He is always creating new careers, staying curious and still working, and he looks really fit too!

A book you’ve found inspiring

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, because it’s about changing countries and places and cultures, moving between them, and that sort of suited my mood — I’ve lived in other countries, so I found that very interesting. And you know, that’s what I like doing. I spend time in Belgium, France, Australia, Spain. I love moving around.

A possession you would never sell

I would never sell my bicycle, I am very attached to it. It cheers me up and clears my mind.

Your favourite painting

I do like Seurat, especially Bathers at Asnières. I love looking at that one, especially when it's on such a large scale.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I don’t buy much for myself apart from food, actually. I am always buying myself cheese. I’ve got two cheese shops near me. I am very lucky with where I live in North London. Going there and tasting a few and getting a cheese I haven’t had before is always one of my great pleasures.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

One of the lasting ones was by Gunter von Hagens, who was a German vivisectionist, who has just died. It was in Shoreditch somewhere and seeing those mummified bodies and where he had dissected out everything and taken away the fat, leaving just the muscle and the nerves… it was weirdly macabre but also incredibly beautiful.

The music that you work to

I often work to music, not all the time. When I do, it’s got to be familiar music, which is generally chill stuff from the 70s and 80s.

The last podcast you listened to

It would have been the Zoe podcast, slightly biased on that one, but I do catch up on the other guests. I also quite like The Rest is History — that’s always good fun.

Who would play you in a film of your life

Theo James from The Gentlemen. Make him a bit greyer at the temples.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

When I did Desert Island Discs I did actually say a fermenting kit. I’ll probably stick with that one. It’s that or a golf club, but I think the fermenting kit would be more useful.

What gets you up the morning

Looking forward to the day, because my days are pretty varied and I am infinitely curious. I have such a weird combination of doing science, TV, writing books and interacting with my colleagues at the university and at Zoe that I often don’t know what I am doing until I look in my diary, and it’s usually fun.

The items you collect

I would say cheeses, but I eat them all. I used to collect Napoleonic soldiers when I was younger, but now it is mostly interesting ferments. People send them to me.

A hotel you could go back and back to

They’re so many. I travel a lot. I went to the Six Senses Uluwatu in Bali. That was pretty special.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

A meal with my wife at Le Pont de la Tour restaurant next to Tower Bridge in London. We were celebrating my getting a job at St Thomas’s Hospital as a consultant. It's a really fancy French restaurant and we ate outside on the terrace, overlooking the Thames. It was sunny and, for me, it was the ultimate dream to get that job. I remember thinking: ‘You can relax now.’ Little did I know that I would change careers five times after that.

The best present you’ve ever received

My wife got me a voucher for skydiving. It was scary. Fun to do, but I’m not sure I’d do it again.

‘Good Mood Food’ by Tim Spector with Dr Federica Amati and recipes by Kathryn Bruton is out today, in all good bookshops.

Forget name and fame. Choosing a portraitist by reputation alone is the quickest way to make an expensive mistake, because no amount of renown can make up for a mismatch between the painter’s style and the patron’s taste. ‘There’s no point commissioning an artist who paints with very wild and vibrant colours when you’re quiet and sober and don’t want your pictures jumping off the walls,’ says portraitist Nicky Philipps.

Confident sitters know this and trust their instincts: ‘I was starting out, 28 years ago, and one of the wealthiest girls in the world came to my stand at my first-ever art fair,’ says Sara Stewart, the founder of Fine Art Commissions, an agency that connects sitters and painters. ‘She commissioned a young artist I had just taken on — it was £500 for a full length. She could have paid £20,000, but she chose that artist because she liked his style and that should be what it is all about.’

Even before finding the right painter, however, the very first step to a commission is figuring out why to do it and what a portrait actually entails. ‘There are wrong reasons,’ cautions Stewart, ‘principally, when someone is given a portrait as a present and doesn’t actually want it.’ In those cases, what invariably seems to happen is that the sitter doesn’t enjoy sitting, the artist faces an uphill struggle and the picture ends up in an attic. It is also important for prospective sitters to understand from the outset that a painted portrait is very different from a photographic one. ‘As well as being a record of their appearance, it’s the artistic interpretation by whichever painter you choose,’ notes portraitist Isabella Watling.

Indeed, suggests another painter, Jamie Coreth, people should approach a commission as if they were buying a picture from the artist, rather than their specific likeness: ‘They are first and foremost commissioning the painter’s artistic judgement. From my standpoint, it is important to be given the freedom to pursue ideas and to follow creative instinct. The best ideas can be missed if the brief is too controlling. Give the artist time and space to do their thing, with vision and excitement. I know from experience that, if I am happy with a painting, it’s often a result which the sitter will be happy about, too, and I am happiest with works where I have been able to realise an original vision for it.’

Portraiture, believes artist Isabel Douglas-Hamilton, is a collaborative process: ‘It gives me permission to study the sitters and really get to know them, and allows me to make 1,000 different decisions about who they are. I don’t want to capture a definitive version of that person, I want to capture their presence.’ Assuming they are happy with all this, sitters should plan their commission as far ahead as possible: ‘Artists have pipelines, so you might have to wait a year,’ says Douglas-Hamilton — and this is without considering the time it will take to paint the picture or the fact that the final varnish happens some 12 months after the painting is completed. ‘If you have, say, a big birthday at the end of 2027, now would be the time to think about commissioning,’ recommends Philipps.

What happens next, however, slightly differs, depending on whether this is a private or a corporate portrait. Livery companies or universities will usually want any new picture to fit in with their existing collection, so this will to an extent dictate a sitter’s choice of artist, medium and portrait size. Private commissions have more latitude, which is at once thrilling and potentially paralysing. Size is perhaps the easiest to determine: ‘My portraits are always life size, so the sitter has to decide between a head and shoulders, a three-quarters or a full length,’ says Watling.

Guiding factors in picking what to go for are budget, wall space and the amount of detail you would like to include. ‘With head and shoulders, you can’t have a backdrop,’ explains Philipps. ‘There’s nothing worse than people putting a painting or something on the wall behind their head. It interferes with the person and the character. If it’s a full-length picture, that’s a different story. I painted somebody in America sitting at his desk with the object that made his career: false hips, you know, the titanium thing that goes into a leg.’

The choice of medium and artist can often be linked, although many portraitists are equally happy to produce a painting or a drawing. There are advantages to both media, according to Stewart: a painting has great wall presence; a drawing is timeless and generally quicker.

Identifying the right portraitist, on the other hand, is often what first-time sitters find most challenging. As Stewart pointed out with her wealthy-patron example, sitters should pick a painter to whose style they respond naturally, much as they would if buying curtains or furniture. The problem is that art is often wrapped up in an intellectual mystique that tends to make people anxious and leads them to question their own opinion. ‘My job, first and foremost, is to make sitters feel relaxed and trust their own judgement,’ Stewart explains.

Knowing what kind of artworks patrons already have and love and what their houses look like is a great starting point, but she also has another ace up her sleeve: rather than asking people what they like from a portfolio of paintings, she asks them to point out what they don’t. ‘That’s the most revealing and the most helpful. You can get a better idea of what style they would be happy to live with than if you ask them what they enjoy.’ This kind of preliminary research makes all the difference: Philipps recommends looking at a wide range of artist portfolios and narrowing them down into a shortlist.

However, finding the right painter isn’t only a matter of identifying the style that best suits the sitter’s taste. Personal rapport is what turns a good commission into a great one. ‘[People] need to be furnished with all the idiosyncrasies, availability, price, everything of that artist, so that there are no unwelcome surprises,’ believes Philipps.

Coreth recalls as one of his favourite commissions a portrait that required several trips to paint his sitter at home: ‘We spent a lot of time together and became great friends as a result. The better we got to know each other, the clearer I felt about how to paint the portrait in a way that resonated as true to the individual.’ This is why, notes Stewart, ‘you have to work out the chemistry — whether the sitter will get on with the artist. Being an agent is a little like being a creative psychologist.’ For example, conversation is rather like Marmite for artists — some love it, some hate it — so Stewart would never pair up a sitter who dreads silence with a portraitist who likes to work quietly.

Philipps falls into the talking camp, because she finds that it helps dispel nerves: ‘I like to chat to sitters as much as possible, particularly at the beginning, because that creates the dynamic, the vibrancy of the sitting.’ Her secret to breaking the ice is to share ‘some unbelievably ludicrous stories about art’, such as, she laughs, when, at one important art show, a sculptor presented a head positioned on a plank: ‘It was so heavy that the men who took it past the judges had to bring it in two bits; the head came in first, followed by the stand with its little peg — and the judges rejected the head and took the plank.’ This helps sitters relax, which in turn opens the door to a better portrait. ‘Most people are stiff and nervous. They don’t know what they’re in for and they’re terrified of their image being in the hands of some stranger, so the best thing you can do is to chat, have a fun, jokey time, and then they will sink into themselves. They will tilt their head one way or the other and then you’ll find a more interesting pose.’

What if they don’t stop chatting? ‘Then, you just ask them to be quiet when you’re painting their mouth,’ as, indeed, Philipps once did with Elizabeth II.

These days, laments Stewart, there has been an increase in people asking for portraits from existing photographs. In her view, that kind of commission is very hard to do well, as the artist needs to be able to compose the sitter under the correct light: ‘I recommend people to choose artists that paint from life if they have time and want the full “sitting” experience, but the key thing is that they should have at least one sitting from life.’ Indeed, Philipps asks even members of the Royal Family for a sitting, preferably more.

Sometimes, people are hesitant to be painted from life because they are very self-conscious. This happens more frequently with women than men, particularly older ones, for whom, says Philipps, it is often sufficient to ‘put in front of them a glass of whisky, ask them to talk about themselves and they’re away’.

The more bashful sitters should not fear, however, as portraitists are adept at making people feel at ease. ‘One thing that is very useful is to find something they’re good at,’ believes Philipps. ‘I had one girl who sat; she said she had come from her cello practice and I said “Oh my gosh, so clever! I would so love to do that!” and I could visibly see her coming at me at a different level. Those little human touches — they really help.’

Other prospective sitters are concerned about the toll that being painted from life might take on their days. It is true that a commission should allow enough sitting time. ‘I wouldn’t want the portrait to feel performative and I hope getting to know the sitters allows them to be at ease and be themselves,’ says Douglas-Hamilton. ‘I think the worst thing you can do, if you’re commissioning a portrait, is expecting it to be done to a very quick deadline — you might as well just get a photograph, at that point. You want to give the artist time to really get to know you.’

One of her favourite commissions was a portrait of a young man, Victor Hope, who she painted against the backdrop of an elaborate interior. ‘You almost don’t notice the sitter at first — he is completely engrossed in reading and then there’s a dog at his feet, which gives an atmosphere of leisureliness, calmness. It’s like you’re entering into their private world.’ That said, ‘you don’t have to sit for 40 hours for a great portrait,’ reassures Stewart. Every picture is a law unto itself, but, as a rule of thumb, Douglas-Hamilton mentions three to four sittings, each lasting one to two hours, for a small oil head and shoulders. Philipps also tends to do two-hour sittings. She has done longer ones on occasion, but, crucially, a good portraitist can read the room: ‘If people are getting tired or fed up, you just stop the sitting.’ Watling suggests bored sitters ‘listen to something on earphones’.

Thorough preliminary research and a solid relationship with the painter of choice should go a long way towards ensuring patrons will like the resulting portrait. To assuage any residual fears, many artists, such as Douglas-Hamilton, will show people a sketch: ‘What I would do with a commission as big as the Victor Hope one, I would do a small, intimate oil sketch, then show it to the people who’ve commissioned me and say: “This is my idea for the big painting. What do you think?” I’ll never embark on a huge painting without them knowing roughly what my commission or my composition idea is.’

Many artists, even those as experienced as Philipps, are open to feedback from sitters, either directly or, more often, through an agent such as Stewart: ‘I don’t want to have something in the picture that bothers them,’ Philipps explains. ‘That would be awful. I’m not such a diva to think I get it right the whole time.’ If a sitter is being especially sensitive about a facial or body feature, she will endeavour to sort it out. ‘There are various mechanisms you can use to un-highlight something, if necessary. It doesn’t happen very often, but I wouldn’t want to stand there and tell people to get over it, because they wouldn’t. They’d put the painting in the attic and the whole thing would be pointless.’

This article first appeared in the October 14, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

On August 26, 1645, 140 people in the village of Bury St Edmonds, Suffolk, were rounded up and imprisoned, accused of witchcraft by their own neighbours. The following day, 18 were executed.

In the eyes of their accusers, these witches had used sorcery to sour beer, destroy crops, and even murder townsfolk they’d quarrelled with. Partly because of the works of the region’s self-appointed 'witchfinder' General Matthew Hopkins, Bury St Edmonds wears the dubious crown for holding the largest witch trial in English history. The terrifying antics in Suffolk even helped fuel the Salem Witch Trials in America, less than 50 years later.

England’s witch craze was a period of great fear, paranoia, and death that spanned the 16th and 17th centuries and resulted in the executions of at least 500 people. It hit its peak during the English Civil War (1642-51).

‘There were a lot of religious, social, economic, and legal stresses at the time,’ says Malcolm Gaskell, author of Worlds of Fear and Wonder: Living with the Supernatural, Past and Present.

Nearly a century earlier, Henry VIII had passed the Witchcraft Act (1542), making witchcraft a crime punishable by death. It was his appropriation of common land from the Catholic Church, however, that contributed to rising costs and unemployment. The influx of gold and silver from Spanish fleets had driven living costs up, while the Little Ice Age meant it was colder, damper, and harder to grow crops. At a time when the untimely death of a family cow could cause its owners to immediately slip into hunger, disquiet was rife across England.

‘People were looking for a quick and easy answer,’ says Diane Purkiss, author of The Witch in History: Early Modern and Late Twentieth Century Representations. ‘What they came up with is witches.’

The very superstitious James VI and I also played a part. In 1589, he narrowly avoided death while sailing through a storm on his way back from Denmark with his new bride, Princess Anne and blamed the violent weather on evil forces and witches. Once back on dry land he instigated the North Berwick Witch Trials in which local healer Agnes Sampson confessed, under torture, to throwing a cursed cat into the sea in order to create the conditions. Shortly after becoming the English King in 1603, James enforced an even stricter Witchcraft Act and re-released his book, Daemonologie, which detailed the existence of widespread witchcraft, sorcery and evil forces.

The idea of magic, spirits and fairies existed long before James’s proclamations, says Marion Gibson, author of Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials: ‘In Pagan times, early Christian missionaries spoke about local people venerating hills and streams, and using charms, prayers, and folk magic.’ The English often talked about supernatural entities, which they believed were the restless dead, she adds.

During this period, people would pray upon local herbs and flowers, and candles, for their own success and to bring harm upon their rivals. According to Gibson, the general consensus was that magic caused as much good as it did bad: ‘Before the witch hunts, there was bad and good magic. It was more of a balance. When people started to think that all magic was bad, that’s when they decided to get witches and punish them.’

During the religious turbulence of the Middle Ages, believers began to think that the devil was recruiting his own followers to undermine Christianity. Those people — in particular marginalised figures at the fringes of society — were witches, says Gibson. Ninety percent of the people accused were women who didn’t fit the era’s social expectations. They were almost always poor, usually childless, unmarried, homeless, elderly, argumentative, especially with their neighbours, disfigured or employed as midwives or healers. ‘There were no nurses or doctors in this period,’ Gibson reminds me. ‘If your child, dog, or sheep is sick, you might go to see a cunning woman, who would suggest some kind of magical remedy.’ If the treatment didn’t work, the healer was quickly blamed.

In 1582, a midwife called Ursley Kemper was found guilty of murdering a baby in St Osyth, Essex. The reality was that after Kemper had successfully cared for Grace Thurlow’s sickly first born child, the pair fell out. When Thurlow picked a different midwife for the birth of her second child, and that baby died after accidentally falling from their cradle, Thurlow accused Kemper of murder through witchcraft. Local magistrates even manipulated Kemper’s 8-year-old son, Thomas, into testifying against his mother, while further evidence was that Kempler kept two cats, a lamb, and a toad as pets.

Then in 1645, 14 women from Framlingham, Suffolk — many of whom were widows living on Church handouts were hanged for witchcraft. In the same year, Essex’s Elizabeth Clarke was accused seemingly because she has one leg, was a single, unmarried parent and because her own mother had previously been found guilty. ‘This is neighbours bringing neighbours to the attention of authorities,’ emphasises Gaskell. ‘It’s not between rich and poor. It's between the poor. They're the ones that live with each other. They're the ones where there's the greatest competition. That's often where the animosity is bitterest.’

The accusations were complicated by overly pious parishioners, who believed labelling their neighbors as witches proved how close they were to God. Some of the accused also insisted they really were witches, says Purkiss, because — after years of being ‘unseen in society’ — the label gave them ‘a moment in the spotlight where they were the most important person in the room.’

While the commonly held belief is that the witch craze took place in rural areas, there were trials in London and Newcastle — where the governor used the services of renowned Scottish witch-picker John Kincaid to hunt for sorcerers. At least 16 people were executed on evidence he provided and Scotland became a much-feared place. Despite having a fifth of the population of England, it executed three times as many people. Those numbers, however, pale in comparison to Germany, which is believed to have executed more than 7,000; Switzerland and France are both estimated to have done away with about 5,000.

The brutality of the Civil War went some way to tempering England’s bloodlust. ‘People had seen too much religious fighting and killing and a greater period of tolerance was ushered in,’ says Gibson. And, around this time, scientific discoveries and knowledge were forcing people to think differently about the world. While individuals continued to be accused, most were acquitted. In 1736, James I’s Witchcraft Act was repealed.

The depiction of witches in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Robert Burns’s Tam o' Shanter, Wilhelm Meinhold's The Amber Witch and Roald Dahl’s The Witches has created an enduring, though not very positive, legacy. ‘They’ve become sort of domesticated into children's stories,’ says Gaskell. ‘If you invert everything we think is good, you create the figure of the witch.’

Even though the witch craze unfolded centuries ago, counties across England are increasingly choosing to pardon and honour those who died. Visitors to Colchester and Lancaster are able to experience how victims were treated by walking around the cramped, damp and dimly lit stone-walled dungeons beneath their castles, where the accused were barely fed, sometimes tortured, and left to rot as they waited to be tried. Newcastle recently erected memorials. The landscapes in Essex and Suffolk are largely unchanged. ‘These are really great places where you can imagine where the history took place and the atrocities that happened,’ says Gaskell.

In the long, candlelit drawing room of the Villa Diodati, five exiles from England listened to the rain thrashing against the tall balcony windows. Thunder rolled symphonically across the black waters of Lake Geneva and lightning crackled above the Jura Mountains, the yellow flashes sending shadows leaping through the darkness.

It was July 1816 in Switzerland. Far off in South-East Asia, a massive volcanic eruption in 1815 had sent up vast ash clouds that had called a halt on summer. The sky was dark, the air chilled, crops failed and famine loomed. Many took it as a sign of the end of days. The tempestuous weather mimicked the personal lives of the English quintet —George Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont and Dr John Polidori.

Lord Byron was fleeing a broken marriage and a raft of scandals that fully vindicated his former lover Lady Caroline Lamb’s assessment that he was ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’. Shelley, too, was on intimate terms with controversy. A vocal atheist, he’d narrowly avoided a severe prison sentence for sedition as a student, caused a minor scandal when he eloped with the 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook and a greater furore when he ditched her and their two children to escape to continental Europe with the teenage Godwin.

Godwin’s stepsister Clairmont was pregnant with Byron’s child, or so she said. His Lordship was not entirely convinced, believing that she had also slept with Shelley. Polidori was Byron’s travelling physician. Dark haired, vain and intelligent, he entertained romantic notions of a literary career, an aspiration his employer took a cruel delight in publicly mocking. Belittled and lampooned, the unhappy medico had conceived the notion that Byron was draining the life out of him. Had the tabloid press existed in Georgian England, we can assume the group would have filled front pages.

In the grand, porticoed house with its views of the glimmering lake and brooding mountains, a mood of febrile morbidity took hold. In the flickering light as the storm raged, the company spoke of somnambulism, re-animation, the harnessing of electricity and the German horror tales of the Fantasmagoriana. As midnight passed, Byron recited from Christabel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Gothic poem of witchcraft, in a voice that had been likened to that of the Devil tempting Eve. Shelley turned deathly pale, shrieked and ran from the room, later describing an apparition of a woman with eyes in her breasts that had sprung up before him.

These incidents and conversations, the dark skies and the anxious, claustrophobic atmosphere inside the mansion would foster the creation of two literary figures who would haunt the nightmares of future generations: Frankenstein’s monster and a sophisticated and seductive feaster on human blood, the vampire.

Confined beneath sombre skies, beset by rivalries, resentments and sexual intrigue, the quintet determined each to write a ghost story. Clairmont shared her stepsister’s love for the fantastical, but, overcome with worries about her future, seems not to have contributed. Byron made a desultory effort, but was distracted by thoughts of a new poem inspired by a recent visit to the dungeons of the nearby castle at Chillon (where, characteristically, he had carved his name on a stone pillar). Shelley’s tale was played out as a single dramatic recitation and is lost for ever. Godwin’s story was sparked by a nightmare in which she saw a ‘pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together’ and then, ‘on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life’.

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, would be published in 1818. Widely derided as nonsense by critics at the time, the novel’s reputation and influence would grow until its fame far outstripped that of the poetry of Shelley or Byron. Then there was poor Polidori. His tale, The Vampyre, was an act of revenge upon the man who mocked and bullied him, Byron.

The vampire of Eastern European legend is a soil-encrusted, red-eyed and semi-human fiend. Polidori transformed it into something more mesmeric, charming and amorally evil, a man whose voice chilled the listener even as it seduced them, whose ‘love was death’. His suave vampire, Lord Ruthven (so plainly modelled on his employer) would be the godfather of Count Dracula, Edward Cullen and others.

The Vampyre might have brought Polidori the literary fame he sought, but alas an unscrupulous publisher issued the story not with his name on the cover, but that of his nemesis, Byron. His Lordship was a celebrity before the word had meaning, so, naturally, it became an immediate sensation. Polidori fought to have his authorship acknowledged, but nobody listened. Thwarted and humiliated, he apparently took his own life with poison, haunted to the end by those cold dark days in that villa on the stormy shores of Lake Geneva.

This article first appeared in the October 21, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

‘Nothing can prepare you for the size of the Karakoram mountains and their glaciers,’ says art dealer and mountaineer William Mitchell. ‘From Concordia, K2 looks like it is just beyond the moraine in front of the camp — when in fact it takes eight hours to walk to its base. Everything is on a gigantic scale.’

In July 2025, he and artist James Hart Dyke, a veteran of painting Mont Blanc, Mount Everest and Patagonia, had set out to journey from Askole, in Pakistan’s Braldu Valley, to K2, the world’s second highest mountain, and back. The result of their extraordinary endeavour is an exhibition of Hart Dyke’s paintings, presented by Mitchell at Marquis House, London.

1. Artist and art dealer followed in the footsteps of Italian photographer Vittorio Sella, who had travelled to K2 in 1909 and taken large-format photographs that have since inspired generations of mountaineers. So rugged and difficult is the terrain that Hart Dyke had to prepare for more than a year for his expedition. Once there, he sketched almost every day of the three-week, 124-mile trek, creating an extraordinary visual record of one of the world’s most inaccessible mountains.
2. The two took on the 40-mile-long Baltoro Glacier. ‘They were long days and, in altitude terms, we were already much higher than the top of most ski resorts in Europe,’ says Mitchell. ‘The midday sun seared straight down on us. As a result, we covered much of the distance from well before dawn, using headtorches over our woollen hats, and then stopping in the early to mid afternoon’.
3. The weather was decidedly not their friend. ‘On our way to Concordia, we passed through a few miles of very steep gullies running between the glacier and the southern flanks of the peaks. Our lead guide, Gul, said we should be very thankful that it wasn’t raining, as this was the most treacherous part of the voyage, because of rockfall,’ recalls Mitchell. The group cheered at the news that they would return a different way, via the Hushe Valley — only for that pass to be snow-bound. ‘We had to come back through these gullies — and it was raining. For two very fraught hours, we had to run in single file through a “bowling alley” of small rocks and even boulders tumbling from both sides. It was extremely unpleasant.’
4. The Balti porters who accompanied Mitchell and Hart Dyke loved cricket. ‘On the way down from K2, we passed through a military checkpoint by a bridge and Ali, the cook, managed to fashion a cricket bat from a piece of abandoned decking. At our last camp before the end of the trek, using a hard, blue physiotherapy ball, we staged a “Pakistan versus the Rest of the World” match. The tourists lost, but it was played at 3,250 metres [10,663ft]’.
5. Hart Dyke’s paintings will be on show until November 22, after which they will travel to Italy, where they will be displayed at Forte di Bard, a fortress at the mouth of the Aosta valley that also hosts the Museum of the Alps, next to 20 photographs by Sella.

‘K2 Artistic Expeditions: James Hart Dyke’ is at Marquis House, London, from November 16–22.

This article first appeared in the October 28, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Officially, you’ll find MI5 in London’s Thames House, the most imposing and well-secured building on Millbank. There are rumours, of course, that the footprint of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency spreads far wider, into shabby, anonymous premises of the kind seen on the Apple TV series Slow Horses and even through secret tunnels under the river.

For much of its history, the organisation wasn’t even a matter of public record: until the 1989 Secret Service Act gave it statutory recognition, ministers routinely denied all knowledge of its existence. It is world famous, yet nobody on the outside has the faintest idea what its day-to-day in 2026 actually looks like — those who claim to know, and are willing to share that information, by definition do not.

Its historic paper trail, however, is a little easier to follow. You only have to take a train to Kew Gardens in west London, home of The National Archives, to which MI5 periodic-ally releases documents (redacted where necessary) that are at least 50 years old and considered not to be inherently sensitive. There, you put in a formal request to view records and before long you are carefully opening a time-capsule box full of memos, minutes and correspondence. In January 2025, The National Archives received more than 100 such documents, including paperwork shedding new light on the discovery of the ‘Cambridge Five’ spy ring. Not long after, work began on The MI5 Archive: Official Secrets.

The book is the first visual record of the organisation’s activities and a remarkably evocative glimpse of a clandestine world. ‘It smells of card indexes and brush passes and last-minute saves,’ writes the novelist Nick Harkaway in his introduction. His father, John le Carré, began his intelligence career at MI5 and one of his untold stories is among those revealed here: during a training exercise, as part of which he had been instructed to ‘kidnap’ and interrogate a fellow officer, he accidentally snatched a local headmaster who happened to be cycling past.

The story of the Secret Service Bureau, as it was initially known, begins in August 1909, on Victoria Street in Westminster. Its remit, defined by the War Office and the Metropolitan Police, was to defend the country by both monitoring foreign agents in Britain and ‘running’ agents abroad. Domestic duties were given to what would later become MI5 and the ‘Foreign Section’, later MI6, looked after operations abroad.

Almost from the outset, the two branches of British intelligence were perceived as having distinct characters: one scholarly, one swashbuckling (to this day, MI5 staff are rumoured to refer to their opposite numbers as TSARs: ‘Those S***s Across the River’).

The First World War made for brisk business and, by 1918, MI5 was employing 850 staff, but with the disappearance of the German threat came swingeing budget cuts and soon there were only 30 people effectively camping out in a South Kensington townhouse. ‘To remain relevant to its Whitehall paymasters, a new enemy was required,’ notes The National Archives.

In 1920, there came the formation of the secretly Moscow-backed Communist Party of Great Britain. The ‘Defence Black List’ of left-wing individuals considered potentially injurious to the security of the state had 25,250 names on it by 1925, many of whom were having their telephones tapped and their post intercepted by an MI5 with a headcount of still only 35 people. The rise of Hitler meant all of this had to be put to one side. MI5 relocated to Wormwood Scrubs, with the cells converted into offices, and then, when the prison was bombed in the Blitz, Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.

Among the papers in The National Archives is a hair-raising September 1940 map showing the projected landings of Germany’s first-wave troop divisions in Operation Sea Lion. MI5, however, was remarkably successful in capturing the German agents sent to Britain and ‘turning’ them via the Double-Cross System, facilitating victory on D-Day. Wartime MI5 was full of eccentric characters such as Thomas Argyll ‘Tar’ Robertson, the remarkable Scottish intelligence officer and former Seaforth Highlander who sported tartan trews and went grouse shooting with the aid of a decoy bird of prey he had fashioned from umbrella ribs.

In 1945, MI5’s agent-runner Maxwell Knight — the complicated former jazz-band leader, Exmoor publican and early British Fascist said to have inspired Ian Fleming’s M — wrote that ‘in the history of espionage and counter-espionage a very high percentage of the greatest coups have been brought off by women’. MI5 gained its first female director general, Stella Rimington, in 1992 and female spies have been rightly celebrated in recent years. Yet there has always been an invisible army of women without whom this archive would not exist: the secretaries, shorthand typists and filing clerks who the then director general Vernon Kell addressed as ‘the ladies of the Office’ in a 1926 memo. As signatories of the Official Secrets Act, most never went on record to tell their stories—with a few exceptions.

The first mention of the Cold War reached the public in 1947 and fears around Stalin’s atomic ambitions led MI5 in some surprising directions. Records from 1948 held in The National Archives detail the activities of the Pigeon Sub-Committee, such as the minutes of a November 1948 meeting in which it was proposed ‘to see what happens to a homing pigeon when it flies over an atomic plant in full blast’.

Over several months, the scope of this inquiry expanded in increasingly Pythonesque dimensions, from the ‘feasibility [of] tying gadget to pigeons leg which would indicate whether bird passed near atomic-plant’ to the development of a container ‘for dropping pigeons from high speed aircraft’. Mention was also made of a pigeon-fancying member of MI5 staff who, if ‘assisted to maintain bigger loft than he does normally’, might ‘be able to meet modest calls for birds’ should a crack winged squad be required to see off the Soviet threat. A proposal for further research was made in May 1949 to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Didcot, Oxfordshire, but there seems to be no record of the pigeon test-flight ever taking place.

Within two years, things had taken a decidedly darker turn and then unknown, but now instantly familiar names were starting to appear in MI5 records. After Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess of the Foreign Office defected to Moscow in 1951, the organisation became suspicious about the activities of Harold ‘Kim’ Philby, an MI6 liaison officer at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. He was recalled to London and interrogated by MI5 on suspicion of being a double agent, but always denied it, even calling a press conference in 1955 to protest his innocence.

On January 9, 1963, however, two days before his official confession statement, an internal MI5 memo records ‘that H. A. R. Philby has confessed’. Philby’s subsequent defection and the unmasking of fellow ‘Cambridge Five’ Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, then Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures, were seismic events for the British intelligence community.

Yet although the MI5 archive contains plenty of transcriptions of phone-taps and surveillance logs, these years were far from a free-for-all. A November 1970 ‘Note For Record’ headed ‘Secret and Personal’ details the surveillance of the trade unionist Jack Jones, who was suspected of being an undercover Communist. ‘The Prime Minister agreed with the Home Secretary and the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary… that the Security Service should be authorised to tap Mr Jones’s telephone. They should not instal a listening device in his flat without further Ministerial authority,’ it states.

Spying has always been an intensely bureaucratic business. ‘Why are we here?’ Harkaway asks in his introduction to the book — is it because we can’t get enough of ‘derring do’? ‘Do we want to know how spying is done to secure ourselves from it?’ he ponders. ‘Or to reveal the past?’ The whys and hows of spycraft certainly hold an enduring fascination, but it’s the quotidian details that really stick in your mind: tea-rings left on documents; terse marginalia; the sorts of small, but fiercely fought internal power struggles that will be familiar to anyone who has worked in an office.

The truth is that spies are rarely glamorous or particularly unusual — but it is this proximity of ordinary human foibles and failings to some of history’s most extraordinary moments that makes immersing yourself in the depths of the MI5’s evocative archive so compelling.

This article first appeared in the October 21, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Jim Howick is so cosy. He is your dad’s friend that has inherited the title of uncle, despite no blood relation. Perhaps I feel this way because Jim has been on TV since my childhood, and acted in many of the shows that I grew up with. Who can forget him in Horrible Histories, as various singing plague-ridden, wig-wearing characters from eras long past? Or in Peep Show, as David Mitchell’s awkward love rival Gerard? Then, of course, there’s Jim’s memorable turn as Mr Hendricks, the science teacher so incompetent at dirty talk that he begins listing kitchen utensils, in Netflix’s smash hit Sex Education.

These days he is Pat Butcher in Ghosts, the bumbling yet kind scoutmaster from beyond the grave who shares his name with the Eastenders’s character (Jim’s idea, he found it funny). The British series, created with some of his Horrible Histories cast mates, has been one of the BBC’s most successful sitcoms in recent years. When it came to an end in 2023 many fans were devastated, but now Pat and his dearly departed friends are back in the feature film Ghosts: The Possession of Button House.

‘It was basically like making the series,’ Jim says of the film, which was shot at West Horsley Place in Surrey. ‘Actually, when it came to the actual takes we probably had less time than we did making the series, which came as a bit of a shock… I think we all expected to be indulged a little bit more,’ he admits. The house itself plays a huge role in the Ghosts universe, as the spirits who live there are confined to the building and its grounds. ‘The house was really important to us, and it was also important to film on location,’ Jim says. ‘But we did have to be careful because there was a weight quota, so we were a bit concerned about falling through the floor. There were elements where we realised: “Oh God, this is an actual, genuine, creaky, really old house.”’

Will he be embarking on more projects with long-term co-creators Mathew Baynton, Simon Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas, Laurence Rickard and Ben Willbond? They’ve been acting and writing together for so long now, it would seem criminal to see them go their separate ways.

‘There’s nothing concrete in place at the moment, but you know… never say never. We’re still very close and I suppose it all depends on what happens in the next three weeks,’ he says, of the film's reception. ‘It’s tricky now because we’re all getting a bit older,’ says Jim, who is 47. ‘The next thing we do will probably have to be set in a nursing home or something.’ At the screening of the film my fellow journalists and I were laughing raucously, giving me plenty of reason to suspect that the cast of Ghosts, although adept at playing the dead, have plenty of life left in their careers yet.

Your aesthetic hero

I always look to the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who I think carried himself and his choices so well. He was so believable, and I think I could relate to him, certainly from an aesthetic point of view, because I am of a similar build and probably play similar characters. You know, neither of us were going to be the juvenile or romantic lead, even when we were young, so I always think about him and his choices, performance wise. I was really upset when he passed, because I felt he had so much to offer.

Last podcast you listened to

Desert Island Discs is my favourite of all time, so I’ll say that.

A possession you’d never sell

I’ve still got my childhood teddy bear. He’s called Hunter and I think I could part with any other possession, but I feel like I just couldn’t bear to give him away. I don’t sleep with him, I should say. He’s in the spare room. I’ve got two dogs, so I've sort of got real life teddies. But he would be the thing I would rescue in a fire. And my dogs, of course.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

I was really impressed with the David Bowie exhibition at the V&A Museum. That was a real experience. He was just such a phenomenal artist who covered such a wide spectrum of genre and performance. I found that really inspiring.

I tell you what, Reece Shearsmith, who is a friend of mine — I can't believe that he’s a friend of mine because he was a hero of mine growing up — has a horror exhibition of his own in his home. He has a newel post which is actually a hinge, when you lift it up it has a red button underneath. When you press it, a wardrobe moves and inside is a room full of oddities and horror memorabilia and magic props and things. He has a book out now, Things I Took from the Dark: The Museum of Me. His collection was genuinely impressive to me because he is someone who really indulged in his first love. I really admire a grown up still doing that. I think we throw stuff out too quickly in life.

The thing you’d take with you to a desert island

A bed.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

My dogs.

The items you collect

Football programmes.

The last thing of note you bought for yourself

It was a piece of art by an artist called Will Rochfort, He does these amazing nostalgic prints. He did an incredible painting. You know the film Jaws? There’s a scene in it where, in the Amity poster, there is a lady on a lido, someone has graffitied it so she’s screaming: “Help, shark!” and a shark’s fin is coming towards her. He made a print of that happening — the boy is sneaking up to the poster with a ladder and a flashlight to deface it. It was a scene that you never saw in the film. I just thought it was amazing, and so I bought a copy of that print.

A book you found inspiring

It’s called A Time of Gifts and it’s by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Basically, he grew up and became a soldier in the Second World War. It is the first book in a trilogy and the writer Jonny Sweet put me on to this and gave it to me as a wrap gift. It’s basically a travelogue, which I love. He, armed with five pound notes and a small rucksack full of clothes, boards a boat on the Thames and goes to Rotterdam, and then walks to Constinople, through Europe in 1936. He walks all the way through Holland and Belgium and through the beginnings of Nazi Germany, which is quite terrifying for him. He sleeps in hay bales, or makes friends with sort of counts and sleeps in palaces, basically lays his head wherever he can and gets into adventures.

Your favourite painting

Oh my goodness me, that is really tough. Let me think. It’s a Caravaggio, I think. Saint Jerome Writing, which is in Malta Cathedral. I just think the lighting is insane. It looks like a film, so tangible and real. It’s just magical. My other favourite painting is Netherlandish Proverbs by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It’s this multi-level town scene and it’s so busy with story and life and just levels. It reminds me of a Hogarth, or something like that. It’s populated and almost feels like it’s moving and there’s just so much detail. I could get lost in that. I really could.

The music that you work to

I think you have to cater for whatever the tone of the piece you're writing is. I tend to listen to soundtracks when I am writing. So, The Social Network soundtrack is a really great one. I also listen to the Tron: Legacy soundtrack. This is when I’m writing my own stuff. When I’m writing Ghosts, we don’t really listen to anything because we have each other.

Every episode I write, I write with Mat, and I think I wouldn’t want to write comedy on my own. I think you have to have a supreme confidence to be able to do that. At least if you are writing with someone else there is an audience of sorts. We do tend to deviate, Mat and I. We sort of tend to find ideas when we stop writing. We spend a great deal of time watching people eat really hot chillies on YouTube. We find that very funny.

Who would play you in a film of your life

Well, I would have said Philip Seymour Hoffman… erm… Zach Galifianakis.

A hotel you could go back and back to

Probably the Phāea Blue in Crete.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

A lunch in Huế in Vietnam next to a beautiful lake surrounded by mountains, it was just incredible.

Best present you’ve ever received

A Sega Mega Drive when I was 11 years old.

‘Ghosts: The Possession of Button House’ is in cinemas now.

On his deathbed, Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai had one regret: ‘If heaven had granted me five more years of life, I could have become a true painter.’ The story may be apocryphal, but it’s perfectly plausible — Hokusai’s entire life reads like a legend.

Born in October 1760 in Honjo, Edo, he was only three when he was adopted into a family that made mirrors for the shogun. After a spell as a block-cutter’s apprentice, he joined the studio of ukiyo-e painter and printmaker Katsukawa Shunshō — ukiyo-e being the ‘floating world’ of theatre and pleasure houses.

The not-quite-yet Hokusai — he went under a different name at the time — began making actor prints, but was expelled, or left, soon after his master’s death. He found a new niche illustrating kyōka, witty poetry books, and in 1798 passed his name on to a pupil, a customary practice at the time, becoming instead Hokusai Tokimasa. The name wouldn’t last: the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco recorded at least 20 different monikers for him — and 90 house moves.

The dawn of the 19th century brought Hokusai fame and fortune. He gave painting performances at temples and in front of the shogun, creating pictures of such a scale — his 1817 depiction of Buddhist patriarch Daruma covered more than 2,000 square feet — that would dwarf many of Western art’s monumental works. Five years earlier, in 1812, the freshly renamed Katsushika Hokusai had also published his own drawing manual, Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing.

Then, disaster struck. In the 1820s, soon after turning 60, he lost both a daughter and his second wife, contended with a grandson’s gambling debts and may have even had a stroke. His work suffered and, in 1830, affairs were so dire the artist lamented to his publishers that he had ‘no money, no clothes to wear, nothing to eat,’ as Matthi Forrer wrote in Simiolus in 2018.”

A lesser man would have probably given up — but not Hokusai. His daughter Ōi joined him and, together, they set out to revive his fortunes. The artist sailed through his seventies, producing some of his most celebrated work, including Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, soon to be the subject of an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

Japan’s highest peak and one of its three holy mountains (forbidden to women until 1872), Mount Fuji had long been a favourite artistic motif, with one of the earliest depictions, Hata no Chitei’s Shōtoku Taishi E-Den, dating from 1069. Hokusai portrayed it from different angles and seasons. In Red Fuji, the mountain, bathed in a fiery glow under a vivid blue sky speckled with fluffy clouds, towers above the trees, almost filling the entire picture, which is devoid of people. In Thunderstorm Beneath the Summit, the peak soars above rain and lightning.

Yet, many of the 36 views also show a slice of early-19th-century Japan, not least the celebrated Mitsui kimono shop, which owed part of its fortune to a groundbreaking policy: it accepted ‘cash only’, doing away with deferred payments, but promised ‘no padded prices’. Both signs appear in Hokusai’s picture, where triangular roofs echo the shape of Mount Fuji.

The revered mountain is also little more than a backdrop in the most famous of the 36 views, Under the Wave off Kanagawa, more familiarly known as The Great Wave. The swell hovers like a menacing talon above fragile oshiokuri-bune, the boats that supplied Edo, modern-day Tokyo, with fresh fish. Thought to be the most widely reproduced piece of non-Western art, The Great Wave was already hugely sought-after in Hokusai’s times, when about 8,000 impressions were made, according to the British Museum.

Perhaps the most intriguing of the 36 views, however, is much less known: Reflection in Lake at Misaka in Kai Province. In this scene, Hokusai shows the reflection of Mount Fuji in the water, its peak clothed in snow — but the mountain above the lake has not a single flake.

In the USA, the Metropolitan Museum in New York suggests this may represent two seasons, but Yale University Art Gallery interprets it as an invitation to question what is real and what isn’t.

Although the Fuji theme was traditional, the 36 views were anything but: this was Japan’s first landscape print series to appear in a large format and among the first to use Prussian blue, a fade-resistant pigment imported from the Netherlands and China. Nor were they 36 — with sales booming, the publisher added another 10, but kept the original title. The prints’ popularity was fuelled by their affordability: in the mid 19th century, one cost about as much as two helpings of noodles, according to the British Museum.

By 1836, Hokusai was secure enough to dictate conditions to his publisher: ‘He requests that Egawa Tomekichi, whom he regarded as the best blockcutter working in Edo at that time, be engaged to cut the blocks,’ noted Ellis Tinios in Print Quarterly in 2015. ‘He explains that Egawa had cut the blocks for Fugaku Hyakkei [One hundred views of Mount Fuji] and, after closely checking every page of that book, he declared that he could not find any fault in Egawa’s realisation of his intentions.’ Nor did he mince words when unhappy: he once complained to a blockcutter about the cutting of eyes and noses, adding sketches for good measure: ‘Recently, these eyes and noses have been very popular. But I really, really hate them!’”

A self-proclaimed ‘old man mad about painting’, Hokusai was an early proponent of lifelong learning. In the afterword to the One hundred views of Mount Fuji, written when he was about 74, he noted: ‘Since the age of six, I had a habit of sketching from life. From 50 onwards, I began producing a fair amount of art work, but nothing I did before the age of 70 was worthy of attention. At 73, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If only I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am 80, so that by 90 I will have penetrated their essential nature. At 100, I hope I may have a divine understanding of them, while at 110 I may have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive.’

He didn’t quite live to 110, but after his death he continued to make waves, as it were — this time into the wider world, as Japanese prints became popular in Europe from the late 19th century. Comparing him to Eugène Delacroix, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo: ‘Hokusai makes you cry out the same thing — but in his case with his lines, his drawing, since in your letter you say to yourself: these waves are claws, the boat is caught in them, you can feel it.’

Claude Debussy hung a print of The Great Wave in his Paris studio and chose a detail of the design as the 1905 cover of the score of his orchestral triptych La Mer. Another devotee was Frank Lloyd Wright, who bought many prints, including Nihonbashi in Edo —with its crowded bridge in the foreground — and Snowy Morning at Koishikawa, where the cold is palpable as a white blanket envelops trees, roofs, fields and the slopes of an exceedingly tall Mount Fuji, to which a woman points from a window.

Indeed, it was the West and most notably a France gripped by Japonisme, that made Hokusai’s reputation as Japan’s greatest artist, according to cultural-exchange scholar Shigemi Inaga: as he noted in Japan Review in 2003, 19th-century French art critics such as Philippe Burty compared the ukiyo-e artist to Francisco Goya or Peter Paul Rubens— w hereas the Histoire de l’Art du Japon, published by the Imperial Japanese Commission for the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, only devoted to Hokusai 12 lines and a single plate.

Praise from abroad has long since filtered back home and The Great Wave is now in the pockets of most Japanese every day — it is printed on the back of 1,000-yen banknotes. The old man mad about painting would probably be delighted.

'Hokusai: Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji’ is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery from October 20–January 17, 2027.

This feature originally appeared in the October 14, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'

'Last night I did nothing but dream of you,’ wrote a passionate Horatio Nelson to Emma Hamilton in January 1800. Their love story unfolds through a treasure trove of letters gathered over 40 years by Clive Richards (1937–2021) — the largest collection of papers relating to the admiral created single-handedly ever since the days of Victorian bigwig Alfred Morrison.

Among the manuscripts are two poignant letters by Hamilton to Nelson, the only two remaining in private hands. She wrote them shortly before the Battle of Trafalgar — and they only reached the fleet after his death. Other correspondence traces the increasingly difficult relationship between Hamilton and Nelson’s family, as his brother William gained control of the Admiral’s inheritance. Riddled with debts, after a spell in prison, Hamilton moved in July 1814 to France, where she died a mere six months later.

Also in the collection are battle papers that offer eyewitness accounts of the greatest naval engagements of the time, from Cape St Vincent to the Nile, Nelson’s own reports and his plans for Trafalgar.

The Nelson papers are on show at Sotheby’s from October 21, the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, to October 28. The collection, which has an estimate of £4million–£6 million, will be offered in a single-lot sealed auction, with bidding closing on November 18. Proceeds will benefit the Clive Richards Foundation, which supports education, healthcare, heritage and the Arts.

This article first appeared in the October 21, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Ronnie Wood needs a coffee. He has just arrived at the Handel Hendrix Museum in Brook St, London, to introduce his latest paintings of Jimi Hendrix and his forthcoming conversation with music journalist Paul Sexton calls for a spot of caffeination.

Steaming cup in hand, hair as wonderfully jagged and bouffant as ever, he is ready for a riveting trip down memory lane. Because, as it turns out, the Rolling Stones lead guitarist not only knew Hendrix well, played music with him and painted him repeatedly — but even shared a flat with him and his dog.

Wood says he first met Hendrix at London club The Speakeasy in 1966. Word about the American had spread quickly, with Eric Clapton telling Wood he ought to see this new talent in town. What he heard blew the Rolling Stone guitarist’s mind: ‘It was like somebody swivelled the Earth a little bit more on its axis.’

He recalls that the American didn’t like his own singing voice: ‘And I said, you don't have to worry about your singing voice, Jimmy, when you play guitar like [that].’ Hendrix did play the guitar with his teeth, but that’s not what Wood is referring to: ‘Everyone takes a leaf out of his book, including me. I have little flourishes where I think, “Oh, that's like a Jimi riff”... But when it comes to interpreting the blues and rock and roll, like Jimi did, no one did it like him.’

He and Hendrix kept bumping into one another and even played together when Wood, who was then touring the USA with the Jeff Beck group, had temporarily switched to the bass: ‘There used to be a gathering place for everyone after the gigs and the Jeff Beck group were no exception. We got up and played a bit, me and Rod and Jeff, and then Jimi would turn up …and he'd say, “Hey, Jeff, let the bass player play, man, let him have a solo.” Every time Jimmy got up with us, he'd let me have a solo.”

It’s after Hendrix had begun making waves in London that the two shared a flat in Holland Park belonging to singer P. P. (Pat) Arnold. Not that it was a regular flatmate experience: ‘Food was never an option. We had a few peas to shove around the plate. I think that's about it. Everybody in rock and roll just shoved a few peas around the plate.’

Instead, they would play guitar, with the otherwise quiet Hendrix doing so both right- and left-handed: ‘Bobby Womack did that, too, but Jimmy was so fluent with it, without being deliberately showy. The guitar was like having a beautiful dog to him, you know, he did tricks, playing with his teeth or playing over the neck, upside down. Then he ran out of ideas and eventually set his guitar on fire. Follow that.’

However, there was also a real dog in the picture, which, as it happens, was not house-trained. As a result, says Wood, the flat sharing only lasted a few nights ‘because his dog would poop all over the house and Arnold threw us out’. Heading out on tour, Hendrix gave the pooch to Wood: ‘Loopy was the name. It was a Basset Hound, ears dragging on the floor. Lovely dog. I kept [her]. She was a girl.’

Hendrix fascinated his one-time flatmate — who had trained at Ealing Art College and has long pursued an artistic as well as a musical career — as much for his face as for his skill — ‘a bit like Mick, he's pretty hard to capture and so it's always a challenge.’ Which is why Wood has continued to paint Hendrix over the years. His two most recent portraits take pride of place, together with prints of earlier works, in one of the exhibition rooms at the Handel Hendrix Museum, the same house in which the legendary American musician lived for three months on the top floor.

In Wood’s pictures, a forever young Hendrix — he died on September 18, 1970, when he was only 27 — looks intense as he plays the guitar, but also relaxed, almost innocent, in a seated portrait, hat tilted on his head. Colours are always bright and that’s deliberate: ‘There's a picture of him somewhere…where he's wearing bright clothes. That's the Jimmy I knew,’ says Wood.

‘He always was wonderful — spread of colour everywhere, jewellery. He wasn't showing off, it was just a natural thing…He just loved to swing a saree on the bed and tie a handkerchief around his kneecap, wearing silly hats and stuff — because he could wear hats. I can't wear hats.’

The night Hendrix died is etched in Wood’s mind: ‘I was at Ronnie Scott's …and he was walking away with his arm around a girl, and I said, “Hey, Jimmy, say goodbye,” and he kept walking. I said, “Jimmy, say goodbye.” So he turned around and he went, “Bye.” And that was goodbye…My goodbye.’

‘Ronnie Wood: The Jimi Hendrix Portraits’ is at the Handel Hendrix House, 23 Brook Street, London, until April 11, 2027

3am

There’s hardly a soul about in Mayfair and the streets are inky-dark. Halfway down Brook’s Mews, however, the lights are about to come on. One of London’s top floral wholesalers is pulling up in a van outside Claridge’s Flowers, which, as well as selling bouquets, creates all the arrangements for the hotel. The vehicle is laden with seasonal blooms, including bunches of British-grown irises and dahlias. So long-established is the relationship that the florists have their own key.

4am

Two doors down, the Claridge’s Bakery is coming to life. ‘We’re working with something alive, so you’re constantly having to adapt to things like the weather,’ says head baker Fred Doncel-Latorre, who has been up since 2.30am, as he refreshes the hotel’s sourdough starter. Boules are rising in a giant steam-oven heated to 260ºC, which can take 40 loaves at a time (the hotel gets through 100 per day).

Meanwhile, 50 of the 300 croissants required for breakfast are baking in a kind of glass-fronted walk-in wardrobe, wafting a heavenly scent. Around the corner, the dough for tomorrow’s pastries is being laminated with butter; three days’ work goes into each croissant.

5am

In 1812, there were two hotels on Brook Street: Mivart’s and a second, belonging to William and Marianne Claridge. The Claridges bought Mivart’s in 1854 and, in 1860, their hotel hit the headlines when the Empress Eugenie, one of history’s first brand ambassadors (for Louis Vuitton), entertained Queen Victoria there. Today, with guests flying in from all over the world, it’s a 24-hour operation, but, in as much as there’s ever a lull, it’s now. Reception is still quiet, apart from the tinkle of cutlery being set out for breakfast in The Foyer and a pianist practising for teatime. This is a good time for maintenance; on the landing, a gilt picture frame is being painstakingly touched up with a tiny brush.

6am

Plenty of people staying here still want a good, old-fashioned newspaper delivered to their door before breakfast: the concierges drop off between 150 and 180 every morning along the hotel’s 2½ miles of corridors. International guests ask for the news from home, even now that they can read it on their phones; The New York Times is popular despite being a day behind, as the copies are flown over on publication day.

7am

Breakfast is served in The Foyer, with its intricate mirrors and plush curvilinear chairs. It’s a best-of-British hit parade — Cacklebean eggs from the Cotswolds, smoked salmon from the Severn & Wye smokery, Stornoway’s finest black pudding — but I spot everything from waffles to a charcuterie plate. My eye is caught by the ‘Japanese breakfast’, with rolled omelette, miso soup, pickles and green tea.

8am

Guests who have landed in London on red-eye flights are beginning to arrive, their suitcases discreetly whisked upstairs. They themselves will travel to their rooms in one of London’s oldest lifts, which still has the dial over the door and a sofa inside. Trolleys glide along unobtrusively: with 269 rooms and suites to look after, housekeeping is an around-the-clock endeavour.

9am

Is Claridge’s ladies powder room London’s best-preserved Art Deco space? The burnished woodwork, flattering mirrors and comfy chairs also invite indiscretion; the last time I was in here, I overheard an incredible piece of celebrity gossip. Outside in the lobby is one of the magnificent seasonal arrangements for which the hotel has been famous since 1859, when floristry was brought in house. ‘We’re part of the theatre,’ Claridge’s Flowers CEO Richard Eagleton tells me.

10am

Hero is 27 and she comes to Claridge’s once a week to sit on the roof. She has deep-brown eyes and is, in case you hadn’t already guessed, a Harris hawk. ‘She scares away pigeons and gulls, which can play havoc with the exterior of the building and its air-conditioning units,’ says Phil Huzzey, with whom Hero lives and who has been working with Claridge’s for 12 years.

11am

While I’m up here, I jump at the opportunity to have a look around the extraordinarily opulent, 11,840sq ft penthouse, which takes up the entire ninth floor, with general manager Thomas Kochs. Built in 2023, it has its own swimming pool, a private gym and 360-degree views of the city (the bespoke sofas move on tracks to capitalise on this). I think it would have won over even Sir Winston Churchill, who, when he and his wife took over the then sixth-floor penthouse, complained about being so high up (he did, however, make sure that the hotel’s railings were never melted down for the war effort).

12 noon

Back downstairs, lunch is already in full swing. ‘A hotel is always judged on its club sandwich,’ culinary director Simon Attridge tells me — and I spot several winding their way to tables, alongside Caesar salads and seafood cocktails (if you really want to push the boat out, there’s a lobster Wellington for two). Employees dine at Muse, the staff restaurant, which is run by the same team and uses exactly the same suppliers. Unlike many hotels, which are notably stingy when it comes to staff meals, the offering is unlimited and, I gather, is one of the reasons so many people have stayed for so long.

1pm

As well as handling some 1,600 staff uniforms and all the laundry from guests (some of whom travel with their own bedding and bed linen), the linen room deals with monogramming and personalisation requests for everything from dressing gowns to teddy bears; often initials, but recently the Crystal Palace FC crest. Overseeing everything is seamstress Afkar Ismail, known to all as Fifi, who arrived 24 years ago after stints with Liberty, Amanda Wakeley and Jaeger. ‘My husband asked me why I wanted to work in a hotel, but as soon as I came here it felt like family,’ she says. Her dedication is extraordinary; she recently stayed late into the night to alter a guest’s wedding dress.

2pm

A few floors further down is the spa, which, in a crowded field, must be one of London’s most luxurious. The pale-pink marble and concentric wooden circles on the ceiling of the sauna hark back to Art Deco, but the state-of-the-art heated pool is infused with electrolytes so you bob around as if you’re in the Dead Sea. The team kindly fits me in for a massage, which is so soothing that I fall asleep and wake myself up by snoring.

3pm

The words ‘hotel business centre’ are normally a heart-sinker, but, at Claridge’s, guests with work to do can sequester themselves in the handsome Map Room, named for the walnut marquetry one inlaid in a wall. A tray of freshly baked madeleines arrives on the dot of 3pm.

This is only the tip of the teatime iceberg: downstairs in the kitchen, I find executive pastry chef Thibault Hauchard scrutinising miniature pineapple-and-lime sables. ‘I’ve never known a hotel like this in terms of attention to detail,’ he says. A high-tech tempering machine works its magic on 40lb of chocolate and a sous chef is painstakingly microplaning the base of meringue nests, which will become peach and lemon-verbena pavlovas, so they sit flat.

4pm

Patisserie is flying off the pass — guests enjoy some 300,000 cakes each year — together with perfect, crustless sandwiches. These are overseen by an industry legend: Volodymr Tokaryk. Nobody seems to know exactly how long he’s been working for the hotel (‘28 years? No, 31…’), but he is estimated to have made more than a million sandwiches in his time, each measuring precisely 10cm by 2½cm. Yes, there’s a special ruler.

5pm

On the first floor, in a wood-panelled office like a ship’s cabin, I find Kate Hudson, hotel archivist. Since 2007, she has been the custodian of Claridge’s history and one of her favourite parts of the job is scouring auctions for its promotional fans, dance cards and luggage labels: ‘I’m permanently on the lookout.’ She shows me issues of Country Life that covered the then-new 1920s interiors; our anonymous diarist, Mademoiselle Sans-Gêne (‘Without Restraint’), also reported on a ‘soul-satisfying’ dinner there in the April 1, 1899, issue. A woman after my own heart.

6pm

The black-and-white chequerboard floor of the lobby is full of visitors arriving for dinners and drinks parties. There are events in the hotel every night of the week, including weddings. No two are alike: Attridge recently devised a Caribbean menu for one couple and another celebration saw a late-night outing for the Claridge’s burger trolley, laden with individually foil-wrapped burgers and fries. This year’s Christmas lunch has already been finalised, but not everyone wants turkey. ‘You’d be amazed by the number of people who want a pizza,’ he laughs.

7pm

Ada Coleman, who supplied the Bright Young Things with their Hanky Pankys, began her bartending career at Claridge’s (‘It was a Manhattan that I made first… it was Fisher, the wine butler, who gave me my first lesson,’ she once said). Her spirit lives on in the hotel’s three bars, but oenophiles will have their heads turned by the wine-tasting room, temperature-controlled home to some 800 bottles. There are almost double that number in the hotel at large: for the first and almost certainly last time in my life, I find myself inches away from a bottle of Château Pétrus.

8pm

For a long time, the Ballroom was Claridge’s see-and-be-seen spot: it was here that this very magazine held a star-spangled party to mark the then Duchess of Cornwall’s turn as Guest Editor. Today, the celeb-magnet is Dante, an outpost of the famous New York restaurant, which began as a pop-up, but was so popular it became permanent. Every table is packed on a mid-week evening and shrimp cocktails, steaks and flambéed sticky-toffee doughnuts are flying out of the kitchen. I’m trying to pace myself, but someone I know was moved to attempt a five-martini dinner here recently.

9pm

Outside on Brook Street, doormen direct black cabs like orchestra conductors. Among them is Craig Debell, who has been with the hotel for 13 years. He and his colleagues take great pride in being the ‘face’ of the hotel. ‘First impressions last,’ he remarks simply. He spends 12 hours a day out here in all weathers — ‘the trick is good insoles’.

10pm

The cigars are long gone, but The Fumoir, Claridge’s smallest bar, has kept its dark good looks and Lalique glass panelling. The director of bars, George Raju, recently obtained an extremely rare 1930s bottle of vermouth. He uncorks it for a very special vodka martini that comes with a pot of caviar on the side and goes down with dangerous ease. (‘Try not to end up in the duty manager’s log book,’ a Claridge’s regular warned me when I said I was having a drink here.)

11pm

Service may be winding down in the restaurants, but in the kitchen the night team is only just getting started. As well as prepping for breakfast, the staff are in charge of the room-service menu, which leans towards home comforts: roasted tomato soup with a cheese toastie, spaghetti bolognese, apple crumble. Some guests are staying here for a long time, after all.

Midnight

Most of its guests might be in bed by now, but Claridge’s never sleeps. One hundred and twenty feet below the ground floor, on a level with parts of the Underground, is the plant room, the hotel’s nerve centre. Excavating the space was a multi-year project and involved a team of miners hand-digging tunnels through London clay; incredibly, the hotel remained fully operational throughout. The pipes for hot and cold water and gas are all colour coded and the space is strikingly clean and tidy. This is the nicest boiler room I’ve ever been in, I tell Mihai Toma, director of engineering, who is showing me around and he tilts his head as if to say: ‘Of course.’

1am

Making my way back upstairs, I pass a wall of watercolours of notable visitors, including The King. ‘Claridge’s is Claridge’s and everywhere else is everywhere else,’ once said the artist behind them, David Downton. In a few hours, I will be reluctantly returning to the latter — but, right now, one of the cloud-like beds upstairs is calling me…

This article first appeared in the October 14, 2026, issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

It is impossible to not fancy David Gandy, but not for the reasons you’d think. Yes, his supermodel looks and remarkable physique — immortalised in Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue campaigns in which he was frequently seen frolicking in tight white swimming trunks off the coast of Capri — obviously play a part. But it is his ambition (which allowed him to become, arguably, the world’s most famous male model), his self awareness and sheer good manners that make him truly attractive.

After my colleague met him at a recent event, he couldn’t stop singing David’s praises. He too had fallen under the model's spell. The David Gandy effect, it seems, is not limited to straight women and gay men. ‘That’s very sweet,’ David replies modestly. ‘Making an impression after a 10-minute conversation is always lovely.’

Life is not as jet-setting and international as it once was for the era-defining model. His two young daughters, Matilda and Tabitha, are now his main priority. ‘One of them just started big school a couple of weeks ago, and my other daughter became house captain,’ he gushes proudly, before adding, ‘I am not quite sure what that means, but it sounds impressive.’

‘That’s pretty much my life, being a dad, and then in between a few other little projects, here and there.’ One of these projects is his work with Hackett, fronting their Nº14 Savile Row AW26 campaign. Focusing on ‘a modern expression of British tailoring’ meant David was an ideal choice. ‘Tailoring is a passion, which came from my dad. My first suit was a hand-me-down from him. My dad didn’t have expensive suits — he doesn’t buy expensive clothes — but for some reason he had a tailored suit from East London,’ David says.

‘My grandfather and father came from quite impoverished backgrounds, but they were always perfectly dressed. They were smart, they had the perfect half Windsor tie and made the best of what they could. They understood about shining your shoes and I still sit around and do that with my daughters.’

David’s career began quite unexpectedly while he was a student at university studying multimedia and computing. A friend of his entered him into a modelling competition, which he hadn’t considered as a career before, but first place changed his mind. Like Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford, he is one of the most recognisable faces in the business; and one of the rare male celebrities who was a model first and foremost, rather than being an actor or musician.

Many expected him to turn to acting. David was sent the script for the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey by the book’s author before it was cast. ‘I got to read the script, but Jamie Dornan is a great model and his passion for acting was far more than mine. He's a great actor.’ He pauses, then adds: ‘I don’t think I was particularly prepared for that opportunity. It would have maybe been exciting.’ He has the rights to a book about Winston Churchill’s bodyguard and would love to see it made into a film, ‘then I would probably put myself forward for that part, because that would interest me… I always do things that are a passion of mine, and I think that is, more than anything’.

Whether David will turn to acting or not, he has already established himself as a notable figure in British culture. Aside from fashion he has been working with Battersea Dogs & Cats Home and with Crisis, helping set up pop-up shops on Savile Row. His fashion brand Wellware has collaborated with Marks & Spencer and is, according to David, 'going from strength to strength’. And if anyone has the qualifications to make smart, flattering clothes for the average man, it is him.

The first question in this column is always ‘Who is your aesthetic hero?’ Time after time, my interviewees have listed David as their choice. ‘If they saw me on the school run at 8:30am in the morning they probably wouldn’t,’ he says. Perhaps at the school gates he’s not looking exactly like he did in those Light Blue adverts, but I doubt he blends seamlessly into the crowd. David was born to stand out.

Your aesthetic hero

It’s an easy one to answer and it’s Paul Newman, specifically for how he dressed. That era of people dressing — of Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Cary Grant — they way they dressed wasn’t trend driven. It was sort of utilitarian-seaque. They were, to me, the best looking and some of the coolest guys who have ever lived on this planet. Whatever they put on, they looked great.

If you ask me for a more modern day choice, I think there are some people who stand out. I think Ryan Gosling constantly does it very well. I think Brad Pitt does it very well — it’s a bit quirky, but it’s individualistic, and I like it. They’re the modern day guys that I think are good.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

God, this is going to be boring, because I’ve recently got into gardening, so I’ve just bought us an aerator cartridge for the lawn mower. It was about £300. Over the last three years we have been working on our garden in London. I’ve planted about 4000 plants, including 500 white hydrangeas. There is lots of pruning in the spring, put it that way.

The possession you’d never sell

Everything’s a bit material in some ways, so I don’t have things that I would never sell. I mean, my classic car which I got restored, which is a 1954 Jaguar named after my daughter Matilda… I don’t think I could ever sell Matilda. That would be quite hard. When my daughters were born I also got two watches, Jaeger-LeCoultre Reversos, which I had engraved with their initials and dates of birth, I would never try to sell those.

But also, little things that wouldn't be worth money to anyone, you know, things that my daughters made me, and little messages between each other. Everything else, I suppose, can be replaced, but those things can’t.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

One of my favourite artists is David Yarrow. I love photography. He is known for these incredible, sort of, beast portraits — of polar bears, elephants, lions etc. I’ve actually got to work with him a couple of times now, which is fun, but his animal collections are the thing that have impressed me the most.

A book you’ve found inspiring

There’s a book I love, which is now a TV show, called SAS: Rogue Heroes, which is about the start of the SAS during the Second World War, and not many people knew of the book at the time. That was an inspiring book. There are also a few books on Ernest Shackleton, about what he and his team went through when they were exploring and got stuck in Antarctica on a ship for what they thought would be six months, but actually turned out to be two years. Absolute madness. They’re both inspiring in many ways. There’s also a great book called Churchill’s Bodyguard, which is a fab story that should be made into a TV series or film.

The music that you work to

I love music. I have music on in the morning, normally Classic FM playing in the kitchen while we’re getting ready for the day, and then my music is quite old school. I was brought up with soul and Motown, and a thing now that people call yacht rock as well, which is like The Doobie Brothers, Michael Macdonald and Hall & Oates. I generally don’t work to music when I’ve properly got to concentrate on stuff, but at all other times there’s always music playing in the house. It’s always old school, which drives my wife slightly round the bend. She likes ‘newer crap’, as I call it. Things that sound like a load of noise.

The last podcast you listened to

Louis Theroux, that was probably the last one that I listened to, because I just think what he does is absolutely brilliant. Desert Island Discs is another great one. I have listened to so many.

The person that would play you in a film of your life

Oh my goodness me, I have no idea. I mean, I’m still alive and I am not that old, so maybe I could play myself if there was enough AI to look 20 years younger?

What you’d take with you to a desert island

If I could I would take my children, my dog and my other half, that’s all I really need in life. That’s where I’m happiest. If I couldn’t take them, probably just a good bottle of gin, some nice tonic and some ice, and I’d just enjoy the desert island, likely half cut which would be very British.

Your favourite painting

I don’t know if I have one. All my art is photography, so I probably don’t have one, even though I studied art. I used to like the artist, Edward Hopper. His piece Nighthawks is what I’d pick if I had to.

What gets you up in the morning

My children. They’re generally quite early risers, or they get into bed with us.

The items you collect

We have a lot of antiques in the house that I’ve collected for years. And then cars, so my vintage car collection. I have just finished having an original Mini restored. I’ve got a Porsche, a Jaguar and a Mercedes. I think cars are my biggest collection.

The hotel you could go back and back to

There’s a place called Dunton Hot Springs in Colorado, and it was an old mining village originally, but when you go there it is like going back to the original mining town. Obviously, it’s lavish luxury, and you’re in the middle of the mountains and surrounded by beautiful hot springs. There’s fishing, horse riding and skiing. It is just the most fantastic experience.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever had

I ate piranha in the Amazon rainforest. It was muddy and bony and fishy and horrible, but when you're in the middle of the rainforest and you’re staying in a hut with tarantulas on the roofs, and that’s what they eat there, you can’t be picky. So I caught it and they cooked it.

The best present you’ve ever received

I was at an event with Jeremy Hackett, and he gave me a wooden model of a Jaguar XK120 exactly like mine. It’s just a lovely present.

To shop Hackett’s Nº14 Savile Row AW26 campaign, fronted by David Gandy, visit their website.

Where was it?
In a village on the edge of Cornbury Park estate in Oxfordshire

A quick description.
It must have been one of Charlbury’s oldest cottages, built of Cotswold stone with a slate roof. I’m 6ft 3in and the main bedroom door was only about 5ft high. There were two further tiny bedrooms, a large attic, which was used as an office or spare room, and a small garage that I sometimes used as a sculpting workshop.

How did you find it?
Through an estate agent in Chipping Norton.

What made you buy it?
It was quite a lot of house for the money and was conveniently close to a friend who had a barn that I rented as a studio for my work.

Best memory of living there?
Two of our three daughters were born when we lived there and the house had a really good vibe, which both my wife, Laura, and I could feel from day one. I also owe it a favour. One night, a tree fell down in the garden during a storm and the cost of having it chopped up for firewood prompted me to buy a chainsaw — the ultimate boy’s toy.

Anything unusual?
Our dog, Pepper, would regularly wee at night if left alone in the kitchen, which had steps down to the cellar. It turned out that the cellar had once been used as the village morgue.

Why did you sell?
It was always intended to be a stepping stone and was never going to be big enough for our whole family. I also really wanted somewhere I could actually stand up in. We eventually found a derelict barn in Cropredy near Banbury, a bit closer to the foundry in which I used to cast my work. The property had trees growing out of a shed and an ancient Land Rover rusting in the yard, but when I walked to the perimeter and put up a snipe, I knew that it would be our next home.

Hamish Mackie is an award-winning wildlife sculptor known for working in bronze, silver and any other castable metal using the lost-wax casting method. Find out more at the Hamish Mackie website.

This feature originally appeared in the October 14, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Nomadic societies seldom have much to offer the world of interior design. Decluttering and travelling light are the essentials of life on the move. For the Ottoman Turks, however, the last stop was Istanbul. The imperial family liked the city so much, they stayed in one palace, Topkapi, for almost 400 years. They moved out in 1853, exactly four centuries after conquering the city. There must be something about the neighbourhood to encourage such high levels of resident satisfaction; the Byzantine rulers had lived in their palace for even longer.

The Ottomans’ first action after taking Constantinople was to repurpose. Hagia Sophia Cathedral became Aya Sofya Mosque. It went from being the largest Christian building in the world to one of the largest Muslim structures. The Church of St Irene — the second biggest — was turned into an Ottoman arsenal and never became a mosque. Many of the weapons were Western European, collected with the same excitement that their Christian opponents collected Ottoman arms and armour.

England’s Elizabeth I was, of course, on the other side. She was known to Sultan Murad III as Sultana Isabel and Ottoman furnishings had entered the British Isles before the Virgin Sultana struck any trade deals with her Continental Catholic enemies’ enemy. Her father had been a great admirer of ‘Turkey rugs’ and, indeed, some of Henry VIII’s most commanding images feature his well-appointed frame anchored to carpets from Ottoman Anatolia. He had hundreds of these floor coverings to choose from. Holbein the painter knew them well. For his less-regal sitters, the Oushak weavings were likely to have an honoured place on a table rather than underfoot.

These were among the first Ottoman products to enliven the interiors of Tudor homes in England. Using ‘Turkey’ rather than ‘Ottoman’ to describe the rugs was in some ways ahead of the times. In 2022, according to the UN, the nation known as Turkey since 1923 became Türkiye, just before the republic’s 100th anniversary, although it must be said that a century of Turkey/Türkiye has not furnished Britain with even a quarter of the previous four centuries of Ottoman interior-design concepts and products. Compounding this is the confusion between the Ottoman Turks, who built an empire in the eastern Mediterranean, and all their Turkic cousins who came out of Central Asia to create shorter-lived kingdoms.

Then there were the Turks whom English Crusaders identified (wrongly, on the whole) as being their foes in the Holy Land. Turk’s Head pubs used to abound in Merry England from the 13th century onwards. Occasionally, the name came closer to home. Folklore says the tavern by that name, which still exists in Penzance, Cornwall, was once thought to refer to an incursion by seasoned traveller Turks from Jerusalem — in fact, it appears that such raids may actually have happened. More certain is a raid by Spaniards in the 16th century. These intruders caused mayhem and even held a prohibited Catholic Mass before heading home.

The Muslim raiders, by contrast, appear never to have got down to Friday prayers in Penzance, if they ever reached there at all. They were an unspecified sort of Turk, possibly Seljuks, who took on the hapless People’s Crusade of 1095 in Anatolia, long before the arrival of the Ottomans, whose engagement with Crusaders was in eastern Europe rather than the Middle East.

A different type of ‘Turk’s head’ — a knot — also entered the English decor lexicon as long ago as the 13th century, in which case it wasn’t inspired by the Ottomans; or it might have been later, when English knot enthusiasts would have seen the full splendour of Ottoman headgear. Among Muslim societies that wore turbans, there were few as flamboyant as the conquerors of Constantinople. Suleiman the Magnificent is topped off with the most towering example of all. In a well-known painting by Titian, it is at least twice the size of the sultan’s head. Every elite Ottoman house would have had turban stands fixed to the walls to display these essentials, some of which were later incorporated into British interiors, without the original purpose in mind.

Shakespeare was, as usual, a pioneer in describing the people of the time rather than the products. Although it is not always clear which type of Turk he was referring to, one near-certain Ottoman appears in Henry IV: ‘This is the English Court, not the Turkish; Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds.’ The Amurath mentioned by the Bard is most probably Sultan Murad III, who killed five brothers en route to the top position.

Shakespeare’s references are less flattering than some of his contemporaries, whose sympathies were more with the warrior Muslim Ottomans than the conniving Byzantine Christians they overthrew. The Ottomans’ real contribution came later, when Britain began to have more contact with them. Until then, it was objects from the Ottoman court that came to dominate the imagination. Together with carpets, there was Iznik pottery. More colourful than the floor coverings, these ceramics achieved a brilliance that eclipsed even Chinese wares. Soon, the English traveller was making his way east to find out more.

It was never easy to meet the Turk in his — and especially her — domestic environment. The word ‘harem’ comes from the Arabic language, but was adopted into English through the Ottomans and remains a jokey byword for everything that a real harem was not. The practice never took off on these shores: English homes didn’t need any more ‘trouble and strife’; instead, additional ladies could be deposited in selected locations, so long as they were not in the same house. One of the few contenders for the title of a British Bey or Pasha would be the 7th Marquess of Bath with his 70-plus ‘wifelets’ installed around the harem of Longleat.

As if one word describing secluded accommodation for women were not enough, there is also the term ‘seraglio’. As much as this alternative name for Topkapi Palace appealed to Mozart, details of what was inside remained a mystery. The best-informed English observer was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. This 18th-century daughter of a duke didn’t gain access to the Imperial Harem, but was welcomed into others. One comment that would have puzzled her audience in England related to how the exterior of a Turkish building was of less importance than its interior.

The harem itself turned out to be less thrilling than the hammam. Lady Mary’s account of glistening bodies at the bagnio made a huge impression on readers in 1763: ‘...all being in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any beauty or defect concealed. Yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest gesture amongst them. There were many amongst them, as exactly proportioned as ever any goddess was drawn by the pencil of a Guido or Titian…’ All they were missing was smallpox scars. As a victim herself, Lady Mary managed to take the Ottoman process of inoculation back with her to Britain, laying the groundwork for Edward Jenner.

The Ottoman-style hammam went on to be the most fashionable leap forward in Western hygiene since soap was brought home from the Middle East during the Crusades. The earliest British bath, the Royal Bagnio, had been built in 1679, probably by Sir Christopher Wren. During the 18th century, the Turkish bath’s influence was so ubiquitous that some English travellers to the Ottoman Empire believed the Turks had taken the concept from Britain. By the 19th century, the biggest and best was opened in Jermyn Street, London, by the London & Provincial Turkish Bath Company. Private homes had them, too, together with that less-wholesome Ottoman import: the smoking room. One of the few that remains, at least partly, is at the Wallace Collection. Built in 1872, it goes full Turkish with floor-to-ceiling Iznik tiles — or the Minton imitation of them.

Furnishings and their names were also indebted to the Ottomans. Not least among these was the so-called ‘ottoman’. The ‘sofa’ and the ‘divan’ were other names that came via Turkey. For England’s country houses, there were also ‘kiosks’ or, more often, tents (yurts). Less well known and taking a more circuitous route is ‘shagreen’. Originally meaning the back of a horse, saghri later became the stingray veneer that was so much a part of Art Deco interiors. It’s one more reminder of the Ottoman Turks’ distant nomadic past, before they found their forever home on the banks of the Bosphorus

From November 7 until May 9, 20207, the V&A Museum will hold the ‘Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires’ exhibition, which will examine two mega-cultures in the ultimate metropolis.

It was with mixed feelings that Athena heard the recent announcement by the Culture Secretary that national museums would ‘remain free for everyone’. The statement came in response to Baroness Hodges’s scathing review of the Arts Council last year, in which she suggested that consideration be given to charging international visitors for access to these institutions.

Her suggestion, it is important to underline, was predicated on the introduction of identity cards, which would have offered a straight-forward means of distinguishing between visitors and residents. The subsequent U-turn on identity cards effectively undermined the whole proposal and arguably made this response a foregone conclusion. That shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the fact that maintaining free access to national museums is not without its complications.

To be clear, in an ideal world, Athena would be delighted for these great institutions —indeed, national cultural institutions of all kinds — to be free for everyone. The problem is that we don’t live in that world. Instead, we have an extremely limited pot of Government money earmarked for culture that provides a small group of heavily visited museums, most of which are in London, with a disproportionate level of financial support. The cash that goes to them, meanwhile, is actually depriving other bodies of funding.

Take the example of English Heritage, which manages a national portfolio of historic monuments on behalf of the Secretary of State. In recent years, to save the Government money, it has been converted from a quango into a self-funding charity. The insistent fiction remains that the charity can be financially self-sufficient, yet, according to the annual report of 2024/25, in only three years its finances have departed from those set out in its optimistic strategic plan to the tune of £19.5 million. This is not a sustainable arrangement.

There are, meanwhile, ironies to the situation of the national museums themselves. The Government support they receive does constitute an essential core of funding. That said, it is already totally inadequate to their needs and has been steadily diminishing as a proportion of their revenue for years. Not only, therefore, do they need to raise ever larger sums from commercial activities, but they are completely dependent on private philanthropic gifts. Those are positive things, but, in the circumstances, can the state claim credit for keeping national museums free?

The Government is now a major financial contributor, rather than sole underwriter of these institutions. Added to which, at up to £33 per adult ticket for the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition, it’s not as if the museum’s work is completely free anyway. The slogan of free access for all to national museums has beguiled governments of all political stripes over the past quarter century. Its real costs, however, are not being properly counted. At the very least, in Athena’s view, international visitors should be paying their way. Or perhaps, at a deliberately modest level, so should we all.

This feature originally appeared in the October 14, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Which city, would you say, is the artistic capital of the world? It’s a billion-dollar question that can be taken either one of two ways. The first: which is the world’s most creatively fertile city? The one home to the highest number of artists and the busiest scene? The second: which city commands the highest art sales? The two yield different answers. The first is probably Mexico City; the second is obviously New York.

London, by contrast, occupies more of a middle ground. The capital’s status as a cradle for artists and art dealers, respectively, has ebbed and flowed; both aspects are currently in flux. Emerging artists are returning to the city’s blue-chip galleries in greater numbers than they have in a while. The art market, disrupted by Brexit, has shifted to Paris and Milan.

Perhaps this is no bad thing. A city is unable to be a bastion of the art market and a well of countercultural activity to the same extent or at the same time. A glance at New York’s creative alumni since the city switched allegiance from artists to bankers in the 1990s reveals a dearth of names on par with those of the Downtown scene, such as Koons, Basquiat or Keith Haring. Basquiat could not have become Basquiat had he been unable to afford even a squalid flat in Lower Manhattan.

Contemporary artists have long been outpaced — and outpriced — by the same gentrifying forces that allow their predecessors to monopolise sales. Yet what goes up must come down. In London, the pendulum is swinging back. Although fewer buyers may be worrisome to dealers, our most prestigious gallerists are using such a moment to pivot towards new artistic subsets.

Pilar Corrias, a blue-chip gallery on Mayfair’s Conduit Street, has started showcasing young talent such as Sholto Blissett. At Halcyon Gallery on New Bond Street, works by Warhol (worth millions) sit alongside those by Wang Tingxin, whose pieces often sell for more modest five-digit figures. Over ten years, the Mayor of London has created what City Hall refers to as ‘ten football pitches’ of affordable studio space, allowing artists to rent these for far below market rates.

It is amid such circumstances that patrons begin to think beyond the household name — and to move the market forward even as they avoid buying a Magritte.

Such dips in the market are necessary for it not to remain static. As Frieze Art Fair returns to The Regent’s Park this month, opportunistic buyers are muscling in to play among the big leagues.

Frieze London and Frieze Masters run from October 14-18.

J. D. Vance likening Emily in Paris to the work of Shakespeare was not on my 2026 bingo card, although perhaps it should have been. In case you didn’t know, the Vice-President recently decided the best use of his time was to defend a show once called a ‘work scheme’ for ‘people who can’t act’ (its final season airs in December) and laud it as a satire of millennial decision-making and tacit defence of the nuclear family. ‘It’s obvious,’ Vance said, ‘that Emily should end up with the French chef’ rather than wasting her time ‘with random people or [focusing] on her job.’ Such antics are emblematic of our era of PLU politics, where leaders seek to show that they are people like us as well as people, like us.

If the latter is a time-honoured tradition, the former is a novelty of our media-literate age. To be like us (no comma) in 2026 is to be clued into the zeitgeist, akin to members of a club keeping up with a culture that moves faster than Richard Hammond on an A road in Herefordshire. An almost academic obsession with a show about fashion and seductive Europeans is not the same as, say, enjoying the football. The aim is not for Vance to pose as an electable everyman but as an esteemed member of the Emily in Paris fan club: the vox populi has become that of Netflix Et Chill.

Cultural fandom is now the ultimate members’ club—and belonging to one is highly prized. Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York City, recently found time to appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live (‘I love you Jimmy,’ he gushed). Kemi Badenoch, for her part, managed to nab front-row seats to Marks & Spencer’s show during London Fashion Week (supermarket clothing wasn’t enough to entice the noticeably absent Anna Wintour) and party with young Conservatives at the Tory party conference last week in Birmingham.

Even a retired stooge such as Barack Obama compiles a public music playlist each summer, weighing in on the discourse. The question is: why? Uniting around, say, an album, song or television show perhaps is a safer bet in an age where political fractures make it hard to unite around Big Issues. There is another, more left-field theory: people at the top seek to belong because they feel lonely.

Notice how it’s always those in the C-suite who most lament our ‘lack of community’, no doubt the trendiest buzzword of 2026, even as anyone who has recently attended a gig can attest that community is alive and well, neither hard to find nor prohibitive to enjoy. Pity James David Vance, who simply must want an invitation to the season-six premiere of his favourite series. It is, after all, Emily’s grand finale, an outcome he personally hopes to avoid when the midterms roll around next month. Bonne chance!

This feature originally appeared in the October 7, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Imagine, for a moment, that you have travelled back in time to an evening in 1923. A man who would not look out of place in one of Sidney Paget’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ illustrations has paused on the landing of his London house and is looking up at the open nursery door. Out in the world he is known for being reserved, even chilly, but, as he watches his young son saying his prayers, a much softer side of his character is clearly visible. There is a chaise in the corner of the nursery and lying on it is a teddy bear — a much-loved birthday present from the Harrods toy department.

Now imagine that, some 40 miles away, in the Surrey village of Shamley Green, another man is walking up the lane to the cottage he shares with his wife and children. He is worn out after a long day in the London office of Punch magazine, but he is whistling something cheerful; he is that sort of person. The lamps have been lit at home and, as he pushes open the gate, he smiles as he spots a small, rotund silhouette on an upstairs windowsill: the toy bear that his 16-year-old son has outgrown, but cannot bring himself to part with.

Alan Milne and Ernest Shepard, as they were then known, had both carved out impressive niches for themselves by the early 1920s. Milne’s effervescent plays were the toast of London and New York; Shepard’s witty cartoons were instrumental to Punch’s popularity. Yet, within a few years, their names would forever be associated with that of a honey-loving little bear: Winnie-the-Pooh. A global superstar — at last count, he has been translated into 72 languages — he is this month celebrating the centenary of his first appearance in a book.

‘The fact that 100 years later we’re still calling people an Eeyore or a Tigger is a testament to Milne’s characterisation and Shepard’s artistry,’ notes James Campbell, author of The Men Who Created Winnie-the-Pooh (Michael O’Mara Books, £25). After marrying into the family — his wife is the artist’s great-granddaughter — he has spent years piecing together the story of an unlikely pair, both greatly affected by the First World War, who together made a new and enduring kind of magic.

Someone intimately familiar with this is Jane Riordan, the writer entrusted with Milne’s legacy and the author of A Little Boy And His Bear, a brand-new collection of Winnie-the-Pooh stories (Farshore, £20) with illustrations by Andrew Grey that channel Shepard’s. ‘I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know the books, but every time I re-read them I find something completely new or a joke I missed when I was younger,’ she says.

Unlike his creation, A. A. Milne was a Bear of Very Great Brain. Born in 1882, he was taught by H. G. Wells at the north London prep school his parents ran and, after going up to Cambridge, got to know future Bloomsburyites such as Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. He became the editor of Granta, the university’s literary journal, and then joined the staff of Punch in 1906 (after being turned down by Country Life, to whom, he later remembered, he had emphasised ‘my games record… and my early collections of birds’ eggs and butterflies’).

Not given to what Eeyore would later call ‘gaiety, song-and-dance, here we go round the mulberry bush’, he was married late to Daphne de Sélincourt, the gregarious goddaughter of Punch’s editor. He gained a well-run home, she an escape from the spinsterhood for which so many women of her generation were destined, but it was a pragmatic match that became increasingly distant.

A pacifist (to the dismay of his conservative seniors at Punch), Milne nevertheless was commissioned into the Warwickshire Regiment in 1915 and experienced the horrors of the Somme before trench fever sent him home to work in propaganda. He took a small toy-dog mascot out to France with him: Carmen, who has since found her way to the Hundred Acre Wood in Riordan’s work. The post-war years were brightened by the arrival, in 1920, of a longed-for son, Christopher Robin, and making a home on Mallord Street in Chelsea, where Augustus John was a neighbour. Still, he was restless. ‘I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality,’ he later admitted.

Shepard was born in 1879 in St John’s Wood, into an artistic family, but his happy childhood ended abruptly in his 10th year when his mother died. His father fell into a decline, finances became precarious and the young Ernest had to grow up fast (he was especially fond of go-getting Piglet, keeping a set of drawings in his studio for the rest of his life). In 1904, he married a fellow Royal Academy Schools student, Florence Chaplin, and the pair — known as Kipper and Pie — settled down to a modest, but contented existence as working artists in rural Surrey.

His life might have looked bohemian, but Shepard was unambiguously in favour of military action against Germany in 1914 and became an officer in the Royal Artillery, experiencing several very near misses. He continued sketching, sometimes on behalf of military intelligence. ‘His earlier work was very heavily hatched, much more static, but during the war he simply didn’t have the time,’ explains Campbell. ‘He had to go faster, so his style changed — he was using fewer lines, but making them work better.’ It was an evolution born of grim necessity, but it would help him bring the Hundred Acre Wood vividly to life.

The world’s most famous bear made his print debut without a name on February 13, 1924, in an illustration alongside Teddy Bear, a Milne poem printed in Punch before being published by Methuen as part of the collection When We Were Very Young. E. V. Lucas, Methuen’s chairman, matchmade Milne and Shepard for the project: he had a hunch that Shepard’s easygoing demeanour would make him an excellent foil for the introspective, occasionally prickly Milne.

Things got off to a bumpy start. After sending him several poems and approving the sketches Shepard produced, Milne invited him to Chelsea to sketch him reading to Christopher Robin. The door was answered by the parlourmaid who, acting on the instructions of the ever socially conscious Daphne Milne, asked Shepard to use the tradesmen’s entrance. Shepard politely refused, went home and wrote to Milne to explain why he had left. From then on, he always used the front door and their partnership was an equal one. ‘The way they worked was unique at that point in time, as far as we know,’ believes Campbell. ‘Never before had a writer and an illustrator been around the same table saying “a bit more of this, a bit less of that”.’

The poems were well received by Punch readers, but Methuen published them without special fanfare in November 1924. Yet the initial print run sold out on the first day and, by the end of the year, more than 50,000 copies had flown off the shelves in the UK and USA. After a shattering war and the Spanish Flu pandemic, readers were longing for light, joy and freedom — Milne’s words and Shepard’s pictures transported them to the safety of their own recollected childhoods, sunny days spent wandering ‘down to the wood where the blue-bells grow’ and daydreaming by the sea.

The duo, together with the real Christopher Robin, became celebrities and a sequel was inevitable. This time, the setting would be Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, where the Milnes had recently bought a weekend home, Cotchford Farm (later the home of the Rolling Stones’s Brian Jones). The focus, too, would shift to the world Milne had been building in bedtime stories for his son, at the heart of which was the Harrods bear formerly known as Edward, but now named Winnie after a real one at London Zoo (the ‘Pooh’ suffix was borrowed from Christopher Robin’s word for swans).

Never a great one for whimsy in his everyday life, Milne revelled in the silliness and jokes. ‘I think for him it was an escape of sorts and it became one for his readers,’ observes Riordan. Guileless and stout-hearted, Pooh is fond of the existential musings that are such a feature of young children’s conversation; today, you can buy a book of his philosophy, The Tao of Pooh.

Up to 150 community libraries housed in former red phone boxes can receive free copies of the original Winnie-the-Pooh stories and the new authorised sequel, A Little Boy and His Bear written by Jane Riordan.

The campaign supports the National Year of Reading and launched on Tuesday (October 6^th) in Canterbury, with Sally Phillips reading to local schoolchildren, alongside author of sequel Jane Riordan and illustrator Andrew Grey.

Anyone who has adapted a phone box can apply to receive copies by clicking here.

Shepard travelled regularly from Surrey with his sketchbook to sit down with Milne, draw Christopher Robin, his collection of soft toys (which by now included a forlorn donkey and a kangaroo) and Ashdown Forest itself. He wandered among its 6,500-acre patchwork of heathery heath, fern-carpeted valleys criss-crossed by streams and ancient deci-duous trees, sketching as he went. Back in his garden studio, he worked in details from photographs of his own son, Graham, as a little boy and Graham’s portly bear Growler, from whom he borrowed Pooh’s ‘tub’.

What emerged was a kind of Eden, which at first glance might seem to have little to do with the Roaring Twenties, but nods to the decade’s Devil-may-care spirit. ‘There are no worries beyond perhaps getting lost in the mist and there’s never a bedtime because it’s always time for elevenses,’ says Riordan. With his scruffy smock and unruly hair, Shepard’s Christopher Robin was refreshingly unlike the cherubic, rather chocolate-boxy children drawn by contemporary artists such as Lilian Hocknell.

His Hundred Acre Wood, meanwhile, was untouched by recent history, like the England Philip Larkin would later conjure in his 1914-set poem MCMXIV, the ‘place-names all hazed over/With flowering grasses’.

Winnie-The-Pooh was published on October 14, 1926, to universal acclaim. Readers of all ages fell in love with Pooh’s gentle humour and, in a world in which moving pictures were scarce, they were entranced by the dynamic imagery. Country Life called the book a ‘lovely portrait’, running Shepard illustrations alongside its review and following it with a tongue-in-cheek piece on Woozle Hunting in its December 4 issue. The book was serialised in the Daily Express and the Evening News and by the end of the year, hundreds of thousands of copies had sold. These were usually read aloud, as they still are today. ‘It’s an integral part of them: because Milne was a playwright, he really understood pacing and how conversation works,’ explains Riordan. ‘It’s something I’m very mindful of writing my new stories — my poor family do have to listen to a lot!’

Now We Are Six, the 1927 return to the Hundred Acre Wood, acknowledged the passage of time by giving Christopher Robin a human friend in the form of Anne, yet ended with his wish to remain ‘six now for ever and ever’. His real-life equivalent would soon be making the uncomfortable transition from child star to public schoolboy: Christopher Milne was mercilessly bullied for the promotional activities in which his mother had involved him, souring his relationship with his parents.

Milne’s wish had come true: by the late 1920s, he was one of the country’s bestselling authors, shoulder to shoulder with the likes of H. G. Wells, J. M. Barrie and Noël Coward. Yet, as did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he came to resent his creation, seeing Pooh as a distraction from his work for adults. Shepard, meanwhile, was grieving after the sudden death of his wife in 1927. The House at Pooh Corner, which came out in October 1928, was to be their final Winnie-the-Pooh book, they decided. They left readers two further lasting gifts: Tigger, bouncy paw eternally raised, and the game of Pooh Sticks.

Yet their partnership endured, with Shepard even illustrating Milne’s Year In, Year Out (1952), his final book. He wrote prolifically for adults, as well as publishing two autobiographies, although Pooh would always define him, to his chagrin. ‘He never really thought of himself as a children’s author,’ points out Riordan. The inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood continued to call on Shepard’s services as new colour editions were printed, but he never fell out of love with them: a 1970 colour sketch entitled ‘Part of a Pooh Orchestra’ shows Eeyore entangled in a tuba as Piglet saws away enthusiastically at a cello.

Milne died at Cotchford Farm in 1956, leaving part of the rights to his literary estate to the Royal Literary Fund, which continues to support authors through them. He is commemorated alongside Shepard by a plaque at Gill’s Lap (called Galleon’s Lap by Milne), Ashdown Forest’s highest point. This was unveiled in 1979 by Christopher Milne himself, who, later in life, after opening a bookshop and becoming a writer himself, reached an understanding with Pooh. The children who visited then are now bringing their own children to the same place to soak up its magic.

Riordan spends a lot of time in the forest seeking out inspiration, following in Pooh’s paw-prints. ‘You really feel as if you’re stepping into one of the illustrations every time you go there,’ she says. ‘It’s changed, of course, but it’s still so familiar from the books.’ Thanks to A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard, it will forever be an enchanted place where a boy and his bear play.

Winnie-the-Pooh: A Little Boy and His Bear by Jane Riordan and illustrated by Andrew Gray, is out now

The Men Who Created Winnie the Pooh by James Campbell, published by Michael O’Mara Books, is out now

This article first appeared in the October 7 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

‘I was left-handed at birth, and at school in Turkey, when I first started primary school, I was converted to using my right hand. That was the first time I heard the word “exile”,’ Elif Shafak says. ‘The teacher was very adamant that I kept my left hand under the desk all the time, and sent it to exile.’ Soon, it would not just be her left hand that was exiled; as an adult Elif would be leaving her home country for fear of retribution for her writing.

The Turkish-British author has published 21 books including The Forty Rules of Love, There are Rivers in the Sky and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, but it was her 2006 novel The Bastard of Istanbul that got her in trouble with the Turkish authorities.

‘It was a shock, I didn’t expect it at all,’ she says of her prosecution for the crime of ‘insulting Turkishness’, according to Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. The novel discusses the Armenian genocide, which the Turkish government denies. ‘Suddenly I was put on trial in a very unexpected way,’ Elif recalls. ‘There is an article in the Turkish Constitution that protects Turkishness against insults, but nobody knows what that means, to be honest. This had been used against journalists and historians, but never ever before against a fiction writer.

‘The words of fictional characters were taken out and used as evidence in the court room. The prosecutor asked for three years in prison for writing a work of fiction. I was acquitted eventually, but it was a very unsettling period, after which I decided to move out of Turkey.’

Elif came to the UK, which ‘became her home’. Two further works, The Gaze and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World were investigated by the Prosecutors Office for ‘the crime of obscenity’, as Elif explored themes of gendered violence, sexual violence and child brides, ‘which in my opinion means child abuse’. ‘Whatever you write about, from history to sexuality, you can easily offend the authorities and you can get into trouble. As a novelist, that's very very difficult,’ she says.

Despite real threats of retribution, Elif continues to write. Lately she has been working on her new novel, In One Brief Moment All Eternity, which will be released on October 15. ‘I am only now emerging from that intense work, and these days I’m doing lots of literary festivals… I am an introvert by nature, but I love doing book events,’ she says. She will be speaking twice at Cheltenham Literature Festival this month.

Writing itself, however, is still a challenge. ‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s your first book, fifth book or 10th book, you always go through valleys of self-doubt and anxiety. The only thing I’ve learnt is that all of that is part of the writing process.’

Your aesthetic hero

I love James Baldwin. The way he carried himself, the way he spoke, his tone, his whole aura, that is very important to me. In terms of colours and hues, I’m very interested in Francisco Goya, the Spanish painter. In his work, the range is mind blowing, from dark, sometimes gloomy drawings to very colourful, bright, vivid hues. He has such complexity in his body of work. So, I would say James Baldwin and Francisco Goya.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition. I had the honour of being one of the three judges in 2025. That was very memorable for me because so many artworks were submitted and displayed, not only paintings but also sculptures, video installations and even tapestries, so it is quite interdisciplinary. Some of the people whose work was being displayed were less well known, some were just members of the public, although there were also very famous painters within the exhibition. That juxtaposition, in the fact that they were all displayed in a very egalitarian way together, is something that really stayed with me.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I mean, I spend a lot of time buying stationery. I just can't stop. If I see a shop full of notebooks I just have to go in there.

The possession you would never sell

I have some first edition books that have been gifted to me. For example, there’s a lovely edition of Madame Bovary on my shelf. I don’t think I would ever sell that, and Madame Bovary also plays a role in my upcoming novel, In One Brief Moment All Eternity. But I’d always choose things that have emotional value rather than financial value.

The music that you work to

I have always loved heavy metal since my youth. Now that I am a middle-aged woman people don’t expect me to listen to it, but I still love it. I think many metalheads actually are gentle souls, and I also think that heavy metal is a large vast kingdom. The only thing that’s happened [with age] is that I have moved to subgenres of heavy metal, so now I listen to more industrial metal, metalcore, melodic death metal, sometimes symphonic heavy metal, Viking and Scandinavian bands.

I listen to this kind of music all the time when I’m writing, but I listen to one song on repeat so it becomes like a loop. Seventy, 90 times I can listen to the same song. That’s how I write. It transports me to a different place and I love its high energy. It is very raw. It helps me to write, hopefully, more calmly.

The last podcast you listened to

I listen to podcasts all the time. I was listening to Stephen Fry speak about the Tudors today, although it was an audiobook, so not strictly a podcast. I listened to that as I walked my dog. There’s also a lovely podcast called Hardcore Literature, and I listen to The News Agents and In Our Time, of course. Those are the ones that immediately come to mind.

A book you’ve found inspiring

I have found so many books inspiring for different reasons. Sometimes we are drawn to the story, sometimes to the style, the rhythm. Sometimes it’s the craftsmanship, how the structure has been built. I also like re-reading the books that I love because it’s a very different experience. So honestly, I don’t know how to choose just one book.

Maybe I would say Don Quixote. That has really been life changing for me. I was very young when I first read a children's edition, and I didn't know novels could do that. It just blew me away. This crazy night roaming La Mancha, the Iberian Peninsula — that stayed very vividly with me.

Who would play you in a film of your life

I don’t know how to answer that, honestly. I have a lot of respect for films, but I don’t feel like I have enough say in that kind of matter.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

My family and my library.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Every morning is different and we can't expect to be cheerful, smiling, hopeful every day. Sometimes it is difficult to get out of bed. We never talk about these things, but I think we must. At the same time, though, there is so much love, gratitude, humanity, empathy, connectivity. I think the worst thing that we can do to ourselves is to fall into apathy, numbness. So love, you know, gets me out of bed. Gratitude gets me out of bed. Empathy, stories, family, friends, nature, and also humanity. These are the things that I try to focus on.

The items you collect

I don't collect anything. When you live such a nomadic life — and I had to live a very nomadic life for a long time — you cannot keep things. You know, how many things can you put in a suitcase? How much of your home can you carry with you if you are going to another country? I left Istanbul and I haven’t been back for over 11 years now. I always think: Had I known that I would not go back, what would I have taken with me? I would have loved to take a sapling, maybe of a fig tree. So, when you live a peripatetic life, it's difficult to become a collector.

A hotel you could go back and back to

I adore family run hotels, in Spain, Italy, France. Usually the ones that have a loving warm energy, and that are not too corporate and commercial. Places where everything is prepared lovingly, and the breakfast is prepared by, maybe, the mother who is in the kitchen, for example. I like such environments a lot.

Your favourite painting

That’s tricky. I don’t know what my favourite painting is. It’s very difficult to choose just one. I’ve started writing on Substack, and for each essay I write I choose a painting and build a literary essay around it. Paintings have been very important to me, always, ever since I was a child in Madrid. I can never forget the time I visited The Prado Museum, it was just mind-blowing.

I like Goya a lot and Velázquez. There is a painting by Velázquez called Las Meninas, in which the painter is inside the painting. I like things that have, of course, stories. Almost all paintings do, but I like it when there’s a layer within a layer within a layer. I wouldn’t call it my favourite painting, because maybe there isn’t just one painting that I can choose in that sense, but it is one of my favourite paintings by Velázquez.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

Any meal that you share where you break bread with family and friends. It’s not only the food but it’s the feelings, the sharing. Food has always been very important in my writing. I was raised by a grandmother, for whom food was a language. Grandmother, when she didn't know about how to talk about difficult subjects, would instead feed you. Food was how she expressed her love.

In many of my books, there are menus. So, for instance, I dreamed of an imaginary tavern in The Island of Missing Trees called The Happy Fig, and many people told me that they so wanted to be in The Happy Fig, and taste that. So food is really very important in my writing because I think it is a language, it is culture, it is history. Much more than mixing up a few ingredients.

The best present you’ve ever received

We got our little dog — Romeo Cappuccino is his name — when he was just a newborn puppy. That was a big gift, but also every day is a gift, every sunrise, every book we receive and pass on. Any blessing, any beauty, any act of love is a gift.

Elif Shafak will be speaking at Cheltenham Literature Festival this month. In conversation with Simon Armitage and about her new novel, ‘In One Brief Moment All Eternity’. Tickets are still available. ‘In One Brief Moment All Eternity’ will be published on October 15.

Dear like-minded travellers, are you thinking of heading south — of packing up your notebooks and chasing the same coruscating light that has always drawn dreamers to the Côte d’Azur?

Here, it is easy to imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald balanced on the rocks in Antibes, Jean Cocteau drafting angels in Menton or James Baldwin writing late at night at home in Saint Paul-de-Vence. Why don’t you follow them there?

For more than a century, the French Riviera has been more of a story than a coastline — written and rewritten by exiles, novelists and poets who came in search of silence, spectacle or to find themselves reflected in its mirrored sea.

It was not all down to the light. We should not deceive ourselves: luxury, peace and pleasure are tempting indulgences. Perhaps the greatest appeal of the Côte d’Azur for this new generation of modern artists was the sheer hedonism suggested by those blue skies and the warm sunshine.

As the 20th century dawned, the Riviera became a refuge for some of the world’s most famous painters. Renoir built himself a villa in Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1907 and was still painting fleshy nudes until his death in 1919. Matisse moved permanently to Nice in the early 1920s, when his favourite subject was painting semi-naked odalisques bathed in sunshine. This was also the era when socialites and writers such as Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Somerset Maugham were drawn to the Côte d’Azur.

After the Second World War, the reputation of the Rivera for hedonism and creativity was secure. The most famous artist in the world, Picasso, moved to the Golfe-Juan in 1946 and Marc Chagall was also a convert. He spent the last four decades of his life in the area, moving first to Vence in 1949 and then to the hilltop village of St-Paul-de-Vence. His subjects were more whimsical, but suffused nevertheless with the light and colour of the south.

The Riviera they knew, however, is not quite the one you will find. The bohemian hotels they once frequented have become five-star palaces and their beaches privatised; the cafés curated for Instagram. Today, you’ll find inspiration in the Riviera’s quieter corners: in small hotels scented with orange blossom, in the back rooms of restaurants where menus are scribbled in chalk and in garden cafés where a glass of rosé is poured without performance.

This is a slow journey along the coast towards places that still reward time and attention.

Who? F. Scott Fitzgerald and Pablo Picasso

Where? Antibes

Begin in Antibes, as Fitzgerald did before you. The American author arrived with his wife, Zelda, in 1925, in search of respite from the excesses of New York. They rented Villa Saint-Louis in Juan-les-Pins, rechristening it Villa America, where Fitzgerald began work on his semi-autobiographical novel Tender is the Night.

The light remains extraordinary. Stand on Cap d’Antibes as dusk falls and you will see what he saw: the sea wrapped around you like swathes of blue silk; the sky bruised pink and cream.

The difference is, of course, that Fitzgerald stayed on the Riviera when it was surprisingly inexpensive and known more as a winter refuge than a summer playground. Today, his villa masquerades as a hotel, the Belle Rives, where even the sun loungers come at a steep price.

Instead, head further round the cap to La Villa Fabulite, a 12-room hideaway shaded by fragrant pine and lemon trees. After a vermouth cassis cocktail, traverse the coastline on foot to the Musée Picasso. Look at them long enough and you’ll start to see the artist’s Cubist faces in the rock formations on Plage de la Garoupe.

Pablo Picasso first came to the Côte d’Azur in the 1920s, but it was his return here 1946 that was to prove a turning point in his life. After enduring the Occupation in Paris, he had emerged from the war with renewed energy and a new lover, the young artist Françoise Gilot. That June, the two of them headed south to the Golfe-Juan and then, in September, he was offered an empty room on the second floor of a medieval château in Antibes.

For two months, he worked feverishly. With artists’ materials still scarce after the war, he improvised with boat paint, asbestos-cement panels and decorators’ brushes.

A succession of exuberant still lifes, nudes and humorous sailors poured from his brush. The masterpiece was La Joie de Vivre, a monumental celebration of peace, sunlight and sensuality, with Gilot dancing naked at its centre.

The couple then moved to nearby Vallauris and Picasso began to experiment with ceramics, producing thousands of pieces over the next decade, as well as the great murals War and Peace.

However, he was not an easy man to live with. In 1953, the relationship with Gilot failed and she was replaced in his affections by Jacqueline Roque — a 27-year-old girl who worked in the local pottery shop. They moved to Cannes, then, in 1958, the château at Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, which had a view of his hero, Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire.

After they married in 1961, Picasso spent the rest of his life with Jacqueline and he lies buried in Vauvenargues. Yet, it was the decade in the Golfe-Juan when he was perhaps at his happiest and you can still see the work he made during those golden years in the museums in Antibes and Vallauris.

Who? Alexandre Dumas and the Impressionists

Where? Nice

In 1841, Alexandre Dumas wrote: ‘A beautiful courtesan, softly lying on the edge of her azure mirror, in the shade of her orange trees in bloom, with her long hair abandoned to the sea breezes, and whose waves would come to wet her bare feet, for Nice is the city of sweet laziness and easy pleasures’ — and plus ça change.

If Antibes is the cocktail party, then Nice is the café the morning after: a little battered, but all the more alive because of it. Here, the Belle Époque façades are peeling, charmingly, the Cours Saleya market is a riot of flowers and the smell of socca drifts from wood-fired stoves in Old Town alleys.

In March 1882, Eugène Manet boarded a train from Nice to Paris with a stash of freshly made oil paintings in his baggage. They included a view of the fishing boats in the port at Nice and one especially charming and spontaneous depiction of his daughter Julie playing on the beach. The work of his wife, Berthe Morisot, both pictures were destined for the seventh Impressionist exhibition, which opened the following month on the rue St Honoré.

Morisot, the most prominent female artist of the group, had spent the winter in the Hôtel Richemont with Eugène and Julie. The mild winter climate of the Côte d’Azur had been a boon for an artist who was deeply committed to the new movement, which championed a more spontaneous approach to painting. As did her fellow Impressionists, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro, she strove to capture the fleeting effects of light and the atmosphere by working en plein air and immersing herself in her subjects.

Such an approach was fine during the summer in the coastal resorts of Normandy, where Impressionism was born during the 1870s, but it was not so alluring when winter came and the weather turned cold and grey. By heading south, Morisot was part of a new geographical trend — the moment when the light of the south began to filter into French painting. Over the next century, the landscapes of Provence and the sunny skies of the Riviera were to become one of the most important themes in modern art.

Nowadays, writers and artists seek out the Hôtel du Couvent, where a resident herbalist blends together teas and tinctures using herbs growing in the cloister garden, to help sharpen thoughts.

Stop by Les Grandes Caves Caprioglio — a family-run institution since 1910 — for a thoughtfully priced selection of local Bellet and Provence wines. Or Pizza Pili, where the montagnarde — crème fraîche, lardons, potatoes, reblochon — can be carried, hot, to the beach and eaten on the stones as the Mediterranean folds itself against the shore.

Who? W. Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau and Princess Grace of Monaco

Where? Cap d’Ail

There are few train journeys lovelier than the one that connects Nice and Cap d’Ail. The train pauses at Villefranche-sur-Mer—a station set directly above the water—where Cap Ferrat juts into view.

W. Somerset Maugham settled on this peninsula for much of his life, although he also described the south of France as ‘a sunny place for shady people’. His choice of guests — Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf — suggest otherwise.

Cap d’Ail is a pocket of calm at complete odds to Monaco. It was here that Greta Garbo retreated from Hollywood, where Sir Winston Churchill painted and where Gabrielle Réval lived and wrote about the town’s intimate relationship with the sea. She is buried here, overlooking the sea she so often returned to in her work.

From the train station, a staircase winds its way down, through palms and pines, to Plage Mala, a crescent of sand and stone. It feels like a secret. In this cove, it's not about being seen.

Villa les Camélias: Musée à Cap d'Ail is the only Belle Époque villa in Cap d’Ail open to the public and exhibits objects and countless photographs dating from the late 19th century to the 1950s, capturing the daily life of Cap d’Ail’s visitors and residents (Sacha Guitry, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Princess Grace of Monaco).

The Nietzsche Path, a steep mountain trail that starts here and ends in Èze, takes about 1½ hours to climb. The philosopher from which it takes its name was inspired to complete Thus Spoke Zarathustra when braving it. (‘All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,’ he once wrote.)

Èze, a medieval village, clings to the mountain like a mirage and is sometimes referred to as ‘the eagle’s nest’. Stay at Les Terrasses d’Èze, a hotel and spa in which you can partake in a form of float therapy. Lying in near silence, weightless, in saltwater, your imagination slowly starts to drift.

Who? James Baldwin, D.H. Lawrence, Henri Matisse, Auguste Renoir, Nicolas Poussins and Marc Chagall

Where? Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Vence

James Baldwin lived in Saint-Paul-de-Vence for 17 years and his house, Chez Baldwin, was a meeting space for intellectuals, artists and exiles. The Provencal landscape, he said, ‘demanded contemplation’. La Colombe d’Or, a historic restaurant with rooms, is Saint Paul’s calling card — its walls hung with Picassos and Braques, left behind in lieu of payment. Alternatively, there is Orion Treehouses, which sits in the middle of a cedarwood forest just around the corner from the Fondation Maeght.

The market town of Vence, Saint Paul’s larger and more authentic sibling, was the first resting place of D.H. Lawrence — before his wife, Frieda, had his remains exhumed and moved, five years after his death.

It was here that Henri Matisse found a second wind: Chapelle du Rosaire was, in his own words, ‘the culmination of a whole life of work and the flowering of a tremendous, sincere, and difficult effort’. Bathed in cobalt blue, lemon yellow and emerald green, the chapel is one of the most spiritual spaces on the Riviera. Pared back and radiant, it is a reminder that simplicity boasts its own kind of grandeur.

If Nietzsche hasn’t made you feel Human, All Too Human, climb to the peak of Baou de Saint-Jeannet, an enormous cliff whose viewpoint attracted Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Nicolas Poussins and Marc Chagall. It’s a lesson in perspective: climb higher, see further.

(St Tropez: Best left to the superyachts and paparazzi. A writer will find little here but distraction.)

Who? Blaise Cendrars, Patti Smith and Anthony Bourdain

Where? Marseille

Marseille, France's second-most populous city (above), is all too often dismissed as being rough around the edges, but it’s never felt more vibrant. Novelist Blaise Cendrars described it as ‘a mess after my own heart’; Patti Smith performed at the Gare de Marseille-Saint-Charles; Anthony Bourdain wanted to retire here. ‘Wherever you are from, you feel at home in Marseille,’ observed Jean-Claude Izzo, the author of the Fabio Montale hard-boiled detective novels. He was right.

The city is raw, restless and constantly being refashioned. There is, right now, a new wave of chefs determined to do more than bouillabaisse and looking to its migrant population, past and present, for inspiration.

At La Friche la Belle de Mai — a multifaceted public space that’s part restaurant, part Arts centre, part market, part skatepark — enjoy a glass of pastis with panisses (chickpea fritters), then slip into Atelier Renata, an exclusive supper club venue without a menu, where dinner is whatever the chef picked up that day. In the morning, browse the sap green Librairie Mazette for something to read before moving east along the coast.

Who? Frédéric Mistral and the Fauvist painters

Where? Cassis

‘He who has seen Paris and not Cassis, has seen nothing’ wrote the poet Frédéric Mistral. The colourful fishing port, with its limestone cliffs, terracotta houses and sheltered, fjord-like inlets known as calanques, once drew in the Fauvist painters — André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck — who captured its magic on canvas, in bold and vivid tones. Linger here.

At Le Petit Oyster Bar, work your way through oysters, razor clams, shrimps, and moules gratinées, washed down with bone-dry Cassis AOC whites. And then onto the Calanques, where the water is so clear that boats look like they’re suspended in mid air. The Calanque d'En-Vau, a narrow limestone cove backed by sheer cliffs, can be reached by boat or a steep, two hour-long trail that’s worth every uphill step.

For writers and artists, this fabled coastline has long offered lessons in how life is best lived. Good writing, like sculpture, removes excess to reveal essence. Inspiration is found not in the opulence of hotel lobbies, but in winding, cliffside paths with the promise of a view at the top. Carry a notebook, and let the landscape do the rest.

Nick Trend’s new book, ‘France: In the Footsteps of the Great Artists’, is out now (Thames & Hudson, £50).

‘Painting the French Riviera’ is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, until January 31, 2027.

Arguably the greatest party London has ever seen was the coronation of Henry VIII in 1509. The Tudor King was determined to upstage Edward I, who had ordered 22,460 chickens for his own coronation in 1274, and, aged only 17, was fizzing with the predictable buzz of a teenage boy with a crown on his head.

Henry’s bash, held at Westminster Hall, featured wine-flowing fountains, jousting and (clutch your pearls) a personal detail assigned to their ladyships who had to crawl under the table to rearrange their dresses whenever they needed to urinate. Debauchery? Darling, it barely touches the sides.

The closest we have come to such a bacchanal in recent times — that we know of — was in 2004, when Kate Moss threw her 30th birthday party inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book The Beautiful And The Damned. As with all the most legendary parties, accounts may vary, but the canonical reading is as follows. Serena Rees, co-founder of luxury lingerie label Agent Provocateur, and filmmaker Sam Taylor-Wood (later Taylor-Johnson) hosted two adjoining parties for the newly tricenarian model at their north London homes — one was ‘The Beautiful’, the other ‘The Damned’ — before the night progressed to a penthouse at Claridge’s, where Moss danced with Ronnie Wood, Marianne Faithfull and other cultural heavyweights until morning. It is the heady mix of stars, almost symbolic in their potency, for which the party is remembered — more than the alleged extracurriculars.

‘The right mix of people is the most essential party trick,’ says Anna Van Praagh, former deputy editor of ES Magazine and chief content officer of The Standard, who, throughout her career, has been lucky enough to attend some of the best bashes of her generation. ‘It is not so much about the great and the good as it is the great and the bad. You want a few serious people present, but only a few. Important people are often very dull and a host’s job is to make sure no guest is stuck for too long with anyone boring.’

As London heads into silly season, parties are being held every night across the capital. Society doyennes, diary journalists and fixtures of ‘The Scene’ are often contending with five or six different invitations an evening. It’s a nice problem to have for those who have it — but choosing which party to attend can be tricky. What could be the night of your life equally could end up a damp squib.

The greatest parties, often, are those that take you by surprise. ‘The best dos are the most spontaneous,’ says Dean Piper, a former celebrity journalist-turned-VIP strategist. ‘I’ve had more fun at baby showers that went on until the wee hours than at most film-premiere after parties.’ The best bash yours truly has attended this year was no doubt Yotam Ottolenghi’s harvest party, an event that may conjure an image of the labneh class reciting incantations around a giant courgette, but was, in fact, a hoedown of the highest order, attended by such names as Helen Fielding and Nigella Lawson. ‘Bad behaviour is very important,’ believes Van Praagh, ‘and a lot more likely to occur if you have enough young people present who don’t have much to lose.’ Attractive waiters are also a must.

To those hosting the parties, the pressure of competition can be fatal. As anxiety clouds judgement, priorities can be forsaken for nonsense. Ham-fisted attempts at entertainment or organised fun rarely fly. ‘I was always confused by the parties thrown at Sushisamba,’ says Piper, of the restaurant in the Heron Tower, EC2. ‘They’d hire these Brazilian people in carnival costumes — we’re talking full headdresses — that always struck me as bizarre and made the entire event feel claustrophobic.

‘I think any form of entertainment that puts the party on pause is a no-no,’ the former hack continues, ‘except the time that Amy Winehouse got up on stage at the Sanderson Hotel after the Brit Awards in 2004, to serenade us.’ Wine-flowing fountains à la Henry VIII are fine; trapeze artists or ballet solos are not. Only one place, Piper suggests, gets the entertainment right. ‘The Goring nails it. Sure, they have singers and magicians and the whole thing is a bit much — but it feels authentic to the hotel. You can tell that the staff love it, too, which makes a big difference.’

If entertainment is usually best avoided, on what should a host be sure to focus? ‘Music is far and away the most important thing,’ says Serena Connolly, head of under-35s membership at The Birley Clubs, which includes The George, Annabel’s, and Mark’s Club. ‘I could drink not a drop of alcohol and still dance until 5am if the music is good. If the music is bad, I’m out in under an hour.’ Van Praagh agrees, although believes that ‘weapons-grade alcohol’ is important. ‘You want people to get drunk quickly.’

Of course, a party needs more than mere music and drinks to deliver the ‘wow’ factor its punters are chasing. A cursory look at London’s greatest dos suggests that this is a must: the last Frost Fair of 1814 involved an elephant crossing the Thames; the 1994 premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral would not have gone down in history had Elizabeth Hurley not worn that Versace dress; and Sir Elton John’s 50th birthday, held at Hammersmith Palais, is legendary not only because he dressed up as Louis XIV, but because his costume involved a 3ft-tall wig that balanced a miniature Spanish warship and working cannon on its crest.

The most effective way of creating ‘a moment’ without interrupting the flow of the party, Van Praagh says, is via the guest list. ‘You want someone there whom no one is expecting to see,’ she explains. That doesn’t mean someone necessarily more famous or ‘above- grade’, but rather someone incongruous. ‘What made parties in the Noughties so exciting,’ says Van Praagh, ‘was the fact that you could be chatting with Noel Gallagher one minute and with A. C. Grayling the next.’

For Connolly, the best way to produce that memorable moment is through a performance that doesn’t put the evening on pause, but rather weaves into it. Attending The George’s summer party together in July, the downstairs bar filled with people trying to catch a glimpse of Sophie Ellis-Bextor, who performed a set of floor-fillers for an hour in between DJ sets (her cover of Like A Prayer has lived in my head rent-free ever since). The right ‘moment’, she suggests, ‘should only bring more people onto the dancefloor’.

If, up until the early days of the Instagram era, a ‘moment’ could easily be created with an outfit going viral online (think of Rihanna’s Guo Pei dress worn at the Met Gala in 2015 that was instantly likened to an omelette), a party is now more likely to become a talking point by foregoing any digital presence; banning phones and cameras and shrouding the event in secrecy. ‘Celebrity parties are all going phone-free,’ Piper says. ‘Take Poppy Delevingne’s 40th birthday this summer. Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce and Rita Ora were all there, yet no one was allowed to “pap” them. That made it a lot more enticing to those who weren’t present and ensured that it was talked about for weeks afterwards.

‘There is a movement of people wanting to bring back the “behind-closed-doors” ethos of the parties of yore,’ Piper continues. ‘All the best stuff happens after the Getty photographer has finished his shift.’ A great guest list, once more, does the heavy lifting. ‘Ideally,’ says Van Praagh, ‘you want to have someone there who has been recently cancelled, as everyone wants to speak to them.’

I wanted to put this latest theory to the test and, thinking I knew exactly which party might follow such a rule, emailed the head of events at The Spectator and asked if I could attend their Young Readers’ event as a reporter. Charming as it was, I was disappointed to find not one controversial person there — not even Douglas Murray — and asked attendees, mostly young men in their mid-to-late twenties, whether they agreed the party could have been enlivened by throwing someone controversial into the mix.

‘What do you mean by controversial?’ one quibbled. ‘Do you mean [the chairman] Charles Moore? Because he’s just over there.’ ‘No,’ I answered, ‘I do not mean Charles Moore. I didn’t think he was controversial. I mean someone properly cancelled like Peter Mandelson.’ My audience shrugged. One of our party, two drinks deep, began to round on Rory Stewart, co-host of The Rest Is Politics and scourge of the alt-right. ‘He is so annoying,’ he said irascibly. ‘Thinks he knows everything.’ People around us agreed. I concluded that a feather-ruffler is indeed a good party trick, yet different crowds have different triggers. Putting the cat among the pigeons depends on the cat and the pigeons.

A good venue also goes a long way. The Spectator, still host of one of the most exclusive summer parties around, is blessed with a townhouse that backs onto St James’s Park and a garden that looks bigger than it actually is. At full capacity, one cannot swing a purse without knocking out several politicians and at least one host of The Newsagents podcast.

London’s premiere party destination in recent decades was the Chiltern Firehouse, yet after that shut down due to a fire in 2024, others muscled in to claim the crown. The strongest substitute so far has been The Standard, King’s Cross, a hotel designed by Archer Humphries and Shawn Hausman (the man behind Hollywood Canteen and Bar Marmont in Los Angeles), which hopes to hold onto it when Chiltern reopens in late 2027. Sweeties, the hotel’s penthouse bar, is a pick for today’s album release parties and more intimate soirées are often held in Townhouse Eight, an apartment with its own bar and kitchen. The whole thing is soundproof, as are the suites that tend to host the afterparties.

No phones, no breaks in the set list, soundproof walls and handsome waiters: anything else needed to throw the party of the year? ‘Yes,’ says Van Praagh. ‘Always bring a pack of cigarettes, whether you smoke or not. All the right people smoke and, if you brandish cigarettes obviously enough, they will flock towards you like a moth to a flame.’

This article first appeared in the October 7 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

As Athena can count the Parthenon as a home, she naturally takes great interest in it. The latest flare-up of the dispute between Britain and Greece over the Parthenon sculptures — familiarly known as the Elgin Marbles — reminds her that the ancient Greeks excelled in epics as well as architecture.

It is now 44 years since the former actress Melina Mercouri, then the Greek Minister for Culture, launched a campaign to return the sculptures to Athens from the British Museum, where they have been on display since 1817. Famously, she cried in front of the marbles for the benefit of journalists — a kind museum curator having pointed her in the right direction, as she had failed to recognise them.

For decades, most of the debate revolved around the question of whether or not the museum had legal title to the sculptures, which it purchased from Lord Elgin. Given the failure to marshal a definitively convincing argument that the British do not hold them legally, Athena thinks the issue of title is a rabbit hole that is best avoided, but this did not stop the Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, declaring last month that ‘Greece cannot accept any arrangement that would require it to recognise the British Museum’s ownership of the sculptures’.

He was responding to a remark by the director of the British Museum, Nicholas Cullinan, that the current loan by the French Government of the Bayeux Tapestry to the UK might provide a model for a loan of the sculptures to Athens. Mitsotakis was having none of it: ‘Nobody would seriously contemplate cutting what survives of the tapestry in two and displaying half in London and half in Bayeux and claiming this was an adequate way to understand it. Yet that is exactly what happened to the Parthenon sculptures. A single masterpiece was divided.’

This, sadly, is typical of the tendentious way the Greek authorities have approached the issue. There is no ‘single masterpiece’ in the case of the sculptures — only fragments of a whole that can never be reconstituted because a large part was irrevocably destroyed in 1687 by the explosion of a powder magazine.

Mitsotakis’s comment emphasises yet again that for the Greek authorities the issue of legal possession is more important than the possibility of seeing the marbles in Athens, which the British Museum would facilitate on the basis of a loan agreement. There seems to Athena to be no sound reasons why the Greek argument remains fruitlessly focused on issues of legal ownership rather than the aesthetic and scholarly benefits of seeing the sculptures in Athens.

Last month, it was reported that Greece’s Central Archaeological Council had refused a request by the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt for the loan for an exhibition of nine fragments from the Parthenon on the grounds that they would be shown alongside pieces lent by the British Museum. Allowing nationalistic emotion to override the priorities of art and scholarship does the Greek authorities no favours.

This article first appeared in the October 7 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

I arranged to join a walk last November with my local University of the Third Age group, an idea that seemed straightforward enough until faced with the real enemy of any day out: the weather. Or rather, its peculiar ability to behave in a way that suggests it resents being forecast.

The Met Office had declared rain at 60% four days earlier, then 70% the day before, then 40% by the morning, only for the sky to appear as blue and smug as a Mediterranean travel brochure. I concluded long ago that the Met Office deserves our sympathy: after Michael Fish reassured the nation in 1987 that no hurricane would arrive, only to have one appear with theatrical force hours later, its confidence has never recovered.

Our walk began at St Katharine Docks, E1, which has nothing to do with St Catherine of Alexandria, St Catherine of Siena. The docks borrowed their name instead from the Royal Foundation of St Katharine, a medieval hospital that originally stood on site, founded by Queen Matilda in 1147. In the early 19th century, the precinct was swept aside to make way for a new commercial site. Thomas Telford designed the basins, Philip Hardwick the warehouses and the result opened in 1828 to mild fanfare and modest success. The narrow entrance prevented the largest ships from entering, a design flaw that feels like the architectural equivalent of buying a wardrobe only to find it won’t fit through the door.

Commercial decline would beset St Katharine as other docks prospered. Bombing in the Second World War accelerated the decay; by 1968, commercial operations ceased. By the 1970s, the area began its second life as a leisure marina, pleasure craft now sitting politely in water once churned by labour. Stepping into the marina today feels like entering a club where membership is implied by proximity to boats with polished teak. Restaurants, offices and apartment buildings line the water with an air of curated ease.

Yet, beneath the refinement lies a scrambled history of demolition, slum clearance and utilitarian warehouses that spoke a more honest architectural language. If authenticity is measured by the scars of survival, St Katharine offers only faint lines. The effect is pleasant enough, although the sense of having entered a well-behaved waterside showroom is hard to ignore. It is an odd moment when one leaves the marina and enters the narrower streets beyond. The shift is immediate. The light changes. The air thickens slightly with the scent of the river rather than the fragrance of artisan coffee. Footsteps echo differently.

For all the talk about respecting heritage, London has a habit of tidying its past until it resembles a postcard. Telford’s warehouses once hummed with labour. Goods were hauled directly from barges through loading doors that now belong to flats with entry systems tucked away from view. One begins to wonder which parts are original and which are the architectural equivalent of cosmetic dentistry; although whether this should be held against modern developers is a matter better left to those who enjoy writing letters to newspapers.

Walking eastward towards Wapping, the landscape contracts. To the naked eye, the river seems to narrow — although not in truth — and the streets begin to show their age. Wapping is a survivor rather than a stage set; a sliver between the Thames and the Highway and a neighbourhood the history of which has not yet been polished into polite silence. Warehouses still stand, converted into flats, but recognisably themselves. The cobbles, uneven in places, tell their stories without fuss.

This was once a world of shipwrights, chandlers and lightermen who did not have the luxury of thinking about heritage. It was also the site of Execution Dock, where pirates were hanged at low tide so the incoming water could wash away their sins. Capt Kidd met his end here in 1701, a detail that the local pub, named after him, displays with cheerful confidence. The sign shows him in a white wig, flanked by illustrations of maritime violence. The river police, the world’s oldest organised force of its kind, began here in 1798 to deal with the endless theft that accompanied the port trade. Smuggling was common, wages were low and temptation immediate. The Thames does not encourage purity of behaviour.

As the dock economy collapsed in the 1960s, Wapping suffered deeply. Jobs vanished, buildings emptied and the district hollowed out. The 1980s brought warehouse conversions and an influx of residents seeking the charm of dockland living. Then came the Murdoch print dispute of 1986, which brought the area to national attention as industrial conflict once more took hold of it. The grit of its heyday remains, lingering among the quiet and contemplative streets.

As in St Katharine Docks, the line between original buildings and their more polished, reconstructed cousins is not always obvious. Yet such is the fate of many cities that outlive their industries: history congeals into atmosphere rather than presence. A walk through these districts reveals a truth about the city. St Katharine Docks presents its best behaviour to visitors. Wapping shows history without apology. One is curated, the other lived. Both are honest in different ways.

At one point during our walk, I thought of J. M. W. Turner — perhaps prompted by the greyness of the Thames or a slant of the autumn light that seemed to struggle with itself. The artist’s ability to paint luminosity from murk is rightly celebrated; poorly acknowledged, however, is his fascination with the body as much as the horizon. He understood that the line between beauty and decay is thin and that both are shaped by tide and time. Wapping, with its mixture of surviving brick, converted warehouses and illicit memory, would likely have amused him.

One suspects he would have found the marina at St Katharine Docks less compelling: too tidy, cautious and determined to behave. Turner enjoyed scenes where the river’s honesty exposed the absurdities of civilisation. He likely would have recognised the beauty in buildings that do not care whether we admire them. Many of Wapping’s structures are blessed with such indifference: they were not designed to please, but to work. Where Italy, my country of origin, builds outward and presents its beauty to the world, London builds inward, hiding it in function.

As we returned to the starting point, I found myself thinking about the river’s effect on time. The tide hides the past twice a day and reveals it again without ceremony. The docks rise, fall, dry and irrigate themselves without care for interpretation. What survives are not the buildings, but the rhythm. Londoners adapt, plan, redevelop and argue. The Thames is a silent witness. Between the marina and the river lies a conversation about memory. One side edits it; the other lets it linger. Somewhere in the middle walks the observer, trying to decide whether the past is best preserved by polish or stubborn endurance.

This article first appeared in the September 2 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Cool Britannia ruled the airwaves (and the column inches) in the 1990s.

As the last decade of the 20th century dawned, the country, poised between a gritty past and the promise and fears of the new millennium, emerged triumphant to lead the world in art, design, fashion, music and pop culture, as a forthcoming Tate Britain exhibition, ‘The 90s; Art and Fashion’ reveals.

The creative energy that coursed through Britain in those years had many facets and faces. Here are some of my favourite moments that I believe best demonstrate this, from the show and beyond:

1. The supermodels When British Vogue asked Peter Lindbergh to photograph the woman of the 1990s, he couldn’t settle on one and chose five: models Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz and Christy Turlington. That January 1990 cover sanctioned their global fame, crystallising the era of the supermodel. Then, three years later, a waifish British girl appeared on a Calvin Klein advertisement and defined a new beauty ideal, in contrast to the polished glamour of the previous decade. With her undone, ‘heroin chic’ look, Kate Moss became, perhaps more than any other, the face of the 1990s
2. Sir Steve McQueen In his 1993 silent film, Bear, a faceoff between two men that has both erotic and aggressive undertones, the video artist and film director put the spotlight on the left behind, those that were seemingly not part of the Cool Britannia wave, but who in that decade eventually found some visibility through the work of Sir Steve and others such as Chris Ofili and Keith Piper

3. Lee Alexander McQueen: Nothing sent a clearer signal about Britain’s creative eminence than the country’s most rebellious, provocative, avant-garde designer taking the helm at a historic French couture house, Givenchy, in 1996

4. The YBAs When the Royal Academy staged an exhibition of more than 100 pieces from Charles Saatchi’s contemporary-art collection in 1997, it caused a stir. There was blood, graphic nudity, even a portrait of murderer Myra Hindley — and picket lines of vocal protesters outside Burlington House. Yet, the Young British Artists featured in that show, whether Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin or Jenny Saville, would go on to dominate the international art scene

5. Geri Halliwell In the decade of club culture and Britpop, the Spice Girl singer encapsulated the spirit of the times when she turned up at the 1997 Brit Award in a Union Flag mini dress. A year later, the frock — a homemade affair, as Halliwell and her sister had stitched a Union Flag teatowel on a black Gucci garment — would become the most expensive pop-star outfit sold at auction, although the record has since been topped

‘The 90s; Art and Fashion’ is at Tate Britain, London, from October 8–February 14, 2027.

Raymond Blanc is finding being on holiday very strange. He has never had ‘more than 10 days holiday at any time.

‘You have to prepare yourself. I think preparation is the most important part of it, because it’s a big thing,’ he says in his heavy French accent.

Unlike most of us, he has hardly taken any time off since he opened his famous Oxfordshire restaurant, Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, A Belmond Hotel. It’s been a huge part of the self-trained chefs life every single day, which is why its recent closure for an 18-month refurbishment has been such a huge adjustment.

‘I’ve spent 41 years creating this extraordinary magic at a beautiful manor house, working five or six days a week, and the suddenly, you know — close,’ the 76-year-old says. He will be retiring from his role as chef-patron at Le Manoir, which held two Michelin stars for more than four decades, staying on in his new role of ‘lifetime ambassador and founder’.

‘At Le Manoir, we have trained more than 50 Michelin star chefs,’ he says. ‘I really prepared myself because I knew, emotionally, it would be difficult, but I made it,’ Raymond adds. ‘If you’re happy, and you can create something beautiful in your life then you’re a lucky person to start with. But then, if you’re able to hand it down to someone who’s going to make it even more beautiful through the years… I count myself as a lucky man.’

He has been spending time with his partner, Natalia Traxel, a doctor and nutritionist, at their flat in the South of France. Despite retiring from his chef role at Le Manoir, Raymond is still keeping busy. He has collaborated with the French bakery chain PAUL on two new limited-edition sandwiches. One contains roast beef with horseradish and celeriac remoulade. The other, creamy brie with caramelised onion chutney and sweet celery shavings. Both sound delicious and much better than the sad supermarket meal deal sandwiches that Raymond still can’t wrap his head around, despite living in the UK for many years now.

‘To be part of that French tradition and excellence… we did something very beautiful,’ he says. He has also been cooking at one-off events at Annabel’s, Royal Ascot and various other events. There is a mention of television work, and various other pursuits. ‘I think I have plenty to do,’ Raymond says, with a smile. ‘I am not very good at saying no, that’s the problem.’

Your aesthetic hero

As a chef, I must say that there are a number of chefs who have inspired me. Mauro Colagreco at Mirazur. I must say, I had an extraordinary experience there. But other chefs such as Andrew Wong, Heston Blumenthal, Luke Selby — and many more — have been very inspiring to me.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I have created, in my flat in the South of France, a huge cabinet of curiosities, eight metres wide. It had to be made three times because the Polish wood that was used is very difficult to paint on. Those poor guys worked for about two years on that. It’s still half empty, but I buy local art to put in it. I recently bought a piece by Antoine Pierini and another by Rene Lalique.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

The Rodin exhibition at the Tate Modern in 2021. I still remember the power of his sculptures, and it was so beautifully presented — the lighting was just perfect, and there was a beautiful story. His partner, Camille Claudel, was never really recognised. But she was as good of a sculptor as he was. I have two little sculptures by her.

But still the best for me would be Marc Chagall. I saw an exhibition of his at the National Museum in South of France in Nice, in 2025. I love his work because it’s so childlike and so dreamline. It puts you in another world.

A possession you’d never sell

My sculptures by Juginder Lamba — I love his work — they live in my garden in London.

A book you’ve found inspiring

At the moment I am reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s dreamlike and it will catch you through its fantasy, its imagery, through the hardship of life. It is always moving, showing new things. But I love many other books. I love Mikhail Bulgakov, he is one of my favourite writers. If you read Heart of a Dog, you will laugh. Also, Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I would recommend every parent to buy it to read to their child before bedtime. I was also taken completely by Cooking in 10 Minutes by Edouard de Pomiane. His writing is so beautiful, so smart, so fun — he doesn’t take himself too seriously.

Your favourite painting

When I was about 12 — and I know this answer is classic, boring in terms of a lack of imagination — I fell in love with Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. I still regard it as the greatest masterpiece. It’s still my very favourite.

The music that you work to

It depends. I listen to African music, more modern music, sometimes music that is very quiet like Spiegel im Spiegel. But I love all the great classical music: Beethoven, Vivaldi, Debussy, Mozart. It’s about mood. Of course, I have a list of French music as well.

The last podcast you listened to

20 Questions With, by Matt Stadlen. He does all the big boys of politics, but some other interviews too. He has loved the work we’ve done at Le Manoir. I was interviewed by him just last week.

Who would play you in a film of your life

Dudley Moore was very similar facially, plus he was fun and didn't take himself too seriously.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

I would definitely take a fishing rod — I’m a good fisherman, so I think I would manage to survive just through my fishing. I would take my oldest kitchen knife, which is now so thin after fifty years of working with it, but that has an emotional significance. I would also take a couple of good books — maybe a whole library — including a book about survival skills.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

I just love life, and obviously though my work pattern is different, I still do. I love to walk, I love the cinema, I love to see art, I love to see friends. It’s easy to wake up. It’s easy. I am excited and I rarely have the blues.

The items you collect

Many different bits and pieces, and wine.

A hotel you could go back and back to

Locally, The Connaught, I think is the most amazing hotel. There is also a great chef there, Hélène Darroze. I also love the Cipriani [in Venice].

The most memorable meal you have ever had

As I mentioned before, Mirazou. That was really the best. Also Andrew Wong was an extraordinary experience. He had made a dessert that was mindblowing: extra virgin olive oil, a sorbet of fresh coconut and dessicated coconut and on the top, caviar. It sounds weird to start with, but my God, that was a genius dish. One of the best dishes of my life.

The best present you’ve ever received

A 1812 Napoleon Cognac, never opened and in the original bottle. My partner Natalia gifted it to me, she had searched for months through French cellars. Every night, after service, I would taste this extraordinary cognac, a tiny amount so it could last forever. The layering of aromatics was amazing. Then I would leave the glass unwashed to discover in the morning further hidden scents that the oxidation would reveal. It was the most appreciated present that I have ever had.

For more information on Raymond’ Blanc’s collaboration with PAUL, click here.

On the fifth day of the eighth lunar month of AD527, Buddhist monk Ichadon faced the execution he had himself engineered. The man he advised, Beopheung, ruler of Silla, one of the three kingdoms of Korea, had been grappling with a thorny problem: he was determined to make Buddhism the state religion, but his council of nobles opposed him.

Ichadon came up with an extraordinary solution: the king would make the proclamation, then deny all knowledge of it. The monk would then admit to having forged the document and pay for this with his life — but his sacrifice, he believed, would persuade the court to embrace Buddhism.

As the executioner lifted his great sword, Ichadon is reputed to have said: ‘If Buddha is worth believing in, let there be a wonder after my death.’ There was: as his head was severed, the sun vanished, thunder and lightning ripped through the sky, monkeys shrieked and milk, not blood, spurted from Ichadon’s neck. The miracle may be only a legend, but the monk’s martyrdom did persuade the court of the power of Buddhism, sowing the seeds of a cultural blossoming that would last for centuries.

Religion is one of the forces that has historically shaped Korean art, as revealed by a forthcoming exhibition at the British Museum, which traces the past 2,000 years of the country’s history, art and material culture through the 23,000-piece collection bequeathed to the nation in 2021 by the late Samsung chairman Lee Kun-Hee.

Another catalyst, says lead curator Sang-ah Kim, is the relationship with the outside world, particularly China and Japan, and how the country’s skilled craftsmen filtered these influences through the prism of their own creativity. ‘Korea was the second culture in the world after China to master high-fire stoneware,’ Dr Kim explains. ‘They learned how to build a kiln and then how to keep the temperature high, but the stoneware they made was totally different [from China’s].

'In the Three Kingdoms period, they made tall, pedestal-looking burial objects. Why are they tall? Because they are for offering; they also put in lots of figurines, animals — companions for the afterlife.’

The same approach to borrowing and reinterpreting ideas continued during Unified Silla (676–935) — a period in which the kingdom once ruled by Beopheung expanded to control the entire peninsula and its capital, Gyeongju, became so dense with tiled roofs that people could walk down the street in the rain without getting wet — and the subsequent Goryeo era (918–1392), from which the name Korea derives.

Buddhism flourished, not least because Gen Wang Geon, Goryeo’s founder, credited divine assistance for his ascension, and so did religious art. The crown, the court and regional clans all built temples and commissioned paintings, sculptures and, most notably, stoneware. In the 10th century, Korea learned from China how to make celadon pottery. However, Goryeo craftsmen developed their own, distinctive ‘kingfisher’ hue and later adapted inlay techniques to ceramics.

‘On the unfired surface, they carved with sharp tools a decoration, then filled that with white and black slip and fired with glaze. There are lots of designs, such as cranes, clouds or chrysanthemums: they are not painted; they are carved.’

Soon afterwards, in 1011, King Hyeonjong, fleeing an approaching army, vowed to have the entire Buddhist canon carved into wood if his enemy was repelled. They were and the first Tripitaka, a woodblock printed edition of the three-part Buddhist scripture, came into being. This was burnt during the Mongol invasion of 1232 — incidentally, Kublai Khan, the first Mongol emperor of China, would later say that Goryeo, albeit small, had artisans and entertainers that surpassed the Han Chinese — but was then replaced between 1236 and 1251. The 80,000 or so woodblocks of the ‘new’ Tripitaka Koreana are still preserved today at the Haeinsa Temple in Hapcheon.

At about the same time, the country also invented a metal moveable type: ‘The Goryeo dynasty’s printing technology was really advanced, partly because they were Buddhists and in Buddhist countries sutra, the sacred text, is really important, it’s how you promote knowledge,’ explains Dr Kim. ‘They already had really high skills in woodblock printing, then, to make it more efficient, they used metal moveable type.’ It beat Gutenberg’s press by about two centuries and, although most of those early prints are lost, the 1377 Jikji, a collection of excerpts from Buddhist scripture, survives to this day.

Then came the moment that set the country on a new course: the Wihwado Retreat, which Dr Kim likens to the Battle of Hastings. In 1388, general Yi Sŏnggye had been dispatched to invade China’s Liaodong Peninsula. However, at Wihwa Island, he decided to turn back and topple the faltering Goryeo monarchy instead. After a few puppet kings, he himself ascended the throne in 1392 and founded a new dynasty, Joseon, which would remain in power for the next 500 years.

It wasn’t only the rulers that changed. The advent of Joseon ushered in a new religion: neo-Confucianism, a revival of the doctrines of Confucius that had taken root in China under the Song dynasty (960–1279). ‘Their aesthetic was quite different,’ notes Dr Kim. ‘They pursued austerity, simplicity and liked natural things, so they used completely different types of ceramics and painting also assumed a different role.’

Western views of Joseon were long shaped by American writer William Elliot Griffis’s description of it as a ‘hermit kingdom’. Instead, counters Dr Kim, this was a transforming country, at once engaged in cultural exchange and intellectual introspection. After the fall of China’s Ming dynasty in 1644 and the rise to power of the ‘barbarian’ Qing, some Joseon scholars saw Korea as the last bastion of civilisation based on neo-Confucian principles.

In the second half of the 17th century, the country’s social hierarchy also began loosening, with the jungin, the equivalent of the middle class, embracing a culture that was previously the preserve of the elite. Interest in practical studies rose and the economy picked up, with travel becoming increasingly popular. From an artistic perspective, all this opened the door, in the 18th century, for ‘true-view’ landscapes. Artists moved away from idealised Chinese scenery in favour of realistic depictions of Korean surroundings — often underpinned by European notions of perspective.

A pioneer of the genre was Jeong Seon, who in 1751, aged 75, painted Clearing After Rain on Mount Inwang. ‘That’s the mountain in Seoul and that’s where that painter lived for his entire life; so the place was quite familiar to him. It looks very realistic, but at the same time, it’s emotional and very atmospheric.’

Today, video may have replaced true landscapes and celadon vessels, but, says Dr Kim, contemporary Korean art is still very much a product of its past, with which it shares many similarities. ‘Today’s artists are open to new ideas, but they do not just copy or mimic them; they incorporate them into their past and their heritage and create something new.’ This has been spearheaded by luminaries such as Nam June Paik (1932–2006), the first contemporary Korean artist to gain international acclaim, and Kimsooja (b. 1957), who in the past few years has had exhibitions at the Barbican in London and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield, West Yorkshire.

That is why, Dr Kim believes, contemporary Korean culture is taking the world by storm: ‘Because in it there is familiarity and unfamiliarity at the same time.’

‘Korea’ is at the British Museum, London, from October 1–January 31, 2027

This feature originally appeared in the September 23, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

We might be mere mortals, but mischief is eternal. And so it is that when I ask Ralph Steadman, aged 90, how he’s keeping busy these days, he laments, without missing a beat, that he ‘can only run five acres a day’ and his face spreads into a devilish smile.

Ralph has made a life out of mischief. A career in cartoons began with training in technical drawing with the Royal Air Force, and a correspondence course at the Percy Bradshaw Press Art School. His first cartoon was published in the Manchester Evening Chronicle in 1956, followed by commissions for Private Eye and Punch.

The inflection point, however, occurred in Louisville in 1970. It was Ralph’s first visit to the USA, and he was to make drawings for a journalist by the name of Hunter S. Thompson. ‘Back at the motel we talked for a while about America, the South, England, just relaxing a bit before dinner,’ Thompson wrote of their first encounter. ‘There was no way either of us could have known, at the time, that it would be the last normal conversation we would have. From that point on, the weekend became a vicious, drunken nightmare. We both went completely to pieces.'

That vicious, drunken nightmare became history in the form of an article, titled The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, which was the birth of ‘Gonzo’ journalism, for which Ralph is so fondly remembered. Well maybe not fondly by those he drew. ‘I warned him several times about letting the subjects see his foul renderings, but for some perverse reason he kept doing it,’ Thompson wrote. ‘Consequently, he was regarded with fear and loathing by nearly everyone who’d seen or even heard about his work.’

‘Foul renderings’ they may be, but Ralph is among the most celebrated illustrators that this island has ever produced. They are also the subject of a new selling exhibition curated by Tin Man Art and Ralph’s daughter Sadie Williams at 31, St George Street, London, which opens tomorrow. It will feature 27 drawings spanning a 70-year career and is the first exhibition of this type in 30 years.

When I ask Ralph what he’d like people to take away from his drawings, his answer is simple: ‘That I noticed something, and recorded it in a certain way.’ He emphasises that the job of a cartoonist is to hold people to account for their actions. ‘It’s a pictorial way of showing up naughty people, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘It’s nice to be a critic. Although I could be a bit self-righteous. Once I was being a bit sour about people you know.’

‘Well only if they deserved it,’ Sadie adds. ‘I don’t think you’ve ever criticised or lambasted anybody who wasn’t behaving in a disreputable way. I don’t think you ever drew Mother Teresa. She was a bit too good for you.’

Choosing 27 images from a collection of thousands to explain an entire career was no easy feat. ‘We went through various drawers and pulled out ones that we thought had a sort of power,’ Sadie says. ‘We also wanted to span the collection a bit. It has some very early works, the pre-Gonzo stuff. And then post 1970, and that’s when you can see his work becomes bigger and a bit less constrained, and the splats come in, the lack of fear of making a mess.’

Making a mess became a signature style of Ralph’s work; ugly splats and ghoulish caricatures of ugly places and ghoulish people. His work would appear in The Times (until then editor William Rees-Mogg had him sacked), the New Statesman, Rolling Stone, Radio Times, The New York Times, The Guardian and The Observer. As well as his withering portraits of politicians, police and whatever else, he illustrated everything from album artwork to Animal Farm, and everything in between. On Sundays in the summer, when I play for a cricket team called Not The MCC, his work takes pride of place as the club badge.

But perhaps his best known drawings draw on that aforementioned ‘fear and loathing’ that his pen could produce. In 1971, Thompson’s iconic novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was brought to life by Ralph, and the pair collaborated further with Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 and The Curse of Lono. ‘I went with [Ralph] and mum to Hawaii when dad and Hunter were asked to cover the marathon for Running magazine,’ Sadie remembers. ‘I was about seven or eight, and we had six weeks out there with Hunter, and, we witnessed his, should we just say, eccentricities. He nearly trod on my head at one point, trying to sneak the TV out of the lounge.’

‘I recently went to Gonzo Fest and I did a talk, and I used some excerpts from my mother’s diaries, and usually the excerpts end in Hunter pulling some sort of dynamite out of a bag and throwing it willy-nilly in some direction.’ ‘I’m actually quite impressed he didn’t kill you, to be honest,’ Ralph interjects.

When I ask if adventures with Thompson ever went too far, the answer is an unequivocal no. ‘When we were doing whatever we were doing, I think it was important that we did it to the best of our abilities, being as dangerous as possible. The best way to be.’

For a man who has seen and experienced so much, it felt foolish to ask if there’s anything left for him to be getting on with. ‘Climb Everest,’ was the instant response. ‘I’m off to Everest next week.’ I hope he’s joking. Not because a 90-year-old man shouldn’t be on top of the world. But because if Ralph is on top of the world, then he can see all of us, and God knows what he would draw.

'Ralph Steadman: Out of Line (Original Works 1961–2016)' runs from October 2–11 at Tin Man Art, 31, St George Street, London.

We're crowding around the glass cabinet as if it contained the Mona Lisa. Its display is portraiture of sorts: a distinguished gentleman leans forward, having just cast his line. This is Heissner, one of the first German-made garden gnomes, which Sir Charles Isham brought back for his rockery at Lamport Hall, Northamptonshire, in the mid 19th century, precipitating a very British passion for gnomery.

A selection of these elderly red-hatted fishermen — including an alarmingly big-eared, toothy-grinned Tony Blair specimen — sits next to models of Bill and Ben, a 1987 Titchpot created in the likeness of Alan Titchmarsh and a signed Ground Force photograph of Charlie Dimmock from 2000.

London’s Garden Museum is the Louvre for lovers of horticulture. Its quirky collection of objects — from the first Flymo to vintage slug pellets — traces the history of British gardening. As are so many of our museums, its existence is down to the generosity of a few people; in this case, Rosemary and John Nicholson, who took on the site on Lambeth Palace Road, SE1, in 1976 to save it from demolition. Many people have bequeathed items in the intervening years (the Titchpot was given by its muse).

Collectors often make great curators, which is why many of the museums featured below began life as private projects. Collections need space to thrive — I write this as a recovering collector, whether rocks, stamps, cigarette cards, feathers or whimsies — so not all survive: consider Keith and Sue Blayze’s 8,500 teapots, once shown at the couple’s Kent café Teapot Island, now under new management, or Barry Kirk’s recently defunct baked-bean museum, housed in his Port Talbot council flat for many years.

Thankfully, many eccentric assemblages, from sewing machines to dog collars, remain open to public view. Here are some of Britain’s strangest — don’t forget, as you exit through the gift shop, to buy a fridge magnet for your collection.

Pass the scalpel: The Old Operating Theatre Museum, London

Tomophobics may want to skip a visit to St Thomas’s Hospital’s original Southwark site, where the church attic has been preserved as an historic surgery space. The raked seating reflects contemporary practice for carrying out procedures — before anaesthesia — in view of medical students. The garret was rediscovered in 1952 after being boarded up when the hospital relocated to Lambeth, unveiling an extraordinary time capsule.

Further grisly gaiety can be found over at the Royal College of Surgeons of England’s Hunterian Museum, which features more than 70,000 objects covering the art and science of surgery from the 17th century to the present day.

Round and round in circles: Amersham Fair Organ Museum, Buckinghamshire

The traditional tinkling merry-go-round sound — best associated with Mary Poppins’s pastel ponies that leap off their carousel to career through bucolic countryside and onto the racecourse — was historically created by mechanical organs in the centre of the ride (in the Disney film, the guard appears from a hatch surrounded by metal pipes).

The late Albert Ree’s collection of these fairground organs, which includes a rare 60-key Gavioli instrument thought to date from 1887 and a Black Forest Waldkirch that was used in a galloping horse roundabout by Lovatt’s of Scotland during the 1920s, is open for six dates from November to April.

Water, water everywhere: London Canal Museum, King’s Cross

Housed in a former 19th-century icehouse built by ice-cream entrepreneur Carlo Gatti, the London Canal Museum takes the visitor along the capital’s historic waterways during industrialisation. Hands-on exhibits include the stern of trailer boat Coronis, constructed in 1935 for the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company.

Less hands-on are the two ice wells secreted underneath the building — the only examples of their kind open to the public in the UK. The museum is situated just off Regent’s Canal, allowing visitors to have an immersive experience and arrive via water: it offers mooring space for two breasted-up narrowboats or one wide-beamed boat.

Follow the lead: The Dog Collar Museum, Leeds Castle, Kent

Gertrude and John Hunt’s unusual interest in rare dog collars morphed into a collection comprising more than 60 pieces, from 16th-century spiked German ironwork and Italian brass identity tags through to 19th-century filigree silver.

In 1977, Mrs Hunt donated the couple’s canine accessories to Leeds Castle in Kent, where they have been bolstered by 20th-century additions, and the 130-strong group is said to be the largest of its kind. The earliest collar in this diminutive display is a 15th-century heavy-duty Spanish mastiff’s collar, worn for protection against wolves and bears — a far cry from the buttery leather and Harris Tweed specimens favoured by modern-day pooches.

Happy hour: Museum of Timekeeping, Upton Hall, Nottinghamshire

Plenty of timepiece collections focus on a specific type — such as the 400 Black Forest cuckoo clocks curated by brothers Roman and Maz Piekarski at the former Cuckooland Museum in Knutsford, now housed at the Irish Museum of Time — but the Museum of Time-keeping considers the concept of measurement.

Exhibitions feature sundials and sand glasses through to naval technology and watches, including the one that belonged to Capt Robert Scott, the British explorer who led two expeditions to the Antarctic regions. The British Horological Institute shares the space at Upton Hall.

Meal deal: The Food Museum, Stowmarket, Suffolk

Although many of us might prefer to forget them, the former Museum of East Anglian Life sprinkles hundreds and thousands on school dinners with a new exhibition dedicated to spotted dick, semolina and other traditional puddings, displayed next to a broader history of food production across its 84-acre site.

Intrepid visitors are invited to sample a two-course school dinner in the on-site café. No one leaves the table until the plates are cleared — will the milk monitor please report for duty.

Rein supreme: The Museum of the Horse, Tuxford, Nottinghamshire

Artist Sally Mitchell and her son rescued a former Georgian coaching inn and posting house from vandals in 2014 and converted the Grade II-listed building into Britain’s only public display of utilitarian equestrian items. Historic spurs, stirrups and saddles are curated across the first floor; the entrance is home to a gallery with a focus on animals and the countryside.

Whereas the National Horseracing Museum in Newmarket, Suffolk, showcases jockeys and jumps, this collection — built over many years by Mitchell — has a domestic focus, including antique stable rarities and some rather gruesome veterinary equipment.

Ursa Major: The Teddy Bear Museum, Dorchester, Dorset

Like a British Library for plushy toys, Britain’s oldest teddy-bear museum gathers every bear that ever there was, spanning makers from Steiff to Merrythought. In addition to antique collectables, the cuddly cabinet displays include celebearties Winnie-the-Pooh, Rupert, Paddington and Sooty — with original Harry Corbett musical automata.

In a strangely meta twist, the museum is set in the home of one Edward Bear, a human-sized teddy, who collects his miniature familiars.

It’s a stitch up: The Sewing Machine Museum, London

From a working replica of Elias Howe’s first mechanical lockstitch to the 1865 Pollack & Schmidt model that was given to Queen Victoria’s daughter to mark her wedding, the Sewing Machine Museum is a stitch in time.

About 600 pieces — amassed by founder Ray Rushton, the former owner of the Wimbledon Sewing Machine Company in Tooting Bec — are open for public viewing on the first Saturday of the month, in a space featuring frontage styled to re-create the family’s original 1946 shop. Among the vintage curiosities on display are the green 1962 Alfa Stitchline loaned to the musician Boy George (autographed on return) and a well-used Singer that was owned by Charlie Chaplin’s mother.

The sun will come out tomorrow: Foundling Museum, London

Playing cards, jewellery and coins fill a large display in the introductory room of the Foundling Museum. They are some of the 18,000 tokens that accompanied babies on arrival at the hospital during the 18th century, identifiers should a relative later claim a child.

Such poignancy runs through exhibits dedicated to those who have experienced life in care, at once a strange and powerful topic for a museum. The Foundling Hospital’s connections with William Hogarth — whose painting of founder Thomas Coram is in the permanent collection — and George Frideric Handel, whose annual performances of his Messiah raised essential funds for the charity, are world-class ancillary pieces.

At the pointy end: Derwent Pencil Museum, Keswick, Cumbria

A stone’s skim from Derwent Water is the graphite mine that served the pencil industry for centuries, a heritage celebrated by a small, but perfectly sketched collection nestled in the crook of Skiddaw. The Pencil Museum is run by Derwent Pencils, which has been making writing instruments in Cumbria since 1832.

Currently situated on the banks of the River Greta, the collection, which reopened in 2017 after widespread storm damage, includes one of the world’s largest colour pencils, measuring 26ft, and one of two special pencils made for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee — the other resides in Buckingham Palace. A new era beckons for the museum — it will close at its present home on November 1 before reopening in larger premises at nearby Rawnsley Hall in March 2027.

This article first appeared in the September 16 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Earlier this month, the Government confirmed that: ‘Mayors and local leaders will be handed the power to introduce an Overnight Visitor Levy — a fee on overnight stays — to help maximise the benefits of tens of millions of people visiting England every year.’

According to the official announcement, it will be left to the local authorities concerned to decide the level at which they will set the levy and, indeed, whether they will charge one at all. Rather than being applied at a flat rate, it will be calculated as a percentage of the cost of an overnight stay. This, it is claimed, will have the effect of ‘shielding families from disproportionate costs for cheaper holidays’.

Food will not be included in the assessed cost and Labour local leaders collectively, including the Mayor of London, have announced a cap of 5% on what they will charge. It will be the responsibility of those providing accommodation both to calculate the cost of the levy and to apply it. Local leaders will be free to spend the money raised as they see fit, with their plans set out by March 2028. The Government expects to legislate for these changes during the current Parliamentary session.

Opponents of the proposals have immediately branded the scheme a ‘tourist tax’ and have argued that it will have a chilling effect on tourism, discouraging overnight stays and putting further financial pressure on the hospitality sector. At some level, it’s hard to disagree with this analysis. In absolute terms, the levy adds to the cost of a holiday and will increase the administrative burden faced by all accommodation providers. No doubt, it will be introduced with sufficient exemptions, local variety and complications to make it confusing.

Rather like the recent increases in National Insurance and minimum wage that have already squeezed the margins of so many businesses, therefore, it feels as if it is a gift by the Government of somebody else’s money and time. All that said, given the universality of tourist taxes, it’s hard to argue that the levy is likely to put many people off travelling.

Not only are such taxes applied successfully around the world, but a levy was introduced in Edinburgh this July and is planned at Cardiff from April 2027. In Athena’s view, therefore, although the tax is unwelcome and burdensome, it is unlikely to change much in terms of the numbers of tourists visiting major attractions. What most concerns her is what we can expect in return.

If none of the money is ring-fenced for investment in heritage or culture, how does it really serve those paying it? Will the local leaders really use the money to support the things and places used by tourists or will the levy merely turn into an additional source of income that will fill an awkward financial gap in budgets? That would be a tourist tax, pure and simple.

When is a pipe not a pipe? No, this is not a new take on the ‘When is a door not a door?’ joke (when it’s ajar —ha! — for those who haven’t heard it before). This is the question posed by a London gallery's new exhibition dedicated to the Belgian artist René Magritte (1898-1967).

‘Great paintings by Magritte grab you immediately,’ says Jasper Sharp, co-curator of This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte at the Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill gallery. ‘They have that fast burn, but they also have something that sits beneath that, which rattles around your head. You never forget some of his paintings. He has a tortoise and hare effect with his work — which I think is really fascinating — like all great art does.’

This duality is explored in full throughout the exhibition, which was organised in collaboration with the Fondation Magritte. It features paintings, drawings and sculptures both by Magritte and other artists, which include Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha and Yoko Ono. Some were made during Magritte’s lifetime, while others were created specifically for the exhibition.

Free to visit, This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte will run until December 12, 2026. The title comes from the well-known Magritte work La Trahison des images. Ceci continue de ne pas être une pipe (The Treachery of Images. This is still not a pipe, 1952). The ink on paper piece revisits Magritte’s earlier, very similar, 1929 work La Trahison des images. Ceci n'est pas une pipe (The Treachery of Images: This is not a pipe).

‘Suddenly you start thinking: “Which one is the pipe here? Is it the word, is it the image?" He’s brilliant, he’s a really great artist,' says Professor Patricia Allmer, a leading expert on Magritte at the University of Edinburgh, of the exhibition’s titular work. She fell in love with the artist’s work as a child after first seeing Le faux miroir (The False Mirror, 1929) and believes that Magritte’s genius lies in exploring the very nature of everyday objects in such a way that leaves the viewer asking questions.

‘It’s very interesting that he still speaks across different generations of artists and people, and I think one of the reasons is that his artworks managed to be, at the same time, simple enough for a child to understand but complex enough for a philosopher to puzzle over,’ Prof Allmer says. ‘There’s also a humour and a certain evocation of the sublime which keeps Magritte endlessly interesting.’

Born in 1898 in Lessines, Belgium, you might know Magritte best for his striking depictions of apples, clouds, men in bowler hats and, of course, pipes (if they are, indeed, really pipes after all), but the Gagosian’s exhibition intends to reveal more about the artist.

A large two-legged lamppost glowing red, that puts me in mind of Louise Bourgeois’s spiders, stands sentry at the door. The sculpture, Streetlamp for Drunk (2018) by Alex Da Corte, is the first of many examples of how Magritte’s uncanny style has lived on. When combined with Georges Thiry’s photograph Enterrement de René Magritte (The Funeral of Magritte, 1967) it plays a clever Magritte-esque mind game. We are at once having his death reinforced, while being reminded of all the ways his legacy is palpably alive.

The first room in the gallery has walls hung with curtains of scarlet and navy, making for a dramatic setting where a brilliant collection of oddities celebrating the artist’s influence take centre stage. Ed Ruscha’s Bird Drinks Creek Dry, Fish Escapes (1965) has all the whimsy and sardonic wit of Magritte’s signature style and Michael Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree, a glass of water claiming stubbornly to be the former, is a direct homage.

I almost mistake George Condo’s The Apple Picker (2009), a painting which shows a man with an apple for a head, for a work by the artist too, while Allison Katz’s Brussels sprout (and Philip) No.4 and Brussels sprout (and Philip) No.7 (both 2025) captures the artist’s sense of humour almost exactly. Koons’s Snorkel Vest (1985) cast in bronze plays upon Magritte’s theme of something familiar having elements of the unfamiliar and Ono’s Sky TV (1966) shows his a-typical clouds in a whole new light.

The stars however are, of course, the artist's own work. In classic pieces Le Lieu commun (The Commonplace, 1964), Le Bouquet tout fait (The Readymade Bouquet, 1956) and Les Tambours de a mort (The Drums of Death, c.1965), Magritte's iconic man in bowler hat shines in his full glory. Le Chef d’orchestre (The Leader of the Band, 1955) which shows a squirrel isolated in a woodland scene and Le Voyageur (The Traveller, 1937) are particular favourites of mine, although each of Magritte's pieces is striking in its own way.

His distinctive style is best summarised by co-curator Sharp. ‘He had an incredibly deadpan way of painting. Many of his fellow surrealists said he must have just been so bored when painting… his surfaces are almost completely flat. He was quite methodical, almost painted like a surgeon.’ Magritte was formerly a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory, and a film poster and advertisement designer, which may have given rise to this meticulous style. Elements of collage too, Sharp points out, run throughout Magritte's work. ‘I think that playfulness and the deadpan style is something which a lot of painting today is being made like… That’s an aspect of his work which feels incredibly contemporary.

Paolo Vedovi, the co-founder of a gallery in Brussels specialising in works by Magritte, and a board member of Fondation Magritte, agrees. ‘It’s so relevant today in the world of images and Instagram and all that. All of Magritte’s images are very strong.'

‘Also, he is so relevant because he has been such a big influence on the contemporary, and his work is still very contemporary itself.’ Vedovi thinks Magritte’s magic lies in how ‘he shows you things that you think you know, but he shows it differently'.

Magritte put it best, although perhaps most elusively, himself: ‘My painting is visible images which conceal nothing… they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question: “What does that mean?” It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.’

‘This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte’ runs until December 12, 2026, at Gagosian’s gallery, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London.

Of course David Shrigley lives in Brighton. Where else would you find a man who painted a bird with the words ‘I am flying to London to shit on the government’, and who created an uncannily proportioned thumbs up, which reads ‘I approve of your stupid ideas’?

Case in point: when I ask David about the last thing he bought for himself, he replies: ‘Vegan Doc Martens.’ So Brighton. He has lunch together with his small and very young team of staff most days, which I am invited to join when I visit. Also very Brighton.

David’s distinctive line drawings and paintings, often featuring sarcastic or absurd one liners, can now be found on everything from a keyring to the finest hotels, museums or restaurants. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2013 and appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2020. Quite the journey from Macclesfield, where he was born in 1968.

He looks much younger than his 58 years and has a boyish quality when I meet him at his Brighton studio (a sign reading ‘Nap in progress’ is stuck to the outside of his door). ‘I’ve had quite a lifestyle change in recent years where I don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t do drugs and don’t eat bread,’ he says.

And that’s not the only change. He has a book coming out, an anthology of writing of ‘flash fiction’ that’s been compiled over the course of 14 years. ‘I started writing on long-haul flights,’ David says. ‘I find it very hard to write and I don’t consider myself to be a literary person — I’m the person who makes the pictures — but increasingly, I guess I have realised that text is very important to my work.’

On average, David would write continuously for about 10 hours, until his laptop battery ran out. He has a sister who lives in New Zealand, so this method of working from aeroplanes ‘facilitated quite a lot of writing’. He also has a show coming up at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London next year that will be more in his comfort zone, where he will respond to some works of the Old Masters.

Of the book, David says: ‘It feels very different from everything else I’ve done. I don’t know how confident I am about it, but it’s exciting. When you feel you’re at the beginning of something, that is always the best way to feel.’

Your aesthetic hero

Off the top of my head it would be Philip Guston, the American painter who became very famous in the 1970s for painting cartoonish pictures of domestic scenes. There was a massive retrospective of his at The Tate two years or so ago. He has become incredibly influential for contemporary painters. Just very strange, figurative, slushy, squishy paintings. I love that aesthetic.

Your favourite painting

It has to be a Philip Guston one. One of those paintings of his that shows a figure in bed smoking, that would have to be it. He also made a lot of really beautiful charcoal drawings over the years.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I bought some vegan Doc Martens. I had a revelation when we got a dog 14 years ago. When she was a puppy we had a house in the country in Devon and out of the window there was a field of sheep and there was one little black lamb. Without my glasses on it could have been her, and I thought: ‘Why is one of those creatures my dearest companion and one of those creatures my dinner?’ I stopped eating meat at that moment, but I still sometimes eat fish.

A possession you would never sell

Probably one of my guitars. Probably all of my guitars, actually. I mean, the first guitar — those things are important, you know — was bought at a moment when music was really important to me and it’s something which I learned to do that I am still quite good at. It has no value but it opened a door for me at that time and it’s representative of a life experience, so for that reason it would be something I’d never touch.

A book you’ve found inspiring

I read a lot and I think that your literary tastes change a lot when you get older, because you always discover new writers. In any given year you discover a couple of writers that you’ve never read before. For example, a writer I started reading quite recently is Denis Johnson. He died in 2017. His first book is called Angels and it's about substance abuse problems, but it’s really beautiful. He himself suffered from addiction, and his prose is just the most beautiful you could read. His most famous work is a novel called Tree of Smoke, which is set in Vietnam. It’s amazing.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

There was an exhibition in 2009 called ‘Sensational Fix’, about the band Sonic Youth, one of my favourite bands. They had a history of collaborating with contemporary artists when it came to their album art. This exhibition pulled together all those collaborations that they did. It was really great, and really unexpected because it was part museum exhibit and also documented a period of time.

The music you work to

I do listen to music, but I don’t tend to put it on when I’m painting. Something I have been listening to a lot recently is Tom Ravenscroft on Rinse FM. It’s a really great mix of music that isn’t from Western Europe or North America, and very odd stuff, as well as lots of dance music. He is very enthusiastic about what he plays, which I really love.

The last podcast you listened to

The Rest is History.

Who would play you in a film of your life

Benedict Cumberbatch. I’m sort of a bit socially awkward, and I think he could do that quite well.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

A solar-panel powered rice cooker.

The items you collect

I make most of my guitars, so that's not really a collection. Whenever I go out for a fancy dinner I take the name card with my name on it. I’ve probably got hundreds of them now. They’re in an envelope in my filing cabinet, filed under my name. The thing is, also, I’m a little bit obsessive compulsive, so I worry that if I don’t take it, something bad will happen.

A hotel you could go back and back to

The Premier Inn by Dalston Junction, because it’s right by Cafe OTO, and I cannot be arsed to get the late train back if I’ve been to a show there.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Seagulls. They make such a racket.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

I have some great stories of fine dining, Michelin-starred restaurants, however I think when you have a lot of really fancy food you crave things that are much more simple. I think the best experience I have had is making sushi on a boat after having caught the fish myself. However, one of the nicest things I’ve done recently is in Devon, where our second house is. There were sprats washing up on the beach and you can just go along and pick them up and it's the most sustainable form of fishing you can do — either you eat them, or the seagulls do.

The best present you’ve ever received

My grandad used to be a joiner and when he moved out of his house he gave me all of his tools, which I’ve still got. One is a massive screwdriver. It’s the most useful thing ever. It’s way better than an actual electric screwdriver because you can get so much more torque on it.

‘Creative Writing’ by David Shrigley is out today, in all good bookshops.

The most surprising genre of painting to be attracting sustained interest from England’s contemporary artists today is still life. From the soft-focus mimosa of Paul Winstanley (b. 1954) to the strange objects that pepper the abstracted interiors of 2025 John Moores Painting Prize winner Ally Fallon (b. 1998), the genre is making a comeback.

Fallon lives and works in Manchester. He studied at the city’s School of Art and Apollo Painting School programme. One of Apollo’s co-founders is Louise Giovanelli (b. 1993). Her own paintings of shimmering satin shirts and soft drapes reflect her interest in depicting how light falls on surfaces and how this can be reproduced in painting.

Further west is the Hereford studio of Clare Woods (b. 1972), where still lifes form an increasing proportion of her work. She paints fast, in oil on aluminium, depicting everything from floral displays and fronds of blossom — a selection of which will be on display at a forthcoming exhibition, ‘Clare Woods: Garden Without Seasons’ at Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London (until November 8) — to glittering chandeliers and sherry trifles. Her rich colours wriggle and writhe across the surface, offering a painterly response to nature morte, but also — simultaneously — a transformation of the subject into a melange of abstract brushstrokes.

Perhaps the rise in popularity of still life is because it allows artists to question the relationship between the reproduced image and the real thing. In an uncanny parallel of our world of deep fakes and falsified truths, these simulacra of the things that surround us teeter on the edge of entropy. How fitting.

This is the final part of our five-part series on the new school of English painting. They will be published every Thursday afternoon throughout September.

Click here to read part one on the new abstract painters, part two on the new figurative painters, part three on historical painters and part four on landscape painters.

Last week, Athena was fortunate to attend one of the private views of the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum. She emerged exhilarated by the experience.

As she has observed before, the display of the celebrated embroidery has caught the public imagination and this occasion reflected that fact. For one thing, it was exceptionally well attended. No less remarkable was the fact that, on arrival, lots of the guests walked straight past the drinks and refreshments, determined to see the object itself. Athena was one of them.

It took her almost exactly 40 minutes to walk the full length of the Tapestry. Her expectation had been that it would be difficult to see when laid out flat, but in fact the arrangement works well. The object itself is displayed in a single, long case that allows the visitor a really close view. Added to which, although the lighting levels are low, it is not difficult to examine and — crucially — onlookers don’t cast shadows across it. Despite continuous polite requests from the museum staff to keep moving along, the visit didn’t feel hurried and there was time to examine details.

Projected onto the wall behind the case as a backdrop to the Tapestry is a series of interpretative animations. Athena noticed them as she waited her turn to see the Tapestry, but, at the end, she realised that she had paid absolutely no attention to them at all and can’t speak for their quality or interest. The same goes for the short display on the architectural legacy of the Normans that leads from the exhibition proper to the shop.

Setting aside the undoubted pleasure of seeing the Tapestry and the manner of its presentation, the experience did raise one concern about what lies ahead. Athena was warned to arrive early for the event and, consequently, the queue for the exhibition was relatively short when she joined it. It nevertheless took a full hour and 20 minutes of queuing to get to the start of the tapestry.

There was the offer to join a ‘fast lane’, but very few people took it and Athena suspects that the system will be abused as a means of jumping the queue. In short, there are clearly going to be real practical difficulties in getting large numbers of people through the exhibition. After all, the Tapestry presents a narrative that can only be read in one order — from the beginning to the end. Athena doesn’t envy the staff on the ground the challenge of managing the crowds in the months to come.

Finally, leaving the exhibition behind and passing through some of the British Museum’s familiar galleries, Athena was struck by how tired they looked. It was a sobering reminder of the massive challenges of repair and renovation that still face this great institution. In relation to those tasks, this memorable and magnificent display of the Bayeux Tapestry — a triumph for all involved — is a mere side show.

This feature originally appeared in the September 16, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

As the glitterati readies itself for Frieze London in October, a more discerning chorus of collectors will gather from 24–27 September at the Saatchi Gallery. The occasion? The 36th edition of the British Art Fair, which this year welcomes 72 dealers in total — 65 of whom are specialists in modern and contemporary art.

Works by two of the most covetable painters on the market — Bridget Riley and the late David Hockney — are on display and available to purchase. ‘His work feels all the more poignant now that he's gone,’ the fair's founder, Gay Hutson, tells me of the Bradford-born painter. Having hosted the fair's inaugural edition in 1988, she has presided over it for nearly 40 years. Somehow, it has never felt more relevant. As fatigue and oversaturation continue to befall the high-profile Frieze (held from 14–18 October), true connoisseurs are flocking to more discreet outlets such as hers in the hope of forging more personal relationships with dealers.

What should one look out for at this year's fair in particular? Sculpture, Hutson says, ‘is clearly having a moment’. Among the works available to purchase are several by Henry Moore (with Osborne Samuel) and Lynn Chadwick (with Pangolin London). ‘These shifts in the market seem to happen almost by osmosis,’ says Hutson, nodding to this year’s installation of Chadwick’s work at Houghton Hall and Moore’s at Kew Gardens. ‘When I started out, all anyone wanted to collect was Victorian watercolours. Art creates its own momentum.’

Besides these notable names are also those of living artists, whose works will be exhibited on the Saatchi Gallery’s second floor. ‘The British Art Fair has always been about having more established artists in dialogue with more nascent and emerging voices,’ Hutson notes. With prices ranging from £1,000 to the high-six figures, the show is open ‘to connoisseurs of all kinds’. Hutson stresses the word ‘connoisseurs’: ‘This show has always been for the insider,’ she concludes. Tickets are now on sale for general admission (£23), concessions (£20) and the collectors' preview (£70).

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Paintings wear their years as people do. Colours fade, surfaces craze with cracks and spot with age. Although it is natural to think of them as permanent, in truth they are constantly evolving, nursed along the way by teams of highly trained and dedicated conservators. ‘The longer I’ve worked in my profession, the more I have come to see that we are walking beside these great paintings through time,’ says Rebecca Hellen, head conservator of easel painting for the National Trust. ‘They are changing just as we are.’

How to deal with those marks of passing time is a question with which every picture restorer wrestles. ‘There are contrasting traditions in conservation in southern and northern Europe,’ explains Alisa Vincentelli, a freelance conservator who has worked at Tate Modern, The Bowes Museum and Auckland Castle, as well as for Christie’s. ‘My first experience as a picture restorer came as a volunteer in the conservation room at the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens. In northern Europe, we tend to try to make “invisible” repairs, whereas in Italy and Greece, damage is often integrated into the painting — it becomes a part of its story.’

Pinpointing exactly which moment in its life to which a picture should be taken back is a key part of the restorer’s role. ‘Leaving aside the repair of damage, for most private clients the judgement is aesthetic,’ says Marine Andrieux, who trained as conservator at the Sorbonne and, after spells at the V&A Museum and Tate, is now a painting restorer with the long-established family firm of Everett Fine Art in Somerset. ‘Paintings that have been in families for generations are often simply so dirty [people] can’t see them anymore. At the moment, I’m working on a Cedric Morris still life that’s been hanging in the owner’s sitting room more or less since it was completed. Morris used very thick impasto, which forms a surface that dust and dirt really cling to, so it requires very extensive and careful cleaning’.

Dust and dirt deposits are removed using a soft, wide goat-hair brush, together with specially adapted vacuum-cleaner nozzles, with specialist solvents that can remove yellowed varnish without damaging the paintwork beneath. In the past, treatment was not always so gentle. Before the 1950s, the everyday job of caring for pictures was generally entrusted to household cleaners and restoration was carried out by local artists.

‘They came in and removed layers of oxidised varnish, often using caustic substances such as lye, vinegar and even urine. It not only took off the varnish, but often some of the surface paint, too. Then, they’d retouch it with oil paints as they saw fit,’ Hellen explains. Today, Andrieux notes, restorers are trained to be more cautious and minimal. ‘We want to repair the damage, not add to it.’ The appalling vision of the notorious 2018 ‘Monkey Christ’ restoration of Ecce Homo in the Sanctuary of Mercy church in Borja, Spain, haunts the nightmares of conservators the world over.

‘We base restoration on historic facts and scientific analysis,’ Hellen explains. Her work on Thomas Moran’s Nearing Camp, Evening on the Upper Colorado River, 1882, for example, involved ‘X-rays, a chemical analysis of the paint and a cross section of the canvas that revealed red pigment bubbling up through the greens and browns like a miniature volcano.’ Alongside that came a two-week field trip to Washington DC to consult with American conservators who had worked on Moran’s epic landscapes. ‘The decisions you make as a conservator in caring for a painting are based on the time you meet the artwork in its life and the time that you are in your own life,’ Hellen says. ‘As much as we try to understand the painting, the judgements we make will always be subjective.’

For that reason, Vincentelli believes, when it comes to the modern art restorer: ‘The most important thing is that we never do any work on a painting that is not reversible — because, however much we try to avoid it, there will always be some input from the era we are working in, whether that’s in terms of the materials or the aesthetics.’

Picture conservation is a profession that straddles the past and the present and even (almost) the future, requiring as it does both a detailed knowledge of materials that have been in use for centuries and an understanding of the latest scientific developments, such as the use of nanomaterials and lasers. It is work that combines the theoretical with the practical, art with analysis. Today, a large conservation department may use infrared reflectography to see through the top layers of the paint and pick out changes made by the artist. For example, in the spring of 2026, National Trust conservators discovered a ‘horse-drawn carriage, a lady in a bonnet, a gentleman and carriage dog’ hidden beneath the surface of a painting, Stourhead in its Infancy, by this very method.

X-ray fluorescence examinations, meanwhile, map the chemical compositions of pigment and can reveal hidden under-drawings. Pest infestations — common in old paintings — can be killed off in nitrogen chambers without damaging the canvas.

However, not every conservator works in laboratory conditions. Living in rural Northumberland with three small children to raise, Vincentelli created a studio in her home and worked on private commissions. ‘I’m pretty sure we were the only family in the village with a Salvator Rosa painting sitting on an easel in the spare bedroom,’ she says.

The joys and challenges of the conservator’s job come from both expected and unexpected quarters. The National Trust collection of about 13,500 paintings contains many that have had ‘interesting’ lives. ‘Often they were commissioned to display in London townhouses, before being transferred, as their owners’ fortunes increased, to country houses,’ Hellen reveals. ‘There, they would be moved around, reframed to fit in with the décor or changing fashion; often, they were made smaller, too, to fit into a new space.’

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the latter is to be found at Petworth House in West Sussex, long a centre of artistic patronage. ‘The celebrated Petworth Beauties, seven full-length portraits of Society ladies by Michael Dahl from the late 17th century were almost literally cut down to size by the 3rd Earl of Egremont in the 1820s,’ Hellen explains. ‘The Earl had the portraits removed from their frames and their legs were folded up behind their backs before reframing. The Beauties were in this uncomfortable position for nearly two centuries. We were given the task of bringing their legs back down again.’

Andrieux took pleasure in restoring a Turner painting of Caernarvon Castle in Wales (‘A tiny canvas that, amazingly, had one of his palettes stuck on the back of it’), but also found herself drawn in by the task of reviving an old metal sign from a West Country inn. ‘It was a vivid-green coat of arms and had swung back and forth outside the pub in the wind and rain for more than a century. Working on that, and other pieces that form part of people’s lives, is fascinating. The clients are so attached to these pieces that the reaction when we return them in their revived state is often quite emotional.’

One of Hellen’s career highlights also involved Turner. ‘Mercury Sent to Admonish Aeneas was one of four paintings completed in 1850,’ she explains. ‘It was never sold and came to the National Gallery as part of the Turner Bequest. After that, it suffered some rather rough treatment. It [was] sent around the world on at least half a dozen occasions and for some years hung in the British Embassy in Athens. Turner used red and blue spermaceti wax in his paintings. It melts at 39˚C, so having it on the wall of an un-air-conditioned building in Greece in summer is clearly not what a conservator would recommend.’

This was not the only way the painting suffered: ‘At some point, it had been re-lined and the restorers had attached the failing canvas to a new canvas by pressing down on the surface with heavy, hot irons.’ Working next to Turner scholar Ian Warrell, Hellen set about tackling the picture’s restoration. ‘It gave me more sleepless nights than anything I have worked on,’ she recalls, ‘but also the greatest pleasure. The rollercoaster of trying to understand Turner’s process, rarely repeated from one canvas to the next, to unravel what he was doing with that incredible non-linear surface… it was totally beguiling.’

Not all conservation work ends so happily, alas. Vincentelli recalls restoring an abstract painted wooden relief by a leading British artist of the 1950s for a large institution (which shall remain anonymous). ‘Shortly after I returned the work, which was in muted shades of grey and brown, a firm of decorators came in to paint the room it was mounted in. They evidently thought it was some kind of fixture that was in need of brightening up and slapped emulsion paint all over it. They did quite a thorough job, apparently, but I’ve never had the heart to go and look at it.’

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

Angela Hartnett has been busy. Managing Michelin-starred Murano and its cafe offspring is a full-time job, as is cooking at Wimbledon, Royal Ascot, Formula 1, Henley Regatta and Sugrue South Downs. It is at the latter, a vineyard in Haywards Heath, where we meet. She and her husband are both investors in the wine here, which pairs brilliantly with the three-course meal Angela has prepared — a fresh tomato and tuna salad, beautifully cooked lamb and roasted plums with cream for dessert.

This is part of a series of wine and lunch events hosted at Sugrue South Downs, and feels almost exactly being a guest on Dish, the podcast she hosts with Nick Grimshaw, where she cooks a bespoke three-course menu for each of their celebrity guests and explains why she has chosen each course. ‘The stressful part is making sure you deliver, because you’re in the lap of the gods always,’ Angela says of these pop-up events, where she’s removed from the comfort of her usual kitchens. ‘But the pressure is what I get a kick out of.’

The chef trained under Gordan Ramsay and was formerly Chef-Patron at Angela Hartnett at the Connaught, where she gained her first Michelin star in 2004. As well as her London restaurants, Angela has a restaurant in France, Cucina Angelina in Courchevel.

She was born in Kent, but was raised in Upminster, London. Angela’s interest in Italian food came at a formative age. Her Italian grandmother cared for her a lot as a child and it was in Italy, where Angela was working for a year as an 18-year-old au pair, where her heritage and her culinary tastes began to intertwine. She gained a history degree from Cambridge Polytechnic, now known as Anglia Ruskin University, before pursuing a career in hospitality.

It was in Cambridge, working in a hotel, that Angela learned how to cook, before going on to work at the Sandy Lane Hotel restaurant in Barbados. Returning to London, she trained at Ramsay’s restaurant Aubergine alongside Marcus Wareing, after which she became Wareing’s sous chef at his restaurant Petrus. She appeared on Hell’s Kitchen and MasterChef, and has an OBE.

Angela often works with her husband, the chef Neil Borthwick. ‘Neil’s a great chef. He’s just brilliant,’ she gushes. ‘I mean, I always say Neil’s a better chef than me, and I genuinely mean that. He has a little extra edge.’ She elaborates: ‘Recently we were cooking something that I would have served with a simple bit of lemon and sauce, but Neil served it with a Japanese spice and it elevated it all. That’s the difference between me and Neil. I’ll still make it taste delicious, but Neil will just give it that extra something.’

Your aesthetic hero

Someone like Hockney, at the moment. He made art approachable. Another person I would say is Elizabeth David. She was an Italian-American cookery writer who wrote with such a brilliant ability.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

The one that I always go to is the RA Summer Exhibition. I love it. Last year I bought a picture from there. It was of ladies eating chips in Pimlico, and it was just such a brilliant photograph. You can find different gems there.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

Probably clothes. I bought a nice dress, because I had to wear something. I’m not into clothes, but I’ll buy them if I have to. I’d love to basically be like Steve Jobs or Barack Obama, where you wear the same thing day in, day out.

Apart from that, there’s an amazing shop on Columbia Road called Vintage Heaven and I found these old antique snail plates and bought those for me and Neil to have for the house.

Your favourite painting

I suppose it depends. I think it changes, doesn’t it? I mean, you can go to the National Gallery and see something like Titian, and then you can go to a modern art gallery and see something by Tracey Emin. I think it always changes for me.

A possession you’d never sell

I've got some earrings I bought from a place in New York, when I first earned a big salary. I suddenly thought, ‘Oh, I'm earning a bit of money now,’ and I bought some vintage diamond earrings. So those and my grandmother's ring which was given to me.

A book that has inspired you

I love Christopher Brookmyre and Ian Rankin, both Scottish authors. I love Austen and I think she’s wonderful too. Pride and Prejudice is still one of my favourite novels. And also Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger.

The music that you work to

I do and I don’t. I love Mark Ronson and I love Raye at the moment. I also saw Lola Young the other night and I think she’s great too.

The last podcast you listened to

The Rest is Football. I’m an Arsenal fan.

Who would play you in a film of your life

Susan Sarandon. I think she’s amazing, though she’s lovely looking. I'm not nearly as attractive. She’s a class actor.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

I’d probably take music. If I was able to take a radio, that would be great.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

These days I don’t know if it’s menopause, or age, or whatever, but I seem to be waking up at 5:30am. The dogs really are what get me up though, and I don’t mind that, you get out of the house and get some exercise — so that’s good.

The items you collect

China and pottery. And antique cookery books — first edition preferred.

A hotel you could go back and back to

Le Bristol in Paris. We went there for Gordon Ramsay’s 40th birthday.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

To me, it's not about the food on the table, it's about who you're with and what you're doing. But, I've said it many times, it's got to be a family Christmas. We all went to Italy, we went to the local restaurant, they made us anellini, we had pork, veal, tiramisu, all the local wines. It was snowing when we came outside, and we were up in the mountains. It was just with my uncle, my aunt, my mum, my brothers and my sister, and it was brilliant. The food was amazing, simple but amazing. It was a great environment and to me, my best meals are always with my family. Family and friends.

The best present you’ve ever received

A good recent present Neil bought me was a face cream for Christmas. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t initially wowed by it as a gift, but actually I’ve been using it and lots of people have said: ‘Your skin is looking really great.’

Angela Hartnett is an investor in Sugrue South Downs. For more information visit their website.

In Reynolds’s time, English landscape painting was thought of as less erudite and important than history painting, but the sheer power of J. M. W. Turner’s sublime views and John Constable’s Suffolk scenes enabled the genre to be taken seriously for the first time.

David Hockney (b. 1937-2026) continued to draw inspiration from the landscape that surrounded him up until his death earlier this year. Throughout his career, he painted the hot hillsides of California and Yorkshire’s cool leafy lanes. In 2020–21, during lockdown, he closely studied the seasons in Normandy. A giant digital frieze of the fields, trees and orchards surrounding his French farmhouse spent the summer on display at London’s Serpentine North.

He would've turned 90 next year, but worked every day up until his death, scrutinising nature with all his might, as well as pushing the boundaries of painting, utilising modern technology to animate his thinking.

The peripatetic Peter Doig (b. 1959) is also drawn to landscape. He was born in Edinburgh and raised in Trinidad and Canada before studying painting in England. Today, he is known for his 1990s Canadian cabins and lakes, as well as moonlit Caribbean beaches. However, he now lives and works in London again and his dreamlike paintings increasingly feature views of the capital.

Both Doig and Hockney have looked beyond our shores for inspiration, but George Shaw (b. 1966) prefers to take his cue from the Midlands, where he grew up. His meticulous paintings in enamel on board depict terraced streets, waste land, graffiti and fly tipping. Yet, through their glowing orange skies and reflective puddles, he manages to give these everyday scenes a quiet beauty of their own.

This is part four of our five-part series on the new school of English painting. They will be published every Thursday afternoon throughout September.

Click here to read part one on the new abstract painters, part two on the new figurative painters, and part three on historical painters.

Where was it?

I rented a stone Cotswold cottage in the village of Notgrove, on a Gloucestershire estate between Bourton-on-the-Water and Northleach

A quick description

It had three bedrooms, a garden large enough for a badminton net and a defunct night storage heater in the kitchen. We were there from 1985–88.

What made you rent it?

I was dating a first-year Oxford student and, being eight years older, my strategy was to lure her out of university for weekends and pack the cottage with friends older than myself, so I appeared more age appropriate. It worked. Georgia and I have been married since 1989.

How did you find it?

I rented it from the parents of a friend. The Aclands were perfect landlords who owned the whole village and charged a peppercorn rent. In those pre-mobile, pre-wifi days, a red telephone box on the village green was used to organise social outings.

Any grumbling about the landlords?

Periodically, Liz Acland would ride past our front garden on her giant hunter and observe that Japanese knotweed was dimly visible between the flowers. I can’t recall doing much about it. Years later, they generously sold us their beautiful mahogany circular dining-room table for a small charity donation, and we have used it ever since at our house in Worcestershire.

Favourite aspect?

The walks — either across the fields to Turkdean in the hope of spotting rock legend Steve Winwood, who lived there, or to The Plough Inn in Cold Aston.

How did you make the cottage your own?

We arrived to find it fully furnished by our predecessors — every plate, pillowcase and log basket provided. When they eventually collected it, we got to know the antique shops and markets of Cirencester and Tetbury. Most of the mirrors and Turkish rugs we bought then are still with us 40 years later.

Why did you move?

The cottage had fulfilled its covert purpose and we became engaged in Calcutta and married in St George’s Hanover Square. We handed back the keys with the happiest of memories. Occasionally we take a detour through Notgrove and think: ‘That was cold but fun’.

Sir Nicholas Coleridge is Provost of Eton and chair of Historic Royal Palaces and The King’s Foundation. You can read his Consuming Passions interview with Lotte Brundle here.

This feature originally appeared in the September 2, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Ten years ago, the author and critic Olivia Laing wondered whether 'an accelerated news cycle' may require 'accelerated art' in response. It was a question she raised in a review of Ali Smith’s 2016 novel, Autumn, that would later form part of an anthology of Laing's writing: Funny Weather: Art In An Emergency (2020). From said title came the name of Arina Izmestieva's gallery and outdoor exhibition programme. Herself a graduate of New York University and, now, a London-based collector and artist, Izmestieva opened Funny Weather's show in the forest in Hampshire last weekend.

Running until November 12, this year's theme is 'Strange Objects'. 'I wanted to place sculptures in a different context to the white-walled gallery we normally see them in,' Izmestieva explains. At the outset, the aim of Funny Weather is to reintroduce sculpture to the landscape that birthed the materials that created it — and to inspire the younger generation to start collecting. A collector herself, Izmestieva boasts a mature understanding of the dialogue between art itself, and the environment in which it is presented.

The current show involves 32 works by eight different artists, many of which were commissioned specifically for the setting. 'We want to invite visitors to rediscover a kind of childlike wonder,' says Izmestieva, 'and to move freely between works: some hidden among trees, revealed through light or discovered at the end of a path.'

Among the artists present are Jill Berelowitz (a South African sculptor who works with bronze and optical resin and has produced works for The Dorchester), Elium (a pseudonym for the multitalented Elise de Falletans, whose past clients include Hermès), Luke James (whose anthropomorphic sculptures are often made of wood, and who has contributed an impressive 12 works to the show) and Thibault Lucas (whom Izmestieva discovered at Poush, an artist incubator in Aubervilliers, just north of Paris, earlier this year).

The majority of works on display are made of bronze, wood or stone. 'These are all materials that can be found in the forest,' Izmestieva observes (wood is obvious, bronze less though — although it can be formed from the melding of copper and tin, found in weapons, jewels and other artefacts from past centuries, fallen prey to erosion and occasionally unearthed by archeologists). One of her favourites, she says, is Elium's Excalibur sword: a two-metre tall, sword-in-the-stone installation created from pink onyx, the material hailing from a foundry in Vicenza and later melded into shape by a stonemason in Britain. 'It took an entire week to install on site,' Izmestieva laughs.

Her own practice, she says, is 'all about texture'. 'With Funny Weather, I want to return materials to their origins, see how they interact with the landscape and what that dialogue sparks within the audience,' the ceramicist explains. That spark is catching on: young collectors, in particular, flooded the show during last weekend's launch, most of them descending from London. Laing's collection of essays, anticipating the dominant anxieties of our day (climate collapse and the threat to democratic institutions) offers not only a titular through-line but genuine clues regarding the ethos of Izmestieva's exhibition: concerned with repatriation, natural resources and continuity.

It seems only fitting that the generation most concerned with and affected by these issues should champion the art that addresses them.

'Strange Objects' is on until November 12 at Barley Mow Hill.

Of all the parties I expected to attend in 2026, I hadn’t anticipated that the most fun would be had from vegetables. ‘Rovi has always been about great produce,’ says chef and cookbook author Yotam Ottolenghi of his restaurant in London's Fitzrovia, which hosted the capital’s foremost harvest party last Thursday. ‘It is about vegetables from root to tip, with a menu shaped by our growers and our kitchen garden near Tottenham.’ The shindig, harking back to Athenian tradition, was also an excuse for a hoedown. Moonlighting as disc jockeys for the night were Aimee Phillips, former manager of The Scissor Sisters, and Femi Koleoso, the live-tour drummer for Gorillaz.

As the country gets back to work and diners return to their old watering holes, restaurateurs are finding renewed success in celebrating the ancient food network. ‘We wanted an evening that had growers, cooks and consumers in the same room,’ Ottolenghi says of his party. Despite 2026 proving fatal for many crops — our winter saw record-breaking rain before the summer baked in record-breaking heat — the UK’s best kitchens are refusing to put on the brakes. Joshua Overington, co-founder of the award-winning Mýse near Castle Howard in North Yorkshire, is hosting the restaurant’s inaugural churn supper on October 4. ‘We had no idea, when we decided to do this, how challenging this summer was going to be for farmers,’ he notes.

The churn supper is an old, northerly tradition that was first named as such in the 19th century, perhaps after the jug of cream that would have been passed around the table or for the first churn of butter that would have taken place at the time. ‘Our supper will be for 26 people,’ Overington explains, ‘and to mark the occasion, we have invited chefs from far and wide to shine a light on a different aspect of British farming: meat, dairy, horticulture…’ Each chef will serve a different course.

‘Far too often,’ he continues, ‘kitchens are self-celebratory and overlook the fact that the hardest work is done by its suppliers. Yet without our farmers or growers, restaurants like mine wouldn’t exist.’ These events, then, are an opportunity for customers to engage in a more direct dialogue with the people who harvest the ingredients on their plate. ‘There’s a real desire to feel closer to our food again,’ says Ottolenghi. ‘To know who grew it, where it came from, and understand why it tastes better at certain times of year.

‘A harvest party,’ he concludes, both ‘makes that connection and celebrates it.’

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The National Anthem strikes up as the credits roll. Earlier, the caped commissionaire had greeted the audience as they arrived, with the usherette in a 1950s outfit; the Tiny Wurlitzer pipe organ rose majestically through a trap door at the front of the stage during the interval; and tea was served in dainty cups. This is the 70-seat Electric Picture Palace in the Suffolk seaside town of Southwold.

‘I’m not making this up,’ clarifies broadcaster Emma Freud as she relays these details of her local cinema, where, a few years ago, she was invited to take the role of organist during the interval of Calendar Girls, in which a group of women create a nude calendar to raise money for charity.

‘I decided to lean into the plot by playing the organ topless. Luckily, the organist’s stool is positioned with its back to the audience. Hilarious, I thought.’

After climbing commando-style through the passage that runs from the front bar, under the auditorium, to the tiny waiting area beneath the stage, Freud stripped to the waist, hauled herself into the organist’s chair, pressed the ‘UP’ button at the appropriate moment and rose into view playing I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside entirely topless.

‘I had optimistically assumed that, after an hour of Helen Mirren and Julie Walters warming up the audience, I might get a small round of applause for the topical derring-do,’ she recalls. ‘I was greeted with utter silence. For 10 long minutes, I played perky seaside ditties as the Southwold residents ate their wine gums and drank their sherry, until blessed relief came as the lights dimmed and I descended back down below, waving to the horrified crowd. It’s still my favourite cinema in Britain, but I’m never doing that again.’

Southwold might take the Oscar for eccentricity, but hidden down cobbled alleyways, on windswept peninsulas and behind unlikely looking shop fronts are more of Britain’s best independent cinemas, those that have weathered the storm of streaming and multiplexes, each plaza and palladium a red-velvet jewel for film buffs in the sticks.

These are the kind of places where you’re likely to get change from a tenner for tickets, ice cream is local, the bar is full and, as the lights come up, it can feel a little like a community drinks party.

Electric Palace, Bridport, Dorset

‘It was a romantic purchase,’ says Alasdair Warren of his decision to buy the Grade II- listed Art Deco cinema in west Dorset more than a decade ago. ‘I watched my first film there with my dad, The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977, and that was the start of my love affair with the building.

'Growing up here in the 1970s, there wasn’t a lot for young people to do, so the cinema was an important piece of social infrastructure.’

You could easily walk past the entrance on South Street without a second glance, but inside is a wonderworld: hanging lamps, moulded swags and Art Deco-style murals painted by local brewery sign writer George Biles in 1936. ‘When you walk into the auditorium, there’s a total “wow” moment, it really is spectacular,’ adds Warren, who put the cinema on the market as he turned 60 this year.

The theatre has been in almost consistent operation since 1926, when a local brewing family, J. C. & R. H. Palmer, opened what was then known as The New Electric Palace, which generated its own power in the engine room, pulling a crowd of more than 500.

Today, the likes of Julian Fellowes, Stephen Frears and Mike Leigh are among its patrons and the red carpet has been rolled out for the premiers of Tamara Drewe and Far from the Madding Crowd, where Dorset is put up in lights.

The Birks Cinema, Aberfeldy, Perthshire

Head 60 miles north-west of Dundee and you’ll reach Aberfeldy, where, in the town square, stands The Birks Cinema: a haven in the Highlands with 104 seats, tubs of Scottish Mackie’s ice cream and pints of Argyllshire Fyne Ale at the bar.

Curtains are made from Glenlyon tweed, volunteers’ badges are by Aberfeldy craft company The Workshop and, for the morning screenings, there’s Glen Lyon Coffee to hand. A record of a British Army recruitment film being played at the Town Hall dates back to 1914 (5s was on offer for anyone bringing along a potential recruit), but it wasn’t until 1939 that the Birks Cinema opened, with Sixty Glorious Years —the first film shown on the town’s new silver screen.

Now, there are the usual blockbusters and live performances, as well as the Birks Wilderness Festival. ‘Where we are, you can fish, Munro bag, shoot, mountain bike and kayak — the festival is a way of reflecting our outdoor community,’ enthuses chair of the cinema’s trustees Shonaig Macpherson, who began work here as a volunteer usher.

‘When we moved from outside Edinburgh, I insisted to my husband that there were two things I needed: a cultural asset and being no more than an hour’s drive from the sleeper to London,’ she explains. Aberfeldy fitted the bill with its cinema — a beacon of community and culture in this corner of the Highlands — and an injection of Hollywood glamour thanks to its Aberfeldy- born patron, Alan Cumming.

The Parade Cinema, Marlborough, Wiltshire

‘When I was young, cycling to the Odeon in Woking to watch a double-feature film was a big part of teenage life. Of course, when you had a girlfriend, the flicks were an excuse to hold her hand,’ reminisces Robert Hiscox, chair of the single-screen Parade Cinema in Marlborough, where he’s lived for the past 40 years. ‘There’s an intense pleasure sitting waiting for a film to start, a feeling of anticipation.’

Until The Parade opened in 2021, in a Grade II-listed former non-conformist chapel (the then Duchess of Cornwall cut the ribbon), the market town had been without a cinema for almost 50 years. ‘It gives the town a heartbeat,’ notes Hiscox, who enjoys the reaction of younger cinema-goers to vintage showings (‘They come out astonished after watching an epic such as The Third Man’).

‘It felt like great fortune to be able to build a proper cinema here, so that films can be seen as they were meant to be — in the dark and without distractions.’

Aldeburgh Cinema, Aldeburgh, Suffolk

‘We always know half the people in the audience,’ observes author and journalist Craig Brown of his local cinema, a theatre that film critic Peter Bradshaw once wrote ‘was like going to what looked like a creaky museum and finding inside, not fragments of Saxon spears under dusty glass, but a film’.

Brown was first entranced by the cinema, housed in a half-timber, 18th-century building, when he was living on the other side of Suffolk. ‘My wife and I stayed to see the wonderful 14-hour German film Heimat. It remains one of my favourite films, perhaps the favourite. We spent longer watching the film than experiencing life outside, so it was properly immersive,’ reflects the man who went on to become artistic director of the Aldeburgh Documentary Festival, now in its 32nd year.

Opened in 1919 by local draper Walter Hill, the cinema was at first in competition with the Jubilee Hall, which had been showing ‘pictures’ from 1917, with silent films and magic lantern shows popular with soldiers on leave. When the weather was too rough for rowing races on the sea on August 19, 1919, the local press reported: ‘Both the Jubilee Hall and the new Picture House recently opened by Mr W. Hill did excellent business in the evening.’

Mick McAloon is now the film programmer at the cinema, balancing offbeat films with blockbusters. ‘With the mainstream films, we try to pick the best,’ he explains. ‘If we think that something is on hundreds of screens across the UK, we ask whether we need to be playing it here as well.’

McAloon’s earliest childhood memories of the cinema are of watching Where Eagles Dare, where ‘the sound was particularly booming’, he remembers. ‘Some might say: “Oh, shall we just stay in tonight?” But some films are made for the big screen. It’s about the collective experience. There’s nothing like all laughing in unison or being moved together. I don’t think that experience will ever go.’

Corfe Castle, Dorset

For 30 years, there’s been a film festival on the Isle of Purbeck, with the 11th- century Corfe Castle as its showstopping venue for the big screen under the stars. Other spots include the old-school Knoll House Hotel (with views that stretch to the Isle of Wight) and a film among the vines at Langham Wine Estate.

The Taybank, Perthshire

Sink into a deck chair on the banks of the River Tay for The Taybank Hotel’s open-air cinema, with its 13ft LED cinema screen, audio via Bluetooth headphones and a shack serving popcorn and scoops of Luvians Ice Cream.

Campbeltown Picture House, Argyll & Bute

Constructed in 1913, this cinema was one of the first purpose-built examples in Scotland. Known locally as The Wee Pictures, the Art Nouveau spectacle was designed by architect and Glasgow School of Art graduate Albert Gardner. In 1935, Gardner refurbished it to afford the ambiance of a Mediterranean courtyard by projecting a blue sky — complete with moving white clouds — onto the auditorium ceiling and flanking the screen with two plasterwork buildings.

The Magic Lantern, Gwynedd

A 1901 silent news reel of the Boer War was the first recorded film to be shown in the Assembly Rooms in Tywyn on the edge of Snowdonia National Park. Ticket sales were buoyed by an influx of military personnel during the Second World War to this part of Wales, but, even if fortunes have wavered over the past century, it’s kept on going, showing everything from Hollywood blockbusters to Welsh language films.

The Kinema In The Woods, Lincolnshire

Once a cricket pavilion in the village of Woodhall Spa, it opened its doors as a cinema in 1922 (using rear projection, still in use today) and is now a step-back-in-time delight: there’s a cabinet of filmic curiosities in the foyer, an old commissionaire’s uniform on display, walls lined with vintage posters and an interval accompanied by a live organ on Saturday nights.

Alnwick Castle, Northumberland

Inside the spellbinding walls of Alnwick Castle (the set of Hogwarts in the early ‘Harry Potter’ films), you’ll find the Adventure Cinema, with outdoor film screenings throughout the summer in the Outer Bailey. Its other venues are equally A list: think Althorp, Belton and Burghley.

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Mohammed Sami (b. 1984) is an Iraqi-born artist who now lives and works in London. He was shortlisted for the 2025 Turner Prize and has had solo exhibitions at Camden Arts Centre and Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. His work offers a new take on history painting, the category that originally occupied the highest tier of Reynolds’s hierarchy.

However, rather than presenting battle scenes as glorious feats of heroism, as 18th-century Academicians had done, Sami’s paintings employ memory and subjectivity to highlight the complexity of war and its deep psychological cost. His fragmentary approach leaves room for the viewer’s own interpretation of events.

Other artists also wrestle with recent history, from the ‘Pussy Riot’ paintings of Justin Mortimer (b. 1970) to the barber-shop interiors of Hurvin Anderson (b. 1965), who remembers these spaces as a focal point for the Birmingham black community of his youth.

Folklore artist Ben Edge (b. 1985) prefers to draw on ancient English myths and traditions that date back thousands of years. In his ambitious Children of Albion (2025), he brings together dozens of historic episodes, from Viking invaders and the Cerne Abbas giant to Margaret Thatcher and Royal Wedding teacups. William Blake’s naked male youth Albion Rose appears, arms extended, above the green and pleasant land, a nod to Edge’s personal admiration for his visionary predecessor.

This is part three of our five-part series on the new school of English painting. They will be published every Thursday afternoon throughout September.

Click here to read part one on the new abstract painters, and part two on the new figurative painters.

Where is it?

In Cirencester. My first, my only and my last house in the country. We have tried to sell it, but it didn’t want us to and it’s now raising the standard for multi-generational living. There are two independent units, one for myself and [my wife] Jackie and one for [my daughter] Hermione and her family.

We’ve also built a house out of a garage block for my other daughter Cecile and her family. We’re all on the same courtyard — rather like a Birmingham back-to-back.

A quick description.

It’s an eyecatching, Grade II-listed farmhouse on the edge of a village that’s sited at the slummy end of the Cotswolds, close to the King and the late Jilly Cooper rather than the Beckhams. If I sat on my roof I could probably see Swindon.

The house has a reputation for being haunted, although I’ve never seen anything. Perhaps they’re star-struck or freaked out by the wallpaper and so they have decamped to an abandoned nunnery.

It was pretty affordable at £1.2 million, but having been used as an antique dealer’s den it originally had no kitchen. We stripped it right back and because we had a great rapport with our planners it all went rather well. People always go in fighting, but the secret is to talk to them.

How did you find it?

Twenty years ago when we were living in Greenwich, Jackie decided that there was something rather vulgar about living in London in your 40s, and so we decided to make a run for it. We saw it advertised in Country Life. There was no shopping around. Jackie viewed just this house and she rang me while I was filming in India, saying: ‘I really like it. Shall I buy it?’ You can watch the entire moment on YouTube as I had a camera crew with me.

What sold it to her?

It ticked a lot of our boxes; for example, it had a cottage for Jackie’s PA, it was a project, the garden was nudging a couple of acres, it was on the way to our cottage in Cornwall, and it was near a station — Kemble, the poshest in the world.

Was it a smooth purchase?

We were more or less cash buyers, nobody lived there, and so it was pretty straightforward, which is just as well as we had a camera crew following our buying journey. They were, however, rather disappointed as they like ‘jeopardy’.

What do you love about the area?

Its people. When I told a producer that we were moving to Gloucestershire, he said: ‘Why are you moving to the poshest county; they hate telly folk,’ but they really didn’t and it was lovely. One neighbour was a little disappointed as he had been looking forward to meeting Bullseye’s Jim Bowen. On the school run you bump into your planner, or the Earl or the Amazon delivery man.

We also love our multi-generational living, which grew out of lockdown and which makes us amazingly happy. Until the 20th century, this is exactly what everyone had been doing for thousands of years, so the 20th century was wrong and I’m so pleased it’s gone. Let’s not do anything like that again.

Favourite aspect of the house?

It’s basically L-shaped and Jackie and I live in the older bit and Hermoine’s crew have the Grand Designs extension that was put on by the 1640s equivalent of Kevin McCloud. The refurbishment in the 1980s to turn it into an emporium meant that they raised the ceilings, meaning some really weird window placements. I adore our drawing room and as part of its refurbishment I went out of my way to make it as 1980s as I could. It is now shades of salmon and apricot, and there’s a large, unrepentant pattern going on.

I remember describing all this to Jilly Cooper, who was laughing like only she could laugh, and it’s a great sadness to me that she died before she got to see our Jilly-inspired Rivals-esque drawing room. It is a complete antidote to the Cotswolds cliché of puritanical minimalism and shades of greige, with a couple of bits of very, very uncomfortable modern furniture and a pitchfork in the corner.

Best memory of living there?

I can’t commit to one as the memories keep coming. This is the longest we’ve ever lived anywhere, so this house has been all about children going away to boarding school, university and film school, children coming home, then returning with husbands, getting married and grandchildren being born.

This house is a repository of us. You need to see your home as the museum of you and the background to everything important that ever happens to you. It’s a big emotional investment. Don’t treat it lightly and think, ‘I’ll find something better and make a couple of quid’.

Actually, there’s so much more to it than that. We have now moved away from that Noughties obsession when we all had to be Sarah Beeny and we worshipped Kirstie and Phil as minor deities. Property is a very irritating way of making money, and it’s a bad way of making happiness. Find somewhere you love — and love it. The more you put into it and the more you do to it, think about it, redecorate it, the more you make it you and the more powerful and supportive it becomes.

Biggest indulgence?

The biggest psychological indulgence was laying a vinyl floor in the kitchen to my own design. It doesn’t take any prisoners; it is orange and lime green and it’s a festival of 1970s Spanish-inspired tile motifs. To make it worse, I covered the large fridge in the same pattern. It’s inescapable, but I think this is one of the reasons the house is enjoying having us. It loves our larger-than-lifeness.

Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen is an artist, interior designer and TV personality. He helped to set up the Llewelyn-Bowen Emporium, 42 Castle Street, Cirencester, Gloucestershire, which is now run by his daughter Cecile. He is also the design curator for Rangeford Villages luxury retirement villages.

A shorter version of this feature appeared in the print edition of Country Life on September 9, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Even the world’s best equestrians aren’t exempt from some blunt riding instruction. Much of it, Scott Brash says, can’t be repeated in Country Life, but the Olympic gold medallist and gentle horseman extraordinaire received a memorable one-liner at his first-ever Nations Cup at La Baule in 2010, where Brash had help with his horse from his teammate Peter Charles. ‘Just as I was trotting into the ring, Peter was behind me and said, “Scott, Scott, stop, stop, stop!” I stopped and was like, “what’s wrong?” And he said, “Grow some balls and jump a clear round, will you?”’

Sixteen years later, Brash is a steady purveyor of clear rounds. They are fluidly delivered, with calm and quiet riding on horses he imbues with beautiful lightness and elasticity. He is also something of a unicorn: in 2015, the Scotsman became the first and so far only rider in history to claim the mythical Rolex Grand Slam of Show Jumping trophy with his horse Hello Sanctos, by consecutively winning the CHI Geneva, the CHIO Aachen and the CSIO Spruce Meadows ‘Masters’ in Canada. Newly announced as a Rolex testimonee that same year, Brash certainly made quite the entry into the Swiss luxury watchmaker’s family of top athletes.

‘Yeah, that was good timing,’ Brash says with a chuckle. ‘Being part of history, it’s quite surreal when you think back about what you've achieved and how difficult it is to do. I’d like to think it’s not changed me. I still think I approach each horse differently as individuals. I’m still as hungry as ever to go and win it again.’ Supported by Lord and Lady Harris and Lord and Lady Kirkham, this month, Brash’s eye is on the Spruce Meadows ‘Masters’, the world’s biggest Grand Prix, which he has won a record three times (September 9-13). ‘It’s the place I watched as a kid on TV growing up, thinking I’d love to compete there one day.’

When we meet up on home turf at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, Brash and his chestnut mare Hello Folie have just jumped clear in the 1.55-metre Defender Stakes. As soon as they’re over the last fence, Folie walks out on a long rein in a stretchy, relaxed outline that would thrill any biomechanically nerdy horse person. ‘She’s so cool in her brain. When she goes in the ring, she comes alive and loves jumping, but the minute you finish, she’s so calm,’ Brash says, stroking the mare’s face as she enjoys a hay net in her stable hotel room after withdrawing from the jump off. ‘She jumps the Grand Prix on Sunday, so I thought there’s no sense for her to gallop round this. She’s done good.’

It’s this sort of horsemanship that makes Brash a standout rider. To Harry Charles, son of Peter Charles and one of the leading young showjumping talents shaping the future of the sport, Brash has always been a role model. ‘Naturally, as a young kid with a dream of doing this, you idolise someone, and Scott was that for me,’ Charles says when he joins us. ‘I could tell you if it was a silhouette going around, that’s Scott. I wish I could make all my horses go the way I’d like to. But Scott can do that so easily and so effortlessly. And he lets each horse go in their own way. He doesn't try to force anything.’

When Charles first joined the big show circuit, Brash was the one who made him feel welcome and would sit with him at breakfast and ask how it was going. ‘And I’m happy now even to call him a very good friend,’ Charles says. In 2024, they won Olympic gold together, a repeat of Brash’s London 2012 feat with Papa Charles. ‘Harry has always been a very good rider, even from the 12’2 days,’ Brash says. ‘Coming into the top sport and being in the Olympic games as a young person, he coped really well with those situations. And he thrives under the pressure now. His whole riding has become very one. He has a very, very top future ahead of him.’

If their schedule allows, Brash and Charles can be spotted on the golf course together. ‘He’s fantastic. I’m terrible,’ Brash says of their game. As a fellow Rolex cohort, Charles — who was snapped up as a teenager by the watchmaker to become their youngest ever equestrian testimonee — quips he hopes Rolex will stay with him when he pivots to golfer. Rolex hasn’t just kept time for him all these years, but also limbs. When Charles fell off at a wall in Aachen in 2022, the main horseshoe stud went straight through the bracelet of his white gold Sky-Dweller, breaking the bracelet but saving his wrist. He went on to win bronze with Brash and Ben Maher at the World Championships three weeks later.

Neither Brash nor Charles learnt to ride on ready-made ponies but had to get on with it onboard the self-governing kind. ‘I wasn’t appreciative at the time, but now I’m so lucky I was made to,’ Charles says. Brash, who was seven when he caught the horse bug, on a pony shared with his sister, had the same. ‘Lots of different ponies that were tricky and naughty, but it really taught you to ride. And understand the horse you have.’

To this day, it’s the Brash way: ‘Play to the strengths and work on the weaknesses,’ he says, noting that while a slower or bigger horse might need more time on a rollback turn, they can take a stride out down a long line to win time. Time, of course, is of the essence in a discipline where milliseconds decide a winner, which makes Rolex’s involvement no coincidence. ‘I’ve always thought of it as a reaction sport,’ Charles comments. ‘Obviously you can have a plan. But if a horse jumps a bit left or goes a bit high, a bit forward, you've got to make instinctive decisions really fast. Especially in a jump off. We feel if we’re a bit behind, and then your plan maybe has to change in a split second.’

Outside the ring, they both say horses respond best when you don’t look at the clock. ‘It’s a balance, and it’s knowing when the horse is ready to put that sort of pressure on them,’ Brash says, adding: ‘Sometimes we can make a mistake and set them back a bit. But then you take a step back to move forward later on. Horsemanship is so important, to produce those moments in time.’ At home, Brash does lots of hacking as the horses see enough schools at shows. His less-is-more style is shaped by his start in the landscape of Peebles, where — in lieu of an indoor school or arena — he would ride up and down the Scottish hills and through a river on the farm.

‘I could still have the horses very fit going to a show, probably fitter than a lot of the other riders. It’s more natural for them. And when they're happy, they love it.’ Mindful of the sport’s increasing travel, he is careful not to get into ‘that hole of chasing ranking points. When a horse is good, it’s easy to be jumping in Shanghai last week and be here this week. You’ve got to pick and choose; the horse can’t do everything. They’re not machines.’

What would Brash and Charles like to see more of in the horse world? ‘A bit more patience,’ Charles says, noting that his family don’t back their horses until around the age of five. ‘You never know with so many horses what it could have been if they weren't galloped at these young horse championships as a five-year-old.’ And, he adds, a little less focus on the glitz and glamour of horses that the media sometimes focuses on. ‘We’re out in the mud, the rain, turning all the foals out in the field. They’ve been bred literally in our gardens. But they want the VIP and the who’s there, which is a shame because that’s a very small proportion of our sport. That’s not why we do it.’

‘They are our life,’ Brash adds of their bond with the horses. ‘They’ve taken us around the world, into scenarios, that, good and bad, have taught us about life.’ They will also surprise you, like Hello Sanctos at the London Olympics. ‘The first day going in, I could feel his heart pounding out of his chest. I thought, oh God, how’s the week going to go now because of this enormous atmosphere? But that showed what an amazing character he was, because every day he grew and got better and better.’

What continues to floor Brash is the trust horses have in us, like a young horse following you onto a horsebox for the first time. ‘They’re incredible, amazing creatures who really want to please us in whatever we’re trying to do in life. Different horses teach us different things. I’m still learning.’

Rampant lions take artful poses, a wolf plays a trick on a crane, and excitable dogs chase their own tails: the Bayeux Tapestry, commissioned shortly after the Battle of Hastings to convey a Norman version of the conquest of England, depicts more animals than humans. Around 200 of them are horses — royal mounts, workhorses and cavalry — all stitched onto 70 metres of linen in wool dyed with woad, madder and weld. As they charge through the embroidery’s nine panels, they pass a barking, quacking, roaring menagerie of over 500 other creatures: from frogs, foxes and fire-breathing dragons to what one commentator describes as a pair of Monty Pythonesque dead parrots.

The Bayeux Tapestry and its extraordinary bestiary is currently on view at the British Museum until July 11 2027. This visit, the first in almost 1,000 years, is something of a homecoming. Though commissioned in Normandy in the 1070s, most likely for display in the Bayeux Cathedral, the tapestry was sewn on English soil. It was a decision intended, not to rub our noses in the victory of William, Duke of Normandy (William the Conqueror) over King Harold II, but to take advantage of Canterbury’s reputation for superior artisanship.

At first glance, the inclusion of this animal kingdom, much of it occupying the margins, appears to be decorative. ‘Pairs of animals in compartments were a traditional form of ornament on textiles,’ explains Gale Owen-Crocker, author of The Design of the Bayeux Tapestry (2026) and Professor Emerita of Anglo-Saxon Culture at the University of Manchester. Creatures of fur and feather, both real and fabulous, were a familiar feature of 11^th-century design. Even within the tapestry’s story, sculpted animals embellish architecture, form the figureheads of ships and are carved into the seats of claw-footed thrones.

Yet the animals frolicking in the borders offer function as well as form, appearing to comment on the central story. They are like a string of colourful emojis inserted beneath a status update, or — for those who remember them — a medieval version of the Muppets’ chattering critics Statler and Waldorf, appraising the action from their theatre balcony.

The marginalia help indicate ‘the emotions and characteristics of the persons’, says Prof Owen-Crocker. The howling dog or wolf beneath King Edward’s coffin conveys grief, she suggests, while the peacocks over William and Harold’s meeting in Rouen hint at the hubris that will contribute to Harold’s downfall. Sometimes the animals seem to play a more lighthearted role. When Harold feasts in Bosham, for example, jaws and beaks in the margins are also filled with food.

Even the smallest details were crucial to telling the story. ‘Most medieval men read pictures rather than words,’ points out Arthur C. Wright in Decoding the Bayeux Tapestry (2019): the tapestry’s Latin tituli would be lost on them. ‘The animals and birds provide the sound-track,’ he adds. ‘And they also seem at times to speak directly to the viewer, to us.’

Vignettes taken from Aesop’s fables, suggesting moral failings or foreshadowing future events, pepper the tapestry, providing a brief diversion from the main action while reinforcing its principal themes. According to R. Howard Bloch, author of Animal fables, the Bayeux Tapestry and the making of the Anglo-Norman world (2005), they reinforce this central tension between human and animalistic urges as the two claimants compete for the throne. ‘Almost all the fables stage some form of drama pitting bodily appetite against the logical faculties,’ he says.

So keen is the tapestry to moralise, Aesop’s fox and crow pop up three times — the foolish bird repeatedly dropping its prized food into the jaws of the fox as it falls for the animal’s flattery. ‘It is hard to believe that the fable of the fox and the crow was not deliberately included as an ironic commentary on the unfolding drama,’ argues Andrew Bridgeford in The Hidden History of the Bayeux Tapestry (2004). But was it Harold or William that was tricked by the cunning fox? That all depends which side you’re on, Bridgeford suggests.

A cast of obliging animals also help set the scene, offering insights into medieval rural life. Livestock and game prance in the margins and a horse churns the earth with a harrow. ‘I believe this is the earliest illustration of a horse collar that enables horses to be used for draught,’ points out Prof Owen-Crocker. There’s also seed-scattering and bird-scaring, copied from bible manuscripts. ‘Somebody is sowing the seeds of a dynasty for himself,’ she proposes, ‘and doesn’t want any interference.’

Elsewhere, the animals help immerse us in courtly life and the country pursuits of the nobility. Harold rides through the second scene bearing a falcon, with collared hounds bounding ahead, while hare and deer are chased in the margins. Such details also serve as a reminder that the Battle of Hastings took place in autumn, when hawking and hunting were in full swing, and they reinforce the central theme of pursuit and dominion. Some images are overtly violent. A bear tied to a tree and attacked with a sword may simply reference the popular pastime of bear baiting, but it’s also possible it functions much like the fables: emphasising the animal instincts of the combatants, where aggression has overtaken reason.

The unfortunate bear is one of several exotic animals lurking in the borders, sure to have delighted eagle-eyed viewers. Two Bactrian camels with dark coats hover over William in an early scene — symbols, perhaps, of international trade; while the numerous lions, tongues lolling in defence of their territory or adopting heraldic postures, are most likely emblems of royalty that interact with the central story by evoking courage and strength.

One thing that has not changed in 1,000 years is that ‘big’ denotes ‘better’. Stallions — especially the well-endowed — are used to confer status, and, as one would expect in an embroidery commissioned by the Normans, William gets the steed with the largest appendage. ‘Riding a stallion suggests masculine assertiveness, especially when accompanied by spurs and a bird of prey on the hand,’ explains Prof Owen-Crocker. When Harold’s ship is blown off course and he is captured by Guy of Ponthieu and held for ransom, his mount changes from a stallion to a gelding or mare, reflecting, she adds, his ‘temporary reduction in status and power’. Guy gets even rougher treatment for this diplomatic disaster and is mounted on a mare with ass’s ears and mane, chiming, she says, ‘with a prolonged portrayal of Guy as a fool’.

Comic interludes such as this are offset with moments when darker forces seem at play as mythical creatures descend on the tapestry, from part-human centaurs and sphinxes to two-headed dragons: figureheads for malevolent forces whose presence issues a warning. Such beasts may suggest the conflict between intellect and savagery or reflect the Norman view of Harold as a two-faced traitor who broke his oath to uphold William’s claim to the English throne; while fork-tongued wyverns spouting bile hint at the venomous rumours and lies undermining William’s authority.

But for all these formidable creatures, it’s the open-beaked birds who perhaps speak to us most directly. As they flap their striped wings between the wobbly-lined borders and crane their necks to view the action, we can almost hear their cacophony. Their reaction to the story, writes Prof Owen-Crocker in Squawk Talk (2006), is much like our own. The tapestry amuses, fascinates, delights and horrifies us ‘just like the feathered watchers in the border’, she says. ‘We are the birds; the birds are us.’

In recent years, ‘Ottolenghi’ has become a byword, used almost exclusively by middle-class dinner party hosts, for ‘I am better than you’. It stands for quality, flavour and, above all, almost unpalatable levels of smugness. No longer do people in the UK prepare ‘Middle Eastern food’, they now prepare ‘Ottolenghi’ food.

‘Drama in the mouth’ is the cooking philosophy of the restaurateur and author. But who is the man behind the moniker? The one who is responsible, surely, for the largest uptick in supermarket sales of tahini and pomegranate molasses this country has ever seen.

He is a flamboyant dresser, for starters. When I meet Yotam (so famous is his last name, that I have momentarily forgotten he will even have a first name) the 57-year-old is beaming, wearing a white shirt patterned with pink turtles. We are here to talk about his new cookbook, Ottolenghi Simple Too, which he assures me that even I, a chronic fish-fingers-in-the-airfryer type of cook, will be able to make something from. The recipes look delicious.

‘This is a book that’s been percolating in the back of my mind since the first Simple, which was published in 2008,’ the Israeli-born British chef and restaurateur says. ‘I am always asking myself: how do I make the food super accessible for a busy world and people who are just looking to find a way into the kitchen that is not too demanding?’

Along with his colleague and co-author Verena Lochmuller, he has collected recipes ‘that are really easy and simple’. ‘It all came together into something that I’m so proud of, because I think it’s really tempting, but also very achievable,’ he says.

This emphasis on easy and simple recipes may be a product of Yotam becoming a father. He has two boys, aged 11 and 13, who he shares with his ex-husband (the pair divorced last Christmas). ‘I cook for my kids very often and for them I know I need to get dinner on the table quite quickly,’ he says. Has being the children of Ottolenghi gifted them a sophisticated palette at all? ‘Unfortunately the answer is no. They love their chicken nuggets,’ he says.

It’s hard to imagine Yotam doing any other job, particularly one without lashings of za’atar, but he has an extremely varied CV. First a stint in the Israel Defence Force, then a short period working for newspapers, before he eventually came to London to study French pastry cooking at Le Cordon Bleu. It’s certainly not the classic chef pipeline.

‘I was planning on becoming an academic, because that is my background,’ he recalls. Yotam’s father was a Chemistry professor and his mother a high school principal. ‘I was thinking that this was going to be my world,’ he says, but after a degree and a masters, he decided the world of academia was too insular for him. ‘I wanted to speak a language that everyone understands. Food is that — whether a person likes cooking or they don’t, they still eat.’

When he hosts, he does still feel the pressure. ‘To put a meal on the table for a group of people is not easy… I still get stressed because I want it to be the best it can, but I also know that the expectations are quite high.’ Without those expectations, however, he thinks ‘you kind of lose your touch.’ Yotam definitely hasn't lost his.

Your aesthetic hero

One of my closest friends, Ivo Bisignano, was a Sicilian designer. He passed away a few years ago, and we worked together on many projects. He really understood food, and I loved how he dressed. He was like a style guru for me, in the sense that anything he touched, he did so well. He was definitely my inspiration in many ways.

An exhibition that has really impressed me

I saw a Louise Bourgeois exhibition in Bilbao, Spain, more than a decade ago. She had her famous spiders. It just stayed with me as something so powerful and intense. How they occupy a space in the room is in a very science fiction way.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I bought some pink birkenstocks for the summer.

A possession you would never sell

I have a tiny statue that I have from childhood, which is one of these office toys of a man balancing. You cannot, whatever you do, push him off centre. I inherited it from my dad.

Your favourite painting

Recently, because the death of David Hockney reminded me, I'd say I really love his works from California. The collages of bits of torn paper he made of the roads and deserts, I found those very impactful. I was exposed to them at a young age and they really shape, somehow, this distorted view of reality which is familiar and unfamiliar. I found them very powerful and I just love them. They really take you somewhere but they also challenge you.

A book you found inspiring

I just read Whistler, by Ann Patchett. I found it very inspiring and very readable, and I love her in general.

The music that you work to

Yesterday I was listening to a lot of music while I was cooking. Do you know Christine and the Queens? I always listen to their music. I don't understand French, but I find it beautiful to listen to.

The last podcast you listened to

I listen to The Rest is History quite religiously.

The person that would play you in a film of your life

Jeff Goldblum.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

A good knife, olive oil and a bowl of lemons.

The thing that gets you up on the morning

I get really excited about starting my day. I can’t wait to come to work, because I love my job so much. I'm not just saying it, I really do feel very excited to come to work.

The items you collect

If I do collect anything then it would be ceramic bowls. They’ve taken over my kitchen.

A hotel to could go back and back to

We opened a restaurant in Geneva a few years ago in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. I go there and I don’t pay and get great food. I love that hotel, although I realise it might not be affordable to everyone.

The best present you’ve ever received

Recently someone came back from Paris and bought me some chocolates from my favourite chocolate shop. It’s called Plaq. It’s a very bougie little chocolate shop. They do very exotic flavours and they taste so good. I highly recommend.

The most memorable meal you've ever eaten

I went to Mallorca a few years ago and went to a restaurant called Sa Foradada. It does paella and the view is incredible. It sits on a cliff overlooking a cove. You can only get there by boat or if you walk down a hill for an hour. It's just the most incredible location.

'Ottolenghi Simple Too' by Yotam Ottolenghi and Verena Lochmuller (Ebury Press, £30) is out now. All photography by Jonathan Lovekin.

I like to think that I demand little in life for health and happiness besides a working fireplace, access to Spotify Premium and a functional railway system. Yet like all human beings, I have my gripes. Three things inspire opprobrium: British Airways; the website via which our office is forced to reserve a desk; and Southern Rail. Of the three, the latter is the worst, by the kind of country mile that it seems unable to journey through without breaking down.

UK trains, once a symbol of industrial advance, have become a laughing stock. At best, they are slow and the price of tickets ludicrously expensive. At worst, they are the bane of Britain, costing £1.5 billion in lost productivity each year. South-East England, our hottest region, is worst hit, with derailments and faltering infrastructure causing entire lines to shut down. Compensation via the Delay Repay scheme now surpasses £150 million per annum.

Patience is wearing thin — particularly for those in commuter towns who are also reliant on cars and forced to contend with sky-high parking costs up to five days a week (most station car parks now charge some £10 a day). The Telegraph revealed in July that passengers had lost at least 42 million hours to delays and cancellations since last summer, a figure no doubt matched by the hours spent lamenting the problem. Trains are both a political lightning rod (Labour and the Green Party want to renationalise our railways) and a flashpoint at dinner parties. If all roads lead to Rome, all railroads must lead to anger-management classes.

Successive governments have promised track upgrades and a ‘streamlining’ of ticket prices; yet Labour’s strategy — to bring the latter down and funnel all projects through a single channel — is managerial, at best. It will take more than one term in office to see through any pledges. To move past such sclerosis, the debate ought to move to design. Most of our carriers have a monopoly on the line that they serve. Using an Open Access system to spur competition — and build better trains — is the fastest way to bring down prices. The Government should also make track upgrades a national priority, diverting public money currently being spent elsewhere. Trust me: it’s better spent here.

In the meantime, one could do worse than to take a leaf out of Stop! That! Train!, the cinematic event du jour co-produced by RuPaul Charles (creator of RuPaul’s Drag Race). The film unfolds within a ‘Glamazonian Express’ train hurtling towards a ‘stormaganza’, with five drag queens manning the convoy. It is a masterclass in glamour and absurdity. We already have the latter; why not both?

Sticky fingers

More than 65 works of art have been ‘misplaced’ from the Houses of Parliament since 2024, according to reports — including a portrait of Benjamin Disraeli and a 19th-century engraving print of William Wilberforce. This is not unusual: a freedom of information request issued by The Times in 2018 found more than 220 artworks had been lost in the parliamentary post, labelled ‘missing’ on the internal system. Politicians? Nicking stuff? Well, I never!

Neither is it unusual for these to magically reappear. As my late grandfather, a man of disorderly ways, often said of misplaced bills and invoices: ‘It’ll turn up.’ We must continue to hope ‘it’ does: the parliamentary collection is said to be worth more than £10 million. Nothing to be sniffed at, although mere pennies besides the collections housed at various members’ clubs (The George in Mayfair owns several works by David Hockney), and where sticky fingers have allegedly pocketed stuff every now and again.

Architectural ironies

An urgent repair order was issued last month to the proprietor of Mentmore Towers, a Grade I-listed building in Buckinghamshire that was once home to the Rothschild family. The home is uninhabited and the roof deteriorating.

Owned since 1999 by property developer Simon Halabi (net worth: £2 billion in 2008), plans to build a hotel and conference centre on site never materialised and the country club and golf course that used to be on the site closed in 2015. The house is of the utmost significance, being the principle extant work of Joseph Paxton (designer of the Crystal Palace) and arguably the pinnacle of Jacobethan Revival style in England. It could be the next Wentworth Woodhouse. Why isn’t it?

From this debacle, however, one of the funnier architectural ironies of 2026 has arisen. Mentmore Towers was used as the location of Wayne Manor in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins from 2005; bat droppings were identified by Historic England during its site inspection, prompting the issue of a compulsory bat survey.

You reap what you sow.

This feature originally appeared in the September 2, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

In spite of their propaganda effort with the Bayeux Tapestry, the Normans have generally had a bad press. Sweeping like mailed gauleiters across the face of Anglo-Saxon England after 1066, they were certainly violent and greedy — yet no one can deny that they had energy or that they transformed England in ways that have since rippled across the globe.

Across the country, they rapidly flung up mottes and baileys, those earthen hills topped by a wooden palisade and a rough, fortified dwelling. Rebellions were repressed with iron-fisted severity. By the time the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, swathes of Yorkshire and Durham were described as ‘wasta’, testament to the scorched-earth policies they adopted in the grim Harrying of the North. Those Anglo-Saxon nobles, the thegns (or thanes), who survived Hastings were dispossessed: in a generation, 95% of their lands had been turned over to Norman knights. Most of the people who lived on those lands became serfs, trapped in the intricate hierarchy of the new feudal system.

The English Church — the seat not only of faith, but of learning, gentility and art — was likewise purged. The last Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury, Stigand, was replaced by a French monk, Lanfranc, in 1070 and the whole church hierarchy was restaffed with Continental bishops and clergy, with papal blessing. Close on the heels of the clergy came the lawyers, as the old system of shire government met the strictures of Roman law, which favoured the Crown.

Small wonder, then, that, over time, the Norman settlement seemed to cast a baleful shadow across the sunlit uplands of Anglo-Saxon England. The country, people said, groaned under the Norman yoke. The Diggers and Levellers of the Civil War looked back to pre-Norman England as a golden age for the working man. Thomas Jefferson took the free, egalitarian Anglo-Saxons as his model for America and considered the Normans to be a bunch of carpetbagging foreign toffs. Victorian Protestants admired pre-Conquest England as a land beyond Romish influence; even Monty Python condemned the Normans as rude and snobbish. ‘Your mother,’ says a castle guard in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with a thick French accent, ‘was a hamster, and your father smells of elderberries.’

William of Malmesbury was a 12th-century historian with a Norman father and English mother and took quite a different line. The incomers, he wrote, ‘breathed new life into religious standards, which had been declining everywhere, so that now you may see churches and monasteries rising in a new style of architecture in all the towns, villages, and country places’.

A whitish freestone the Normans brought from Caen in France was the foundation of the new style. It takes carving easily and was used liberally. From an intricate chancel arch at St Peter’s in Tickencote, Rutland, to the rounded apse of London’s St Bartholomew the Great, Norman churches exude an air of confidence, as simple as they are sublime — soaring to the indescribable glories of Durham Cathedral, work on which was begun in 1093. Embellished, damaged and restored down the centuries, the stone churches the Normans built for their new estates remain today at the heart of the English parish system.

The Normans were especially keen on towers. They experimented at Caen in 1067 and swiftly brought the idea across the Channel. By the time of Henry I’s death in 1135, every Saxon cathedral in England, at Winchester and Rochester as at Worcester and Ely, had been torn down and rebuilt in a massive Romanesque style, with suitable towers (even before the Conquest, Edward the Confessor, brought up in Normandy, used Norman masons at Westminster Abbey and sent Norman knights to build castles along the Welsh border).

Then, the Normans gave us French. Nobody knows how these Norse men managed to learn French so quickly themselves, having arrived in Normandy as rude Vikings barely a century earlier, but they did. The English, typically, eventually managed to cram French vocab from the Normans, but utterly failed to master the grammar. By the time we gave up the effort and reverted to writing in English (Henry IV, who reigned from 1399, was the first king to speak English), we had absorbed thousands of words. In particular, French terms for government and law made their way into common English, words such as parliament, court, jury, justice, crown, tax, prison, judge and verdict.

The result of the collision of Norman French and Old English is a language truffled with French terms and equivalents, such as royal/kingly, enquire/ask, insane/mad. The French equivalent still implies status, so although you might live in a flat, you offer to sell an apartment. Curiously, scholars dismiss the widespread belief that as the lords ate beef and pork, the peasants looked after cows and pigs. The so-called Norman food myth ignores the fact that the way the words are used today only began 500 years after the Conquest and may simply reflect the later prestige of French cuisine.

Much of what the Normans introduced to England in brutal and simple form would mellow into something more suited to the English temperament. The free and easy Saxons never bothered much with castles, but the Normans were wild for them, creating architectural marvels such as the White Tower at the Tower of London or Rochester Castle in Kent, which thrill the visitor to this day. Castles were useful for subduing the locals and good insurance against being murdered in your bed by the disgruntled peasantry you had just reduced to serfdom.

The feudal system, which the Normans imposed on England, buttressed by those forbidding castles, tended to produce a highly tenacious landowning class with a firm grip on its acreage and a penchant for deer parks and productive farms. Soon, aristocrats were to be found adding creature comforts to their strongholds and hanging their halls with self-aggrandising mottos and escutcheons (it was the Normans who wore devices on their shields, to identify them in battle, which slowly morphed into the intricate glories of 13th-century heraldry).

Having established the pattern, the baronial landholding softened in style as the centuries rolled by. The grip, however, remained firm. Castles, chilly and cramped, gave way to manor houses and fine country houses, ‘amidst their tall ancestral trees’. English estates came complete with home farm, deer park and hunting rights and, sometimes, even a surname (Old French sur and nom) based on their location. The feudal idea of land as the basis of hereditary rank, held from the Crown, was buttressed by the idea of primogeniture, which saw estates pass down intact to a single heir, rather than being divided among children. Primogeniture wasn’t a direct Norman import, in the way of fallow deer or escutcheons, yet it was implicit in how the law developed after 1066, reinforced by strict laws of entail.

Under the Normans, the shift from Winchester to London accelerated, not least because English trade, in wool especially, now ran in a southerly direction. Wine came back together with the stone and so did the skills to maintain and expand the English wine industry. The conquerors also brought fallow deer for the hunt, as well as introducing dovecotes for pigeon flesh, eggs, manure and feathers. As to whether the Normans brought rabbits, the jury — something else they introduced — is out on that one.

Dovecotes and vineyards appear in the Domesday Book, commissioned two decades after the Conquest and completed in only two years. A unique investigation into rights, duties, landholdings and resources, nothing like it was to appear anywhere in Europe for another 800 years. The Anglo-Saxons had laid the administrative groundwork, but it was the Normans that made the system serve central government, so the Crown could tax, adjudicate and govern England with confident precision. Named for the chequered cloth that covered the counting-table and making twice-yearly audits at Easter and Michaelmas, the Exchequer grew directly out of this Norman appetite for prying and recording — as did the concept of juries, embodied in those sworn juries of local men (English and Norman) that gave evidence to Domesday’s royal commissioners.

The Anglo-Norman amalgam worked so well and was so sophisticated for its time that it also shielded England from later developments in Continental law. Magna Carta, which curbed the power of the monarch and established the early notion of English liberties, was the consequence.

I wasn’t born with a double-barrelled name. It’s something I invented, and I’ll admit as to why. By the age of 13, I wanted to be taken seriously in Aston Martin showrooms. Often in life one has to overcome existential hurdles, and in this case the rather obvious hurdle was that I didn’t look anywhere near old enough to drive. Nor did I have the £80,000 in my Midland Live! Cash account needed to buy an Aston Martin. Yet, to my prodigiously strategic mind, a double-barrelled name suggested I might have a parent who had the readies and therefore, by gifting me a brochure for the new DB7, Stratstone of Mayfair was making a very wise publishing-based investment.

The truth is that my father, whose surname was Hay, had died and been replaced by a man called Nicholls, so that explains the eponym. With Bentley, Bugatti and McLaren all offering such inviting dealerships and particulars I wished to Blu Tack to my bedroom wall, the deed-poll paperwork was filed.

Others inherit these things from birth, which can be a mixed blessing. Sophia Patience Money-Coutts, of this parish, describes her nomenclature as ‘laughable… like the sort of soppy, button-nosed simpleton who keeps fainting in a Georgette Heyer novel.’ What makes it funny, of course, is it suggests she can’t get enough of the green stuff and, thanks to family connections, she — unlike the single-barrelled Nigel Farage — will never be de-banked. Sophia’s parents took an even greater liberty with her magician brother, Drummond, who shares his name with the Royal Bank of Scotland’s private arm. I mean, how many financial institutions can you squeeze onto one birth certificate?

The British tradition of double surnames comes from aristocratic estates that sought to preserve names that would have become extinct due to the absence of male heirs. This is how we wound up with the Spencer-Churchills and the Stopford-Sackvilles. Also, even the term ‘double-barrelled’ hints at an affinity for tweedy outdoor pursuits.

Having a double-barrelled name doesn’t mean that you come from money, of course, or, indeed, that you’re even posh; although when Sophia insists that you pronounce her name ‘So-Fire’ it feels like she might have been going for that after all.

More and more families are combining the mother and father’s surnames — something that feels very modern. What do we want? An end to the patriarchy. What do we need? A hyphenated compromise. But one does need to be careful that the two names work together. I know a Danish girl whose parents decided to combine their surnames, and as a result she goes by the eyebrow-raising name of Lise Munch-Busch. And just now, on the internet, I was reading about a couple who applied for an insurance quote: a Mr and Mrs Child-Harmer. I’m going to assume that the Child-Harmer clan doesn’t date back to the Norman conquest and was simply the result of too much prosecco at the registry office.

Monty Python was a font of excellent double-barrelled names. The Upper Class Twit of the Year sketch did as much to instil the compound name as aristocratic in the public consciousness as it did satirise it. Who can forget Nigel Incubator-Jones and Oliver St.John-Mollusc. Another Python character, Raymond Luxury-Yacht, insisted that his surname was pronounced very differently from how it was spelt. ‘It’s pronounced Throatwarbler-Mangrove.’

To hyphen or not to hyphen? It’s a personal choice; one doesn’t indicate it’s posher than the other. Tom Parker Bowles, also of this parish, is sans-hyphen, as is Iain Duncan Smith, Kristin Scott Thomas and Helena Bonham Carter (although some of her relatives disagree). I doubt The Queen’s son has this problem, but the danger is people will assume it’s a middle name. And people who go by their full names have a tendency to try and assassinate the American president. Shout out to John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald there. I can only assume it was this confusion that led Prime Minister David Lloyd George to add a hyphen upon his elevation to the peerage.

Of course, if you want to be really silly, why stop at two-barrels? Why not have an entire Gatling gun of surnames. The Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpes and Van-Tempest-Stewarts are fundamentally outflanked by quadruple-barrellers such as the 9^th Baron Thurlow, Roualeyn Robert Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce (b.1952) and the champion quintuple-shooter Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville (ret.), from which one could claim four houses at Stowe!

Size matters in this game. The longest name on record in England was that of a British Army captain who died at the Somme in 1917. His name was Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache. His father wasn’t a landowner. The only slightly silly sounding Ralph William Lyonel Tollemache-Tollemache was, in fact, a bankrupt priest. Like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Tollemache-Tollemache senior took eccentric pleasure in giving his 15 children absurd names.

The perception of poshness often increases with anything that whiffs of deposed European royalty. A ‘von’ or a ‘de’ or a ‘du’ confers an automatic sense of entitlement. If you’re a de Beaufort or a von Bismarck, you’ll get party invitations based on the ‘of’ alone. Sometimes you don’t need an ‘of’ or a double-barrel. I’d suggest the surnames Rothschild and Astor can get you past any velvet rope. But they’re not much fun, are they? So let us tip our hats to the man who created the world’s longest and most unhinged name of them all. A name so long it’d take up half the phone book and is about to put me well over my character-count.

He was a German-American typesetter born Hubert Blaine Wolfstern in 1914. That wasn’t interesting enough for Wolfstern, so when he left Germany to settle in Philadelphia on the eve of WWII he changed it. He decided to take 26 christian names for each letter of the alphabet, and to give his surname a limousine-like extension. Please be upstanding for Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus...

(Deep breath)...

Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorffwelchevoralternwarengewissen-haftschaferswessenschafewarenwohlgepflegeundsorgfaltigkeit-beschutzenvonangreifendurchihrraubgierigfeindewelchevoraltern-zwolftausendjahresvorandieerscheinenvanderersteerdemenschderraum-schiffgebrauchlichtalsseinursprungvonkraftgestartseinlangefahrthin-zwischensternartigraumaufdersuchenachdiesternwelchegehabt-bewohnbarplanetenkreisedrehensichundwohinderneurasse-vonverstandigmenschlichkeitkonntefortpflanzenundsicher-freuenanlebenslanglichfreudeundruhemitnichteinfurcht-orangreifenvonandererintelligentgeschopfsvonhinz wischensternartigraum.

[Ed note: we have had to insert hyphens into the name, otherwise it wouldn't fit on the page. The name does not in fact have any hyphens.]

That is a 604-letter surname. This typesetter really loved type, didn’t he? It wasn’t always practical when filling out forms though, making introductions and suchlike, so he would often go by the more modest Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff. In an interview in 1965, he explained the benefits of having an unusual name. ‘When somebody calls my name, I don’t have any trouble finding out who they mean… I don’t like being part of the common herd.