A note confirming the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is among the 70,000 pieces of literary history that members of the public can now browse online, thanks to the recent digitisation of the London Library’s membership records.

The ledgers and membership forms, which list the library’s many notable members from 1841, had previously been stored in some 300 tightly bound, fragile volumes.

‘My question was, how can we save this most precious part of the library’s history and make it accessible to everyone?’ said Nathalie Belkin, the institution’s first dedicated archivist, who took up the post in 2019. Over almost two years, each volume was carefully disbound by Oxfordshire specialist Temple Bookbinders, before every individual page was scanned and transcribed by heritage digitisation firm TownsWeb.

The process revealed some surprises — even for those already very familiar with the archive. ‘We had Conan Doyle’s membership form, but we didn’t know there was a notification of his death among the records,’ said Belkin. Another discovery was that the playwright Terence Rattigan (1911–77) actually joined the library twice: once as a student and again after finding success.

Founded by Thomas Carlyle in 1841, the London Library moved to its present home in St James’s Square in 1845. Among its many treasures are a 1611 King James Bible and a Fourth Folio of Shakespeare. Its list of members features Alfred Lord Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh and Daphne du Maurier.

It has appeared in several novels, too, such as On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Ian Fleming was a member) and A. S. Byatt’s Possession.

The London Library is an institution like no other and members have access to every issue of Country Life ever published. Click here to read Emma Hughes's 2025 feature on what it is that makes it tick.
This feature originally appeared in the July 29, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Reeta Chakrabarti has been in my living room more than a thousand times, but we have never met until now. It’s easy to have a parasocial relationship with the journalist, presenter and, more recently, author because she’s such a familiar face on BBC News, but it is hard in truth to truly know her.

‘There’s not much about me [online] because I have always guarded my privacy fairly carefully,’ she says. ‘I don’t give too much away and I like to maintain barriers between professional and public life.’ She strongly believes that journalists should report with impartiality. ‘Most journalists understand this, but there are some out there who put themselves at the centre of the story, and I don’t think you should.’

Nevertheless, Reeta has a book out, and while it is fictional she admits that the process of promoting it has been much more personal than presenting the news. Her first novel, Finding Belle, was published in May last year and her second novel, An Impossible Woman, is due to be published in 2027. She will be speaking about them at The Queen’s Reading Room Festival in Derbyshire on September 19-20.

The whole process has shown a much softer side of her. When we meet at a cafe near Broadcasting House (for convenience, of course) Reeta is softly spoken, composed and kind — asking me how I’m faring in yet another of this year’s sweltering heatwaves. Off duty she is very different to how she is on the job.

Reeta was born in 1964 in London to an Indian-Bengali family and raised in Birmingham and Hull. She lived in Calcutta (now Kolkata) as a teenager before studying English and French at Exeter College, University of Oxford, after which she became a journalist.

‘I wanted to be a journalist when I was about 10,’ she recalls. ‘I had all sorts of ambitions, and the only feasible one was to be a journalist. The others were: secret agent, astronaut or Wimbledon winner.’

Her first role was as a freelance reporter for the Arts pages of a local newspaper in Birmingham, but her heart was always in news. She originally joined the Beeb as a Radio 4 producer on the Today programme, The World at One and PM, before pivoting to reporting on 5 Live Breakfast.

Later, as a community affairs correspondent, she covered the Stephen Lawrence inquest and Damilola Taylor’s murder trial. As a political correspondent, she reported on three general elections and she was in Lviv, Ukraine, just ten days after the 2022 Russian invasion and in Israel two weeks after the October 7, 2023, attacks.

She is married to Paul Hamilton, a former English professor at Queen Mary University of London, with whom she shares three children. The pair met at university and now live together in North London.

Did he worry when she’ was working in war-torn countries? ‘Definitely,’ says Reeta, ‘but I had talked to him each time before saying yes and he was wise enough to know that he shouldn’t stand in my way.’ Now that I’ve met her, I agree that this is wise indeed.

Your aesthetic hero

I love the way that some French actresses look — like Juliette Binoche. This is sort of unattainable, but also the model Inès de La Fressange. I mean, it’s their professional role to look the way that they do, but they do that while somehow being full of character. They are fully themselves. Charlotte Gainsbourg as well — she’s someone who puts on jeans and a T-shirt and just looks amazing.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

Well, I buy an awful lot of clothes, so that’s not really of note, but we went to Rome a couple of weeks ago and I bought something that I’ve coveted for a long time: a red handbag. Italian bags are just so gorgeous.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

Recently, we went to the Lee Miller exhibition. It was really fascinating. I didn’t really know much about her, but she seems like a woman who really grabbed her own destiny. She was in front of the camera, unbelievably beautiful, got bored of it, had an affair with Man Ray, lived in Paris and then came back to Britain to write for Vogue and became their war correspondent. Then eventually she did cookery books. I love that. I love women who don’t live within constraints.

A possession you’d never sell

It has to be something to do with my children's childhood — something sentimental. We have a great big teddy bear that my husband gave me when I was pregnant with our first child. He is called Picasso and he belonged to me and my first born, and I still have Picasso.

Your favourite painting

I’m fascinated by an Indian-Hungarian painter called Amrita Sher-Gil [the subject of Reeta’s upcoming book]. She’s not that well known in the west. She lived about 100 years ago and died tragically aged 28. She's a brilliant painter, a real colourist — absolutely fantastic. She’s got a very interesting life story and painted these amazing canvases of ordinary people who were very sad and melancholy. They were people who had no control over their lives and the poverty that had been handed to them.

Out of all of her paintings I’d choose one called Two Girls. It’s an extraordinary picture of two naked women. One’s white and one’s brown. It’s a picture of tremendous intimacy. Are they lovers? They’re certainly not sisters. One has her arm around the other and the brown woman looks very soft and relaxed, while the white woman is almost expressionless. It’s a very mysterious painting — sort of erotic. I have puzzled over it a lot.

The music that you work to

I know that I could certainly not work to songs. Anything with lyrics would be distracting, but perhaps classical music or some not very characterful jazz, but maybe even that would be distracting. This is probably why I never have.

The last podcast you listened to

I listen to the news. I listen to Radio 4 a great deal, sometimes a bit of Times Radio. I do listen to the occasional podcast, like the Empire series. Also, Three Million by my colleague Kavita Puli — which was tremendous. It’s about the Bengal famine. I was just going to listen to half an hour in the gym and I listened to two and a half hours that morning.

A book you’ve found inspiring

That’s like asking: ‘Which is your favourite child?’. There’s just been so many. I guess I would choose books by women, just because I read a lot of classics when I was younger during my English degree. So, probably Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein. I read the latter late actually, in the last five years, which for someone of my vintage is very late. It blew me away. And she was 18 when she wrote it! There’s so much in it — and the fact that the monster of popular culture is not a monster at all, he just wants to be loved.

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

I mean, this sounds so utterly frivolous, but I would take lots of vats of face and body cream, because I’m a sucker for lotions and potions. So I might starve to death, but my skin would look great.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Just having a very busy diary — that gets me up. And I’ll often have a swim in the morning too. It’s very rhythmic and monotonous so it sorts your head out.

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

Wow, wouldn’t that be wonderful? It would be Indira Varma. She’s great. Much more statuesque than I am.

The items you collect

I’m not really a collector, I don't have that sort of personality, but the one thing I have got more than one of is an orchid. I have a little bookshelf with four on, and they’re all doing well. I’m not a gardener, I manage to kill most plants apart from these orchids. One is almost ten years old now.

A hotel you could go back and back to

I’ve been to so many hotels with work, but I think there are some in Kolkata — where most of my extended family is — worth mentioning. One is called the Fairlawn Hotel and the other is the Kenilworth Hotel.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

There’s no contest for this. Me and my husband, a long time ago, went through a phase of saving up to experience fine dining. We went to one restaurant, maybe in the 1990s, in Versailles. We had a huge ten course meal. We pigged ourselves and after course five I was wondering how I was going to manage. The last pudding was called ‘The Head of Marie Antoinette’. It was a large macaroon that you dipped into very thick chocolate. I didn’t eat for the whole following day. It was a great experience.

The best present you’ve ever received

For our 10th wedding anniversary my husband took me on a surprise visit to Venice, which was absolutely lovely. We had quite small children then and I remember feeling slightly panicky about it, but it was really wonderful.

In a different spirit, I’d say things my children gave me when they were very small. So, a necklace given to me by one and another pair of perfectly impossible-to-wear earrings from another.

Visit The Queen’s Reading Room Festival website for more information and to purchase a ticket to Reeta’s talk.

A few weeks before Christmas 1938, some nine months before the outbreak of the Second World War, a young stockbroker called Nicholas Winton was all packed and ready to go on a skiing holiday to Switzerland. A phone call from a friend, Martin Blake, changed his plans — and saved the life of hundreds of children.

Winton had long been aware of the threat of Nazism. His parents were German-Jews who'd left for England before the First World War, and though he lived a good life as a stockbroker he moved in Socialist circles, and was only too aware of the growing threat of Nazism. The Swiss holiday was cancelled, and he instead went to Prague to see what he could do to help.

What he found shocked him. Desperate families living in fear, appalling conditions in the camps where many Jews were already being held, and impossible red tape blocking any of them from leaving Czechoslovakia. He had no legal training and no experience in relocating people, but he set about seeing what he could do.

He took a hotel room in Prague and set it up as an office, working around the clock. Two weeks later, he had a huge list of children, their families, addresses and passport-style photographs, and headed back to London to try and find a way to get them out.

What followed was months of battling authorities, finding sponsor families happy to take the children in (a condition of the British government allowing them to stay) and putting in place financial guarantees intended to pay for the eventual return of the children to their families. He linked up with others trying to help refugees, notably the heroic Doreen Warriner, and set up his own office in London, run by his mother and staffed by volunteers. They begged and cajoled, negotiated and lobbied, even — by Winton's own admission — resorting to forging documents for some of the children when official channels were proving too slow.

Amazingly, it worked and train journeys across Europe began, eventually allowing 669 children, the vast majority of them Jewish, to traverse the continent and get on a ship to London.

For years, Winton barely told a soul about what he'd done. He'd never expected nor sought praise, and indeed remained heartbroken that more couldn't have been saved — the USA, among other countries, refused to allow any Czech refugee children in to the country. What was even more heartbreaking, was that a further trainload of 250 children were at the station, and indeed thought to have been sitting on the train ready to depart Prague for London on September 1, 1939. The start of the war meant that the train never left the station; only two of those children are thought to have made it through the war.

Recognition eventually came by chance when Winton's wife, Grete, found an old scrapbook in storage which had all the details of the work her husband had done. She contact the BBC, who told the story on an unforgettable episode of That's Life, in which Winton met many of the refugees he'd saved — most of whom had no idea how they'd escaped the country.

Those 669 children went on to have lives, careers, children and grandchildren of their own; a 60 Minutes programme about Winton which aired shortly before his death in 2015 estimated that some 15,000 people owe their lives to the north London stockbroker. If you do nothing else today, theThat's Life programme from 1989 and the 60 Minutes episode from 2014 are more than worth half an hour of your time. There's also a film of his life: One Life, starring Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham Carter — and if you happen to be in Prague, you'll find a statue of Winton at the railway station.

Fascinating though Winton's story is, you may be wondering what it has to do with the property section of Country Life. Well, the house built for Winton in the 1950s on the outskirts of Maidenhead has now hit the market with Hamptons for £3,850,000.

The current owners bought it in 2017, two years after Winton died at the age of 106. How wonderful that a man who did so much good lived a long and happy life.

Since then, it has been, in Hamptons’ words, ‘masterfully rebuilt from scratch, and reimagined into a distinguished state-of-the-art residence, combining architectural elegance with refined modern living’.

This striking contemporary home is largely wrapped in vertical timber cladding and features extensive Crittall-style glazing. If the Scandi aesthetic is your bag, then you’ll love this house.

Owner Hugh Chambers explains: ‘When we first saw New Ditton and heard the incredible story of Sir Nicholas Winton, we were inspired to build on his original architectural style, influenced by his Danish wife, and extend this into a light and contemporary Scandinavian look and feel.

‘The house we built is designed as both a warm family home as well as a spectacular entertaining space. We like to think that Sir Nicholas would have approved of the happiness and laughter that now fills his wonderful house.’

There are huge, bright living spaces throughout the home, thanks to floor-to-ceiling Crittall-style glazing both inside and out. The enormous kitchen and dining room deserves a particular shout-out. It’s split across two levels, with a white-panelled, vaulted ceiling and double-height glazed walls providing sweeping views across the garden.

Beyond it is a pantry and a laundry room as well as a bedroom with an ensuite.

Also on the ground floor are three reception rooms - drawing room, sitting room and study — all impeccably styled with a neutral colour palette that complements the contemporary design.

Upstairs, there are four bedrooms, each with an ensuite bathroom. The main bedroom even comes with two dressing areas.

According to Hamptons, modern finishes in the house include underfloor heating, B&W and Sonos sound systems, and full LAN data network. It seems no stone has been left unturned.

This extends to the grounds too, which are enclosed by old brick walls. There’s a large terrace, with a seating area anchored by beautiful olive trees, and carefully-maintained lawns and flower beds. A large football pitch is a reminder that despite its immaculate style, New Ditton is still very much a family home.

The grounds also include an annexe and an adjoining gym. There is planning permission in place to combine the two to create one large space. A separate garage, also timber clad, provides further storage.

Hamptons Prime agent Charles Wellbelove describes New Ditton as ‘a seamless architectural masterpiece’ with ‘beautiful landscape gardens offering immense seclusion and privacy’.

He adds: ‘This delightful and very comfortable home benefits with fantastic access to London especially by the Elizabeth Line located only a few miles away.’

New Ditton is for sale via Hamptons — see more details.

Zoë de Givenchy is having a ‘crazy’ summer. From Nantucket and the Hamptons, to London and Paris, there is nowhere she won’t be this season. Her lifestyle brand, ZdG, which she founded at the beginning of the Pandemic, takes her all over the world. Recently it has taken her to Versailles (ZdG has collaborated with luxury retailer Moda Operandi on their new ‘Le Potager du Roi’ collection).

Zoë’s instantly recognisable surname is courtesy of her husband. ‘It was definitely an “at first sight” thing,’ she says of their relationship. She met Olivier de Givenchy in London at a friend’s wedding. ‘He cut in on a dance, actually, grabbed my free hand and twirled me off,’ she recalls. ‘Afterwards, he followed me to Annabel’s.'

Olivier is a J.P. Morgan banker and the nephew of designer Hubert de Givenchy (1927-2018), who founded the famous fashion house. ‘With a surname like that comes certain expectations and preconceived notions… it can be an asset but it can also be a frustration, so I’m mindful of that with my children.’ Zoë has two children, a 10 year old and a 13 year old with Olivier, and two step children, both in their late twenties, from his previous relationship. It must make for a full house at home in Los Angeles, California, and on visits to their country house in France.

Born in Australia to her mother, an academic, and her father, who worked in real estate, Zoë was the middle child of three and the only girl. The designer has always been creative, but initially sought out a very different kind of career. ‘I always had my own gardens, I was drawing, arranging flowers with my mum,’ she says. ‘I was good at school and I loved debating. If you were bright you were encouraged to do something academic, so I sort of ignored my creative aspect and went to study law before ending up, in a roundabout way, being where I should be.’

‘I always thought that I was the clever one, but never the creative one,’ she says. It was through working in communications and brand development in the legal world, and then London’s banking district, that she came to have her own consulting firm. She sold it when she became pregnant with her first son.

‘I knew I needed to really focus on being a mummy, so that was great timing. Then I had the chance to be creative thereafter, and it’s been a wonderful journey of discovery.’ She says that she now takes this knowledge with her into parenting: ‘I’m careful not to label, because I think we take on what we are told.’

Your aesthetic hero

It has to be Hubert. He was just the best. If you look at his homes and the way that he created such grandeur, he had exceptional taste. One of my favourite things that he’s left for our family is his library. It’s extraordinary. He was a real student of history, art and culture. I remember once he gave me a rock wrapped in twine which was beautiful. He found it in Japan, and I remember thinking about the beauty of small and simple objects.

A possession you’d never sell

The portraits of my children by Julia Condon, who is a painter in London.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

Brâncuși, which was probably in 2024 at the Pompidou in Paris, because it was about creating a world. You got to step into his atelier and it was exceptional.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

A new Dior handbag. I’m obsessed with it. It’s wicker and I wear it every day. It’s so beautiful.

Your favourite painting

Those huge canvases by Rothko — in person they are so emotional. I think there was one with magenta and black, which is not a pairing I normally love, and a red and yellow one. It was actually something that surprised me, because I always thought they seemed a bit overrated, but they're extraordinary.

A book you’ve found inspiring

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I still reference it a lot. I feel like it’s very relevant now. It’s sort of a love story.

The music you work to

This might sound a bit strange, but I change music depending on the weather. On a rainy day I will put on jazz, so it feels like a coffee bar type vibe. On a sunny day I love 1960s and 1970s Californian music. Foggy day: classical.

The last podcast you listened to

A surfing podcast last night. My son made me listen to it, it’s so funny. Pinch My Salt, it’s called. They say ‘bro’ a lot and it’s really Californian. In general, I listen to a whole range. I love podcasts. I like Business of Home, Acquired, The World’s First Podcast, Lipstick on the Rim. I don’t mind a self-help podcast either, like Jay Shetty’s podcast. Also Ruthie’s Table, Mel Robbins's podcast and Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis Dreyfus.

Who would play you in a film of your life

Oh my god, how boring would that be? Um… probably Rose Byrne, because everyone says I look a bit like her and she was also raised in Australia, and she’s funny.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

A coffee machine.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

The school run.

The items you collect

Plants. My latest thing is a Japanese quince. Also, I just love Monty Don. I want to meet him. Whenever I have Gardeners' World on the telly my husband says: ‘Oh my God, you’re going to run away with Monty Don.’

A hotel you could go back and back to

Anything by Les Airelles. Lately we went to their one in Saint Tropez. That hotel group really knows how to do incredible service.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

The Noma pop up, here in LA. It was nearly emotional, it was so extraordinary. It almost rendered me speechless.

The best present you’ve ever received

My husband bought me a quite rare Cartier pendant from the 70s. It’s called the Golden Fleece and looks like a ram (I’m an Aries). He attached it to a black silk cord and it’s just the coolest thing. He has an exceptional eye.

Visit the ZdG website for more information and to shop.

Who would have thought the victim of a murder could make a piece of good dining-room art? Yet, for those sitting around the table at Ston Easton Park, Somerset, it proved an ideal conversation starter. It brought out the Agatha Christie in everyone and, in its own dark way, did exactly what dining-room art is meant to do: give people something to talk about.

The story of the painting made a particular impression on author Emma Craigie, not least because the murder was meant to have taken place at Ston Easton itself, where she spent an influential part of her childhood. ‘The painting was called Four Servants of Ston Easton Estate. It was by Thomas Beach, a pupil of Reynolds,’ she explains. ‘It featured, as its name suggests, four servants (unusual in itself), one of whom, a maid, was said to have been murdered. In an attic room of the house, there was a dark stain on the floor. My dad always said it was the blood of the maid who had been killed. The painting was like having a thriller on the wall.’

Not every house can count on an artistic murder mystery to entertain guests, however, and the question of what makes good dining-room art is an issue that new country-house owners also appear to be facing: Charlie Thomas of Bonhams has noticed that, post-covid, ‘many people who had lived in major cities moved into much larger houses and suddenly found themselves with extra rooms to fill — including the dining room. They started with the table, chairs and sideboard and then realised they needed the art on the walls, too’. What, indeed, were they to put?

The answer, it seems, is that almost anything can work, as long as it fulfils certain criteria. ‘Bear in mind,’ says art dealer, writer and broadcaster Philip Mould, ‘that a dining room is a place where people are often seated in the same spot for two or three hours — without escape. Its walls, therefore, offer a unique opportunity for contemplation.’ Historically, Mould points out, the trend was for still lifes of animals, fowl, fruit, game and flowers, ‘the work of painters such as Melchior d’Hondecoeter and Jan Weenix, no doubt intended in part to aid digestion’. However, his own preference is for modern British portraits, ‘works that bring recognisable humanity to the gathering, spark conversation and offer someone else to commune with once you have exhausted those on your left and right’.

Like Mould, interior designer Jane Churchill believes that, ‘if you’ve got anything that’s going to be a talking point, into the dining room it goes’. She also stresses that, ‘when it comes to dining art, things are a lot less formal’ than in the past — the kitchen has increasingly become a favoured eating area. ‘Where once the old family portraits dominated rather dark dining rooms, we now see clients being a lot more creative and colourful. We had a client who had some wonderful Picasso prints that needed a good audience. Her solution was to display them on the far wall and create an open bookcase alongside, with pots, books and china. Her own favourite is a modern ink-on-paper piece featuring a bright pink butterfly by Sarah Graham.’

Don’t ‘put people off their food’ is the golden rule of natural-pigment paint evangelist and country-house interior designer Edward Bulmer. ‘Not long ago, I had dinner in a large Victorian dining room. Across the wide mahogany table was a full-length St Sebastian commanding the height of the wall and the centre of the room. The flesh oozing blood from the arrows of his martyrdom was hardly a conducive sight.’

Another tip is to choose pictures that appeal to the entire family, if the dining room is one that you use informally at home. In his Herefordshire home, Bulmer once hung The Flagellation of Christ at the Column by Jean Baptiste van Loo. ‘I saw it as a beautifully rendered figure. However, this is not what my daughters felt and one day they asked if we really had to have all the “old pictures” in that room.’ The new works he’s placed on the walls are now ‘a mixture of commissions and acquisitions, all from friends, and so have become a much more meaningful talking point for all generations’.

Statistically, says Thomas, reflecting on content sales handled by Bonhams, ‘if you are going to work out a percentage of what we see in country-house dining rooms, portraits win’. When it comes to what is actually bought, portraits by recognised artists are consistent successes. He calls ‘orphans’ the pictures where the identity of the sitters is unknown and suggests that one solution to the dining-room art conundrum could be to buy these orphans and cover the walls with them en masse. He has seen this done to striking effect in a French château.

The late Martin Miller, antiquarian and co-founder of the Miller’s Antiques Handbook & Price Guide, also used to do this incredibly well in his own houses, buying up quantities of similar prints or paintings to cover the walls with them. When it comes to portraits, however, interior designer Lucy Manners, who lives, with her husband, James Hervey-Bathurst, in the historic setting of Eastnor Castle, cautions that some country-house dining rooms can be very similar, ‘with walls hung exclusively with ancestors, many of whom are not particularly handsome or beautiful. It works better when there are some paintings by good artists and if those paintings are well lit, which is what we have done at Eastnor’.

In such cases, she recommends introducing variety into the hang: a strong modern work, for example, can reset the entire room. ‘I saw a Lucian Freud in one dining room recently, which worked very well because it was so strong.’ A particularly celebrated example of a dining room peppered with portraits is the State Dining Room at Knowsley Hall, Merseyside, home to the Earl and Countess of Derby. When Lady Derby, an art historian by training, arrived, she found that ‘all the portraits were jumbled up in no particular order’. She promptly took them down, unframed them for surface cleaning and frame conservation and rehung them in pairs, arranged in chronological order of succession. ‘I find them very useful for explaining the 600-year history of the Stanley family.’

Her personal favourite is a portrait with a distinctly pioneering backstory: Lady Margaret Beaufort, painted by the English School as a femme seule, a rare position that allowed her to administer her own estate rather than cede control to her husband, Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby. As Lady Derby notes, ‘Beaufort was both the first Countess of Derby and the King’s mother to Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty’.

In the family’s private dining room, where storytelling remains just as important, but the mood is more relaxed, the emphasis shifts from dynastic history to personal narrative. ‘We have a charming Romney of the children of the 12th Earl of Derby, Edward, later the 13th Earl, and his sister Charlotte, both looking rather wistful and sad. Their mother ran off when they were little and their father was pursuing a famous actress in London, so the siblings became very close.’

Perhaps one of the most extraordinary dining rooms in the country is at Trafalgar Park in Wiltshire. When political adviser Michael Wade bought the house (which he has since sold) in 1995, much of it had fallen into ruin. The first thing he did was to restore the old Music Room — featuring a mural painted by Giovanni Battista Cipriani in 1766 — and turn it into a dining room. ‘It depicted romantic paintings of Aphrodite, the Three Graces and Shakespeare. The ceiling and wall areas below the dado rail were decorated so as to frame the mural. The result was to provide a sumptuous immersion when dining at night by candlelight.’

It is a reminder that a mural is not merely decorative, but one of the most powerful ways of transforming a dining room into a complete visual experience — and one that certainly provides a talking point. Whether you opt for mythological murals or Picasso prints, the best dining-room pictures perform their oldest duty: they break the ice, warm up the conversation and occasionally steal the show.

Long before the pudding arrives, someone, somewhere, will always lean forward and ask: ‘So, what’s that one about?’ — especially if it happens to depict the victim of a murder.

What, pray tell, is the greatest artwork of our time? For Spectator editor Michael Gove, a staffer once told me, the answer is none other than the films of Christopher Nolan. Yet this view failed to materialise when the Speccie ran a feature on 21st-century masterpieces last year (the coveted accolade went instead to Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, Channel 4’s adaptation of Sugar Rush by Julie Burchill, and others). Gove, allegedly, had suggested that Nolan’s films also be in contention. Staffers disagreed. Their magazine could not, and should not, be seen as pandering to Hollywood.

Refuting the blockbuster might have made sense were one to erase the epic from artistic history. Yet the genre of The Aeneid and of Paradise Lost is currently enjoying a resurgence. Nolan’s latest effort, The Odyssey, opened last Friday to critical and commercial acclaim: the umpteenth adaptation of Homer’s ancient poem and, akin to the translation it used as source material (Emily Wilson’s, from 2017), set to be the definitive.

It has become unfashionable for artists, whether they be painters or filmmakers, to dwell much on the everyday. The epic offers an antidote to contemporary art’s obsession with banality: the threat of war, surveillance culture and eco catastrophe means audiences have shifted away from stories that deal with relatable absurdities and towards those that grapple with more classical themes such as death, power and fate. The most recent film to win Best Picture at the Oscars, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, explores the theme of heroism in a thinly veiled satire of modern-day America. Kane Parsons’s Backrooms, the movie event of 2026 before The Odyssey came along, gives banality the epic treatment through a seemingly interminable journey into the ghostly, liminal spaces opened up by existential dread.

Nolan, too, is interested both in heroism and the immensity of the world. In 2014, Interstellar followed astronauts searching for a home beyond Earth. 2023’s Oppenheimer explored the journey of a man lionised for his military contributions and later castigated for expressing a conscience. These are the hallmarks of the modern-day epic — and a neat fit for our Odyssean times. Not for nothing have pundits spent the weeks leading up to The Odyssey’s release invoking Homeric epithets wherever the political context appeared relevant.

The modern condition is no longer served by art that edifies ennui. A film like The Odyssey — gargantuan, pedigreed, obsessed with scale — feels far more emblematic of our strange and itinerant times.

This feature appears in the July 22, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

At this year’s Hay Festival, I was lucky enough to see two out of three of my favourite contemporary female authors — Elizabeth Strout and Maggie O’Farrell. As for the third, alas I was three years behind the curve. Margaret Atwood’s last appearance on stage at Hay was in 2023 and there is no knowing when the 86-year-old Canadian might be back.

Her name cropped up again a couple of weeks later, however, over coffee with a Norwegian travel colleague whose company, Up Norway, designs highly personalised, expertly delivered trips to Norway and the Nordic countries (take note should a holiday to that part of the world be on your agenda). She told me of an extraordinary literary art project in Oslo, now in its 12th year, and I was instantly hooked.

Future Library is the brainchild of Scottish conceptual artist Katie Paterson, who has been doing weird and wonderful things in the art world for several years — often in collaboration with scientists and scientific researchers.

Among her notable works are the broadcast sound of melting glaciers, a map of some 27,000 dead stars and a lightbulb designed to simulate the experience of moonlight. A library, by comparison, might seem somewhat mundane.

Paterson’s library, however, is not exactly as it might sound. This is a 100-year ‘living artwork’, commissioned as part of Oslo’s cultural Slow Space public art programme, with a distinct beginning, middle and end.

The project started in 2014 with the felling of an area of trees within the Nordmarka Forest on the edge of the city to make way for the planting of 1,000 spruce saplings. The felled trees were to be used in the construction of a special ‘Silent Room’ within the Deichman Bjørvika Public Library where Future Library would be housed; the new spruce trees would be used in 2114, 100 years on, as paper for the printing of the library’s contents.

The middle part is where the project takes a more intriguing turn. Each year, from 2014 onwards, a writer of global standing would be asked by the trustees of Future Library (an evolving group as time goes by) to contribute an original written work of any length and in any literary genre, with only one catch. Apart from its title, each work would remain unread and unpublished, sealed within a thin, illuminated glass drawer of the Silent Room’s walls, until 2114, when a limited-edition anthology of all the manuscripts would be printed.

First up to contribute to Future Library was Atwood, with a work titled Scribbler Moon. We know no more than that. Since then, nine further writers, including the brilliant Turkish-British author Elif Shafak, have submitted manuscripts and two more, American writers Tommy Orange and Amitav Ghosh, joined the fold on June 28. Their handing-over ceremony, as did those before them, took place amid the spruce-tree plantation in Nordmarka Forest, their works representing 2024 and 2025 respectively.

The big reveal of 2026’s writer is expected imminently. The Silent Room, therefore, its curvaceous interior fashioned from 100 concentric layers of wood like the growth rings of a tree, now has 12 full drawers with another 88 to go.

How many of these, one wonders, will be filled with manuscripts by people who are yet to be born and how many people alive today will ever get to read them? The City of Oslo and the Future Library Trust have signed a 100-year contract guaranteeing the protection of Nordmarka Forest, the Silent Room and the manuscripts, but who is to say how the world might have changed by 2114. Perhaps humans won’t be reading books anymore, perhaps libraries will be a thing of the past and perhaps, God forbid, no one will care a fig about Atwood.

This feature originally appeared in the July 1, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

'I was so lucky getting mono,’ coos Mira Sorvino as Romy White in 1997’s Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. ‘That was, like, the best diet ever.’ She and her best friend are reflecting on their senior prom ahead of their cohort’s first decennial meet-up, preparing to face the hierarchical world of secondary school once more. What could possibly go wrong? It turns out, everything.

Summer is prime time for the alumni gathering. People flock back, often begrudgingly, to the schools that made them who they are. Anxieties run high, yet the pull is gravitational. Who’s got married? Divorced? Had children? Come out of the closet? Where does everyone live? Who now owns their own home? Whose businesses have succeeded? Whose have failed?

The older one becomes, the more the points of comparison multiply. Who is still in good health? Who, indeed, is still alive? Curiosity always wins out; either that, or we have a repressed teenager within each of us keen to prove ourselves and craving the approval of peers we once deemed superior.

My first sixth-form reunion is taking place in September, 10 years and two months after we left. ‘There’s no escaping it,’ says a friend (I’ll bet: ours is happening on a boat). I have to hand it to the organisers, who decided to take charge once it became clear that our school had forgotten to arrange anything: a far cry from Harrow, which hosts its annual Founders Day in March and invites old boys back to the Hill to play Harrow Football against sixth formers in their old house.

‘It’s a great day out,’ says an old Harrovian. ‘No talk about work or weddings: we just run around the mud getting generally embarrassed about how much less fit we are than our 18-year-old counterparts.’ Not all school reunions are created equal. Some prior attendees mention the worst of their pubescent fears coming home to roost. ‘We all need our heroes,’ one tells me, ‘and I was shattered to find that the person I idolised most at school now led an ordinary life. It was depressing.’ An old Paulina reveals that she once tried to organise a reunion only to face resistance from a group who couldn’t believe that she, a one-time it-girl, was thinking of inviting them. ‘You’re having us on,’ they told her.

Some will organise games. Others, addresses. The most outlandish will involve rituals. For most, however, the school reunion is an occasion to confront the potential reality that the best years of our lives are behind us. ‘I bloody hope not,’ says an old Radleian. ‘Imagine how sad it would have been to peak at school!’ Here's hoping you didn't.

This feature originally appeared in the July 15, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It was written in the stars, perhaps. All signs pointed towards Sir Michael and Clare, Lady Morpurgo ending up together. Their love story began long before either of them was born; before they had met, their ancestors' paths had crossed multiple times.

In the 1780s, James Dunn, an ancestor of Clare’s, saved a man's life. That man was John Wesley, Michael’s ancestor. This is just the first of an almost unbelievable set of connections that have been pulling Michael and Clare towards one another over the years.

The second has to do with publishing. Clare’s father Sir Allen Lane co-founded Penguin Books, which had a lot to do with the encouragement of his mentor, John Lane (who Allen took his surname from — this is a long story). At the beginning of the First World War, Michael’s grandfather Emile Cammaerts was setting-up a relief fund for Belgian orphans that had fled to Britain. To raise money for them, he decided to create a fundraising book. That book was published by John Lane.

The next connection came after the Second World War, when Allen Lane appointed a new history editor at Penguin Books — Jack Morpurgo, Michael’s step-father. And finally, in 1960, Allen Lane was in the dock of the Old Bailey for the Lady Chatterley Trial, accused of publishing an ‘obscene’ book. Clare was there with her mother to watch — as was Francis Cammaerts, Michael’s uncle. A distinguished teacher, Cammaerts was called as a defence witness in the trial and spoke in favour of Lane. Penguin Books won the case.

Clare and Michael finally met in Greece in the summer of 1962. It was ‘Coup de foudre,’ Michael writes in his new book Down Burrow Lane: Life and Love on the Farm, the launch of which will be ticketed and held at Netherwood Estate in Herefordshire on July 24. The book itself is published in September and is, as Michael writes, ‘in truth, mostly the story of Clare’.

He describes her as his ‘Juliet’ upon first meeting. ‘Tongue-tied, I was… Not a word could I utter. I simply gazed at her.’ Clare merrily admits that her first impressions matched up: ‘He was very gorgeous,’ she brags, although in his book Michael seems to remember things differently, recalling that Clare told her sister afterwards: ‘He’s fine, very sweet. Just right for you.’

That they were head over heels for one another, I have no doubt. The pair married aged 19 and 21 and, 63 years later when I meet them on a sunny day at Fulham Palace in London, they appear just as besotted with each other as ever.

I had set out to interview Michael alone — the author of War Horse, Private Peaceful, Kenzuke’s Kingdom and more besides is worthy of a solo slot. But then Clare arrived with him. She is bright and sparkly and doesn’t seem at all her age (84). It is she, I come to realise, who is the biggest part of the Michael Morpurgo story and, I suspect, it is Michael’s relationship with her that has inspired many of his best novels. Indeed, she mentioned he should look into horses in the war, which in part led to the writing of War Horse.

Fifty years ago, the pair started the charity Farms for City Children — a project to help school children who may not otherwise get to experience the countryside. This is the main subject of Down Burrow Lane. ‘The myth is that it is “Michael Morpurgo” who does this, and it is absolutely the opposite,’ Michael says. ‘Clare inspired the whole thing, right from the start — it was important to set the record right.’

Your aesthetic heroes

Michael: My hero is another writer whom I would very much like to model myself as, and that’s Robert Louis Stevenson. He was a lovely man and he had very strong principles. I have a great respect for him — he’s the writer I most want to be.

Clare: It’s not something I think about much, but I have just finished reading Brick Lane, by Monica Ali. I would love to meet her. It's a fantastic story, so I’d choose her. I haven’t got a hero like Michael, or a heroine. Joan of Arc used to be my hero, or heroine, but that answer is a bit antique these days, isn’t it?

Exhibitions that have impressed you

Michael: I remember going to a place in Amsterdam where there were a couple of hundred paintings by Van Gogh. It was interesting, actually, because you see them reproduced and reproduced and reproduced, and then suddenly you're standing in front of them, and it is a different thing to be there and close to them. I'm always fascinated by the lives of these people, particularly people like Van Gogh, who had no recognition whatsoever in their lifetime.

Clare: We went to Thomas Jefferson’s house, Monticello. It wasn't strictly an exhibition, but it was amazing to think about — that all that time ago, he brought so much stuff back from Europe. It was almost like a European house in America. It was very beautiful.

The last things of note that you bought for yourselves

Clare: Last week Michael bought me a hat — it’s a very sweet straw hat that is embroidered all over with daisies.

Michael: That was quite funny, actually, because we saw it in the shop, and she's very against buying new clothes. She thinks they should all be second hand, but she needed one because it was hot. Anyway, we bought it and we came out of the shop. I said: ‘It must be made by some wonderful designer because it’s so lovely, let’s look inside and see who it’s made by.’ And it said ‘Shein’.

Your favourite paintings

Clare: I used to say Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds by Constable, but I wouldn’t say that now. You say what you think, Michael. I’m just thinking.

Michael: I think the painting that has meant most to me is the one Clare’s wearing on her shirt [a Quentin Blake piece celebrating Farms for City Children]. I think he's a great artist. He has managed to capture [in this painting] in about four and a half geese and a child what the whole world is like for us down in Devon. So that’s why it's my favourite painting.

Clare: I tell you what I love, Eric Ravilious. And we knew his son very well too.

Michael: We both share Eric Ravilious, and I have Quentin Blake and she has Constable.

The possessions that you’d never sell

Clare: The silver teapot.

Michael: Ah, yes, the first thing we ever bought together. In Hampstead, when we were living in a £5-a-week flat — if you can believe that? — there was a wonderful silver shop, and this very lovely silver teapot and we had it and used it and used it and used it.

Clare: I’d never sell that.

The books you’ve found inspiring

Clare: Brick Lane, which I mentioned before and Stefan Zweig's Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman.

Michael: I think the book which I have dipped into the most over the years is a wonderful poetry anthology by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney called The Rattle Bag. It has about 500 poems inside and the wonderful thing about it is that you never tire. We keep it in our bathroom. It’s wonderfully familiar and, for me now, I think familiarity is quite important. Clare's very good, she reads new stuff. I tend to like the remembered things, and we knew Ted Hughes quite well — so the book is quite important to us anyway. I think a book that I really treasure has to have some kind of association to do with the people who made it.

Who would play both of you in a film of your lives

Michael: I’d probably like to be Paul Newman. She’s thinking: ‘Yeah, I’d like you to be Paul Newman too!’

Clare: No, I wouldn’t actually. I’d like you to be Gregory Peck. And, how about that lovely lady in the film for me?

Michael: Can I choose one too please? If you’re asking me to choose the love of my life on film, I’d pick Audrey Hepburn. They were in that film together called Roman Holiday.

The music you work to

Michael: Again, I think we now have favourites that we listen to pretty much again and again and again. Of the classical composers, I'm really rather transfixed by Mozart. I like choral music, church music of the 18th and 17th centuries, because that's what I used to sing when I was a young boy, but I also want to mention the Scottish group, The Proclaimers, and The Traveling Wilburys.

Clare: There was a lovely duo that we saw play classic guitar in Petworth. John Williams and Julian Bream. The other person that we love is Joan Baez. We are of our time.

The last podcasts you listened to

Clare: Michael listens to a lot.

Michael: Short History Of…, which I listen to a lot in the night, because there’s always one that I haven’t heard of.

Clare: I listen to the radio when it’s on, and that’s about it.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

Clare: The first thing that came into my head was a bathing costume, but I wouldn’t need one, would I? So probably, I’d take a knife.

Michael: To defend yourself or cut through things?

Clare: Everything. It would be very boring not to have a knife.

Michael: You’re so practical. That’s very interesting, because when I was on Desert Island Discs I didn’t know what to take, so I asked my granddaughter and she said a waterslide.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Michael: Um… [after a pointed look from Clare] getting breakfast for my wife. She’s not a great getter-upper.

The hotels you could go back and back to

Michael: When I was young we used to go to a hotel outside Venice, The Cipriani. It was wonderful because you’d wake up and open the window in the morning onto an extraordinary Italian landscape.

Clare: Another hotel is the Grandes Ecoles in Rue Cardinal behind the Panthéon. It has a garden which feels so huge in Paris, and blackbirds, and there are no televisions in the rooms. They are quite small rooms, as is the way in Paris, but they look after you nicely.

The most memorable meals you’ve ever eaten

Michael: Clare cooks a really good mushroom risotto, and I always look forward to that. And for pudding, just at the moment, I really like strawberries and yogurt.

Clare: I think probably a risotto or kedgeree.

The best presents you’ve ever received

Michael: This is the most difficult interview I’ve ever had.

Clare: You quite like surprises.

Michael: I do. Let’s see. I know it sounds strange but I actually think the pair of slippers you gave me one Christmas, which are unbelievably comfortable.

Clare: I am thinking of mine. Are you thinking what mine might be?

Michael: No, I am not going to tell you what you think.

Clare: Go on, think of something that I liked, and that I was surprised by.

Michael: Well, over the years I have given Clare jewellery from a wonderful Jewellery maker who lives in Devon, called Charmian Harris. I think her necklaces are the nicest things I’ve ever given her.

For tickets to the launch of Michael’s new book 'Down Burrow Lane: Life and Love on the Farm', at Netherwood Estate in Herefordshire on July 24, see here. 'Down Burrow Lane: Life and Love on the Farm' will be published in September, and available in all good bookshops. For more information on Farms for City Children, see here.

You might find it odd to think that the pinnacle of cinematic tension, excitement and action is a train chase featuring a dog and a gun-wielding penguin, but I would challenge anyone who has watched The Wrong Trousers to disagree. The Oscar-winning short film is not only a masterclass in British humour and my favourite film, but also the most famous and beloved example of the talents of Bristol’s Aardman Animations.

The villain of the piece, Feathers McGraw — a penguin lodger hiding a double life as a cunning diamond thief — was such a fan favourite that he returned in Vengeance Most Fowl 31 years later. When this latest installment aired on Christmas Day in 2024, 9.4 million of us watched along. Such is the magic of Britain’s most beloved man and dog.

Wallace & Gromit, and their penguin nemesis, are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the success of the Bristol-born animation studio, which celebrates its 50th birthday this year.

The four-time Oscar winning outfit was founded by Sir Peter Lord and Sir David Sproxton. The pair were not sirs when they met, because they were 12-years-old. As schoolboys in Woking, Surrey, they created ‘Aardman’, a short animated sketch featuring a superhero character, which the BBC later bought. The name is a portmanteau of aardvark (because it sounded funny) and superman. In 1972, they received their first cheque from the BBC, but didn’t yet have a name for their bank account; They decided on ‘Aardman Animations’. It was in 1976 that the studio set up its headquarters in Bristol.

Perhaps it was fate that led them to meet Nick Park at the National Film and Television School. He was working on a student film based on his dad, who loved ‘tinkering about in the shed’. It followed a man who built a rocket in his basement in order to fly to the moon, because of his love of cheese. You’ll know it as A Grand Day Out — the first Wallace & Gromit offering, which was seven years in the making.

The name Gromit was inspired by Park’s electrician brother (a grommet is a ring that protects wires). ‘I liked it, so adopted it,’ he told The Guardian in 2024. Curiously, in Park’s very early sketches for the series, Gromit was a cat. I wonder whether the duo would have experienced the same level of unadulterated adoration. Park joined Aardman in 1985, bringing Wallace & Gromit along for the ride, and the production company went from strength to strength.

Considering the long hours and painstaking work it takes for most films to be made (Aardman have, in later years, experimented with CGI), the studio has had an impressively large output. In addition to the Wallace & Gromit franchise, they are responsible for the Chicken Run films, the various adventures of Shaun the Sheep (who originated as a Wallace & Gromit character in A Close Shave, 1995), Early Man, Flushed Away and Morph. They are also known for Creature Comforts, one of their earlier works voiced by real people, not actors.

They are less well known for the music video to Peter Gabriel’s 1986 track Sledgehammer — an injustice. A random collaboration, but perhaps the lyrics ‘you could have a steam train, if you just laid down your tracks’ put Gabriel in mind of the infamous penguin chase described above.

With the dawn of the noughties, Aardman’s influence grew. Chicken Run (2000) became the studio’s first full-length feature film to be funded by the American powerhouse DreamWorks (perhaps the reasons for the film’s American male lead) and the French company Pathé. This began a significant collaboration between the English and American studios, which expanded Aardman’s audience to the USA.

The next film to benefit from this partnership came in 2005. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit saw our dynamic man-and-dog duo fight to protect the local village vegetable competition from a ravenous, carrot-gobbling beast. They had planned to call the film ‘The Great Vegetable Plot’, but research showed that Americans might not get the gag, because of the language difference, and children would be put off by ‘vegetables’.

Despite not being hungry for their five-a-day, the film was a massive hit. This was the first feature-length Wallace & Gromit offering and topped box office charts in the USA and at home, as well as winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film and a BAFTA for Best British Film.

Its success was followed in 2007 by Shaun the Sheep, which ran for seven series and also spanned several feature films. It is, apparently, a very big hit in New Zealand after the government pushed for greater awareness around their sheep tourism industry. The more you know.

Some of the biggest names in acting, such as Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham-Carter, Eddie Redmayne and Tom Hiddleston, have lent their voices to Aardman productions. Large orchestral tributes, theme park rides, numerous sculptures, a Coldplay music video and a garden in Japan, of all places, have become de rigueur for the once tiny studio, which is, at its core, committed to training the next generation of animators at Aardman Academy. How do they make magic?

‘It is about that craft, the level of detail and the “thumb-printiness” that you see in our productions. That is really authentic, and audiences recognise that,’ says Ngaio Harding-Hill, who started working for Aardman in 1999, and is now their director of attractions, live experiences and archive. ‘We always talk about the second- and third-look details that you see in our productions,’ she adds. ‘If you watch one of our films two, three, or even four times, every time you'll see a different detail in the background that speaks to the Easter eggs and gags that are integral to Aardman.’

You can indulge in these details at leisure at MShed, in Bristol, where Cracking Exhibition, Gromit!, is running until September 13 — just one in a long line of tributes to the creative company’s success as it turns 50. This year will also see the opening of an immersive show at the London Lightroom and Aardman’s 11th feature film — Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom.

Aardman is Bristol and Bristol is Aardman. At the gift shop in M Shed, a museum all about the city, you can buy everything from a Feathers McGraw water bottle (the lid is his rubber-glove hat — £29.95) to a silver pair of Wallace & Gromit cufflinks (£135). The demand for Aardman’s creations, it seems, is never ending, much like the train tracks in The Wrong Trousers.

Inside the exhibition, which has taken about two weeks to install, a gigantic birthday cake topped with 18 different Aardman puppets welcomes me. Displayed around the room are original concept illustrations for various characters, story boards and real sets from Aardman productions. Sadly the collection is limited to mostly pieces from the studio’s past 20 years, due to a fire in 2005 that destroyed much of Aardman’s archive.

‘I think, locally, people feel really fond of Aardman,’ says Helen McConnell Simpson, the senior curator at Bristol Museums. ‘The spirit of creativity and the homemade quality really speaks to Bristol's DIY art scene, our street art and our spirit.’ Many of the films pay homage to the city in various ways, she explains. For example, the museum where the diamond heist takes place in The Wrong Trousers is based on Bristol Museum. The bus used in Shaun the Sheep: The Movie is green, a tribute to the 1950s models that were once used to get around Bristol.

‘The message [of the exhibition] is really around creativity, celebration and joy. It’s a tough old world at the moment, and having something that people can come to and really lose themselves in is really lovely,’ says McConnell Simpson.

Exhibitions curator Steven Bradley thinks the intergenerational appeal of the work is its biggest strength. ‘It's become this staple, often of Christmases, when your family comes together, you sit down and you watch something,’ he says. ‘You're not necessarily on your phones or tablets and you're watching something that's reflecting everyday life. That’s quite an impressive legacy, I think.’

At the Young V&A in east London, where Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends is running until November 15, children press their faces against the glass, getting as close as they can to Aardman’s creations. The hot weather hasn’t put them off in the slightest. They tinker with lighting rigs, learning how stop-motion sets are set up for films and dream up their own characters on scraps of paper.

Tanaya Basu De Sarkar, V&A assistant curator, is chuffed about how much of a hit it has been. ‘Stop motion is a really accessible craft — that’s something we wanted to talk about throughout the exhibition. It's something children can go home and have a go at themselves,’ she explains.

‘Peter Lord and David Sproxton met when they were children, which is something we wanted to run through the exhibition as well. The response has been great. I know people who have said their kids have gone home and said that they want to be a stop-motion animator.’

A short tube journey away, at the Barbican Centre, I attended a Family Film Club screening of The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. I had been worried that the old-fashioned world of odd contraptions, copious gorgonzola and ‘ooh aye lad’ regional accents wouldn’t be as popular with today’s children as it had been with me as a child, and indeed as an adult. I needn’t have. The cinema is packed. When Susie Evans, a film curator, asks the crowd what we are watching today, dozens of tiny fists shoot into the air. ‘Wallace & Gromit!’ a chorus of little voices shout.

When Julian Nott, who has scored the Wallace & Gromit franchise, comes on stage to introduce the works, the crowd falls into a hushed silence. As he talks about his years-long involvement with the films, his passion echoes the sentiments of everyone who I have spoken to about Aardman’s work. ‘Everybody loves the characters, don't they? I mean, Gromit is perfect.’ The children listen in awe.

Since being a student with Park, Nott has been involved with Aardman’s journey. In the process, he has created a soundtrack so distinctive and cheerful, people could bring to mind the beloved man and dog pairing that it signifies blindfolded. ‘When I first encountered Aardman it was a completely different company,’ he recalls. ‘It was a tiny little animation company, if I remember rightly, in a roof space — an attic, virtually — in a rundown building in Bristol somewhere, with just two guys: David and Peter.’

Back then ‘it wasn’t famous,’ Nott says, ‘but it was unique’. ‘They had a real original personality to the work they were doing.’ Wallace & Gromit, he thinks, has had the biggest success because it is ‘the product of one man’s imagination’.

‘Nick Park made Wallace & Gromit because he loved it. He believed in it. He loved those characters — and that's quite different from most animation, which is made for business purposes.’ Here is the real reason that Aardman is so beloved. It is not a money making machine. It hasn’t been caught up in the idea of what film studios are ‘supposed’ to be doing.

While other companies rehash the same old stories, pumping out live action versions that have already been told quicker than you can say ‘tale as old as time’, Aardman lives life in the slow lane, hand-making sets and manually manipulating their beloved clay characters frame by frame.

Sure, they’ve dabbled in CGI, but at their core is this age-old craft. They remain in Bristol, shunning the ‘big city’ appeal of London, and continue to make most of their films ‘the old-fashioned way’, with the characteristic British wit that made them world famous — isn’t that just cracking?

'Cracking Exhibition, Gromit!', runs until September 13 at M Shed, Bristol. Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends runs until November 15 at the Young V&A, London.

Where is it?

A remote spot in the Cotswolds.

A quick description

A barn at the top of a valley that was built in 1730 and first converted in the 1960s.

How did you find it?

We used Property Vision [a buying agency] and gave them a specific set of parameters, including not wanting to be in a village.

How smooth was the purchase?

We went to see it separately at first and instantly knew that it had our name all over it. Our offer was initially accepted, but then we lost out to a higher bidder. Six weeks after he’d purchased the property, his marriage came unstuck and we were given first refusal.

What made you buy it?

The pièce de résistance is the covered colonnaded Roman walkway. On approaching the house, no one knows that it’s there as it stands behind a wall with a door.

Favourite aspect?

It’s a bit kitsch, but we have a hot tub overlooking the valley.

Best memory of living there?

It sits on two ley lines. I don’t know whether that has an impact, but it’s a happy house. Some people arrive in a terrible state, but leave skipping.

Biggest mistake?

We thought we’d save some money by using a reconstituted stone floor in the entrance and kitchen. When it was half installed, we realised that it wasn’t going to work and instead used stones reclaimed from a 17th-century French château. You can’t skimp on these things.

Biggest indulgence?

My husband is a great collector. When we moved here, I decided we needed a proper dining table — a rustic Spanish refectory table rather than some chipboard covered with a tablecloth. I sent him in search of one and he came back with a vast statue of a lady on a horse. The dining table is still made of chipboard.

Sue Jones is the co-founder and creative director of OKA. The company has launched its first wallpaper collection based on three of its most iconic prints: Ocellus, Areca and Ghini, made in the UK.

This feature originally appeared in the July 8, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

‘The palm of the exhibition belongs to a large landscape by Constable, with which the ancient or modern masters have very few masterpieces that could be put in opposition.’ Visiting the Royal Academy show in 1821, French novelist Charles Nodier was mesmerised by The Hay Wain.

The picture, which usually hangs at the National Gallery, is now returning to the county that inspired it, where it will star in the eponymous exhibition at the Colchester + Ipswich Museum’s Christchurch Mansion, Suffolk: ‘The Hay Wain: Walking Constable’s Landscape’.

1. Despite Nodier’s enthusiasm, the picture struggled to sell. Constable’s friend John Fisher expressed interest. However, he told the painter: ‘I cannot now reach what it is worth, and what you must have.’ Dealer John Arrowsmith had fewer quibbles and offered a meagre £70 for it, which Constable refused
2. When Arrowsmith came back with £250, the artist relented and sold it, albeit reluctantly: ‘It might promote my fame and procure me commissions, but it is property to my family; though I want money dreadfully’
3. Arrowsmith took the painting to France, where it went on to become a sensation at the Paris Salon in 1824. It earned Constable a gold medal — and made his name, as the painter wrote to his friend Fisher: ‘Collins called. He says I am a great man at Paris, that it is curious they speak there of only three English artists, namely Wilkie, Lawrence, and Constable’
4. The Hay Wain returned to Britain in 1838, eventually entering the collection of Henry Vaughan in 1866. Legend has it he was later offered an astounding £10,000 for it, at which he replied: ‘If this picture is worth the sum you name, I cannot longer afford to keep it; and when it leaves my possession, it shall go into the custody of the Nation.’ This it did, as Vaughan bequeathed it to the National Gallery in 1886
5. The Hay Wain will now be on display alongside paintings from the museum’s own collection, including two of the painter’s childhood home, Golding Constable’s Flower Garden and Golding Constable’s Kitchen Garden

‘The Hay Wain: Walking Constable’s Landscape’ at Colchester + Ipswich Museum is on until October 4. Visit the museum's website for more information.

In 1982, the Guinness World Record for the longest-ever after-dinner speech was broken. It lasted 12-and-a-half hours and it will probably not surprise you that it was delivered by Gyles Brandreth.

Fortunately, when I speak to Gyles over the phone, he is on his way to the ITV studio where he will be filming This Morning. The journey is only 30 minutes long. Otherwise, I fear I would’ve been here all day.

When he is not talking — a rarity — Gyles is listening on his award-winning podcast, Rosebud, where he interviews celebrities about their early memories. ‘To Country Life readers who haven’t yet discovered podcasts, I say to them: get with the programme. There is more to life than Radio 4.’

The podcast, which is ‘totally apolitical’, has so far featured high profile celebrities and politicians, including Sir Ed Davey, Kemi Badenoch (who Gyles is a ‘great fan’ of) and Sir Keir Starmer.

Would he interview Nigel Farage? ‘Yes, certainly,’ Gyles says. ‘I am interested in people. I wouldn’t be voting for him, because I want a credible party with clear long term views and the knee-jerk reaction of Farage doesn't interest me but, as a person — of course.’

Who would he have if he could have any guest, living or dead? He replies that he doesn’t know if I am old enough to be eligible (I am 26 and baby-faced, but certainly out of childhood), but that he’d choose me. I suspect that this is a line, but still feel very flattered until he follows this up with: ‘I don’t mind who we have, seriously.’

Podcast host is the latest job in a long and varied career. ‘I used to be a Member of Parliament, and when I lost my seat in 1997 I wasn’t sure what to do. My wife [Michèle Brown] said: “do whatever you want to do.”’ So he did.

Gyles has been a politician, television presenter, theatre producer, journalist, author and publisher. As a young MP, ‘I think I aspired, probably, to be Prime Minister,’ he admits. He is still, he says, ‘waiting for the call’ and ‘very much’ a Conservative, as is his daughter Aphra Brandreth, who is the MP for Chester South and Eddisbury.

Now nearly 80 years old, he suggests that he may be trying yet another new role. ‘I am listening to some songs at the moment because of the Edinburgh show I’m doing. My co-performer and I may be singing,’ he says.

‘She’s a friend of mine called Harriet Jaine. She is the producer of my podcast. We did a charity show last year to raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital with Joanna Lumley and Jim Broadbent, and I invited Harriet to come on and sing some songs. She was a sensation, so I said: “Will you be in my show?” It’s called Up Memory Lane!.’

Singing doesn’t really seem the most natural fit for Gyles, but given that the PM job looks set to be filled, what choice does he have? And looking back on Gyles’ talent as a career chameleon, I am sure he’ll find his voice, as he always seems to.

Your aesthetic hero

I mean, I’ve got so many answers. I’m going to say Oscar Wilde, because I feel like I’ve known him, personally, all my life. At my boarding school, the founder was a very old man who has been a friend of Wilde’s. So, as a boy I knew a friend of Oscar Wilde’s, and now I’m lucky enough to be a friend of Oscar Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland. I’ve written seven murder mystery novels based on Wilde’s life and am president of The Oscar Wilde Society. My favourite line of his is: ‘Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.’

A book you’ve found inspiring

A book of mine that I keep on my bedside table is Dancing by the Light of the Moon. It’s an anthology of poetry, so it’s not really mine. I keep it there because the poems in it are inspiring — and the great thing about poems is that they’re often quite short, so you can get a quick adrenaline rush by reading one. At the end of the book is a poem called ‘Everything is Going to be Alright’, by Derek Mahon. That is the inspiration I need.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

An exhibition of portraits by John Singer Sargent. His portraits are immaculate. The exhibition was at the Tate Britain not that long ago and his paintings were wonderful. I love them. People are often a little bit more elongated than they might have been in real life but, because I’m interested in people and I like people, the Sargent paintings are great. You feel as though you’re meeting some of the most interesting people in the world, because he’s caught them on canvas.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

Almost certainly a yoghurt with granola from Grosvenor House on Park Lane where we record my Rosebud podcast. That’s my go-to treat. I spend almost nothing on things. I mean, I haven’t bought clothes in literally 30 or 40 years, as you can see — look at me! I only wear one pair of shoes — the same every day.

Your favourite painting

There’s a painting in St Petersburg in the Hermitage Museum called ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son’, by Rembrandt. It is the only painting that I’ve seen when, on sight, it moved me to tears, which is why I remember it.

The music you work to

I don’t work to music, I work in silence. It’s not possible. I am a male, therefore I can only do one thing at a time, right? I do listen to music, and if I want a lift I listen to the songs of Charles Trenet. I listen to the same songs endlessly. For example, in the kitchen at night, when I'm doing the washing up or clearing up, I could listen to the same song 10 times in a row.

A possession you’d never sell

My problem is: I’m a hoarder. I have a whole room, in the basement of our house, that is my jumper room. The moment I die, my wife has got the skip company on rapid dial. I cannot give away or sell anything. I don’t find it difficult — I find it impossible. I have a wonderful bust of William Shakespeare, given to me by a friend some years ago, and I certainly wouldn’t give that away.

The last podcast you listened to

This is awful. The last podcast I listened to was my own. It’s ridiculous. Every night when I‘m getting ready for bed and cleaning my teeth, I listen for 30 minutes. We do three episodes a week and interestingly, when you’re actually doing it, it just sort of happens to you — and you don’t know what the episodes are really like until you hear them back. Curiously, they often land differently from the way they sound when it’s happening. It’s a different experience listening to them on audio to watching them on YouTube, too.

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

Well, I think Leonardo DiCaprio is getting a bit old now. Of course, I wouldn’t mind playing myself. But, when I was young, the actors I liked were Terry-Thomas, George Sanders, David Niven. But maybe… I tell you, The Muppet Christmas Carol is a great movie. I wouldn’t mind Kermit playing me.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

I’d take yoghurt and granola so I’d have a quality breakfast. I would take the obvious things too: The Complete Works of Shakespeare, the King James Version of the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer — because I love all the language of that, and I might take the Oxford English Dictionary to improve my vocabulary.

The items you collect

I have a collection of teddy bears. We had so many of them that when we got to a thousand, my wife said: ‘Enough,’ so they now live at Newby Hall, near Ripon in North Yorkshire. They have built for us the Brandreth Bear House there — and that’s where our teddy bears live, so I share them with the world. I collect everything. Teddy bears, jumpers, books.

The thing that gets you up each morning

I wake up — that’s what gets me up, and I get going. I’ve never been somebody for lying in bed, really. I’ve spent a lot of my adult life on breakfast television, so I’m used to getting up quite early.

A hotel you could go back and back to

The Randolph Hotel in Oxford on Beaumont Street. I was there this week. It’s a Hilton hotel now and it’s wonderful. It's quite old school in many ways, but I love it because I first went there when I was a student at Oxford a long time ago. I then lived there for a while when I ran the Oxford theater festival because the Playhouse theater in Oxford is right next door, They've done it up beautifully and they've given it an Alice in Wonderland theme — which I have had a lifetime obsession with.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

Well, I can’t say yoghurt and granola again. But yes, it is yoghurt and granola from Grosvenor House.

The best present you’ve ever received

Probably my wife, but she wasn’t a gift. She didn’t even come gift wrapped, so I’d say my three children.

For tickets to Gyles' Edinburgh Fringe show, see here. To listen to his podcast, see here

It was the shortest reign in the history of England. On July 10, 1553, Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen of England and Ireland, only for the Privy Council to depose her nine days later and place her cousin Mary on the throne. Lady Jane first lost the crown, then her head and, ultimately, thanks to French painter Paul Delaroche, even her dignity.

‘The art around Jane Grey is absolutely dominated by the 1833 portrait of her, kneeling with the executioner on one side,’ says historian Philippa Gregory, the author of The Last Tudor, a novel on the Grey sisters, who finds the painting ‘an absolute classic image of female weakness painted onto a woman who was not weak.

'It’s the most irritating portrait there is: Jane is on her knees. She’s blindfolded. She’s dressed in a white nightgown. It’s silk. It’s off the shoulder. It’s absurd. Her hair is all a mess and all down and, behind her, there’s a woman who ought to be supporting her, but is actually fainting for grief.’

As for the executioner on the right, clad in red tights, says Dr Gregory: ‘He’s literally saying: “I am the patriarchy.”’ Much truer to the life of the nine-day queen, in her view, is another, far less known painting from about the 1590s, the so-called Streatham portrait, now at the National Portrait Gallery (despite historian David Starkey disputing the sitter’s identification as Grey).

In it, explains Dr Gregory, ‘she’s wearing Tudor clothes. Her hair is under a cap, as it would have been, and under her hand is a book of theology. She was an absolutely outstanding scholar, extraordinary, a child savant. She taught herself Greek and Latin and I think was learning Egyptian writing.

'She had a tremendous interest in theology and was a convinced Protestant, a reformer of the church. She knew that the consequence of not changing her faith would be death — and she took that decision in a very conscious and deliberate, and you may say, saintly way’.

Dr Gregory stops for a moment, then almost explodes with rage: ‘She was a very young woman of extraordinary scholarship and extraordinary courage, and to see her turned into this image of failure and victim-hood is a disgrace.’

Time, then, to set aside 19th-century notions of feminine frailty and romantic death and restore the history of one of Britain’s most brilliant minds.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on July 8, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

In the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City, there is a small plaster cast, made for a woman’s torso. Kahlo wore it to protect her crumbling spine — one of the many indignities she was forced to endure during a lifetime of infirmity that led to her premature death at the age of 47.

On its surface, she painted a hammer, a sickle and a foetus: revolutionary zeal and motherhood firmly entwined in the body politic. Kahlo lived the intense and prolific life of a semi-invalid. As it did the writer Marcel Proust, illness shaped her personality. She endured polio as a child, which left her with a pronounced limp, but it was a bus crash at the age of 18 that did the real damage, driving a metal handrail through her womb and spinal column.

Most people, at some point in their lives, have experienced overwhelming, engulfing pain, but it is a solitary experience. For nearly three decades, through multiple operations and miscarriages, Kahlo painted that experience, depicting herself as a shipwrecked survivor, isolated and wounded in an exotic fantasy, but still defiantly living. To watch oneself from the outside is a text-book sign of post-traumatic stress.

Kahlo returned obsessively to her own image and at times her paintings look hallucinogenic — a reminder perhaps of the ready availability of drugs she took to numb the pain. The batwing eyebrows, the faint moustache, the hair tightly knotted into elaborate styles are, without a doubt, gloriously confrontational and she certainly deserves her reputation as a proto-feminist, but a darkness and a paranoia have settled in.

Her self-portraits reverberate with the sound of being stared at. Now, a new exhibition at Tate Modern, ‘Frida: The Making of an Icon’, assesses the legacy of the artist, one of the most important of the 20th century. Across some 30 self-portraits, it explores ‘Fridamania’: how Kahlo’s life and image have been read, appropriated and commodified into a global brand.

No fact is entirely secure and nothing is certain, but at the heart of it all is the face of an artist who understood her destiny. Born in 1907, Kahlo grew up in Coyoacán, a wealthy suburb of Mexico City. It was, by her own account, ‘a marvellous childhood’.

Her father, a German immigrant, ran a photography studio and her mother, a devout Catholic, was of Mexican-Spanish and Oaxaca heritage. From this dual inheritance of European intelligentsia and indigenous ancestry came a productive tension that would shape Kahlo’s art and her personality. The painting My Grandparents, My Parents and I (1936) considered this duality by painting her maternal Mexican grandparents as the land and her German grandparents as the sea.

A bright, accomplished child, she had planned to study medicine, but, after the bus accident, she started painting, turning her forensic gaze onto herself and unpicking the wounds of her broken body. Artworks such as The Henry Ford Hospital (1932) recall the anatomical drawings of a medical textbook. ‘I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best,’ she once said.

As a card-carrying member of the Mexican Communist Party, she held to the belief that the struggle for her homeland’s emergence in the modern age would be through collective action. Surrealist André Breton once described her as a bomb wrapped in a ribbon and the paintings of her disfigured body are sometimes read as an allegory for the shattered dreams of Mexican liberation.

In Self-portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States (1932), she straddles two worlds, embodying the predicament of a country caught between a pre-industrial past and the economic might of its bullying neighbour. In 1928, Kahlo fell in love with the famous muralist Diego Rivera, more than 20 years her senior. He was the great explainer of the Mexican Revolution (although he had, in fact, been in Paris with Pablo Picasso at the time of the outbreak).

She became his beautiful wife, photographed in Vogue in traditional Tehuana dress and street jewellery, with her hair decorated with roses. It would take time for her art to emerge from his colossal shadow. Their relationship was intense and melodramatic.

With his vast frame, bullfrog eyes and animal energy, Rivera had a prodigious appetite for sex and even seduced Kahlo’s sister Cristina. Between bouts of illness, Kahlo, too, had affairs — most famously with Leon Trotsky who, having escaped Stalin’s Russia, briefly lived with the Riveras in their home, Casa Azul.

After their relationship came to an end, she gave him the painting Self-portrait dedicated to Leon Trotsky (1937). Breton described it as having ‘all the gifts of seduction’. Kahlo and Rivera eventually divorced in 1939, but remarried the following year. During that brief, brittle separation, Kahlo cut off her hair and painted a self-portrait dressed in a man’s suit, her black tresses strewn over a barren landscape like writhing snakes.

Rivera worried anxiously about her finances (she sold little) and persuaded his patrons to buy her work, something Kahlo was furious to discover, writing to him of the determination to be a success on her own terms. As the years progressed, however, her health continued to deteriorate and fantasy became a way to survive and explore a reality that was, at times, too grotesque to bear. She sometimes painted herself with a monkey and, although she was never specific about its symbolism, the ancient Mayans believed that monkeys were humans transformed.

Over the course of her life, she underwent 32 operations and had some toes amputated and eventually her right leg. Her response was unequivocal: ‘Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?’

At her first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953, she was too ill to stand, so her four-poster bed was placed in the gallery in which she held court — a spectacle that had all the drama of a Catholic Mass. Soon afterwards, she retreated to her bed, where the porous line between dream and reality gradually washed away; she died the following year.

If there is one anecdote from her extraordinary life that might give some indication as to the strange, semi-delirious nature of her art, it is one the novelist Angela Carter picked up on. At the moment of the bus crash, as the rod pierced her spine, her clothes were wrenched off and a bag of gold powder, held by a fellow passenger, exploded all over her.

A shattered, gilded body, it is almost as fantastic as any painting she created. Life is often stranger than fiction — Viva La Vida, as she wrote on one of her last paintings.

The life and times of Frida Kahlo

1907, July 6 — Born in Coyoacán, Mexico. She later claims 1910 (the start of the Mexican Revolution) as her birth year to align herself symbolically with the new Mexico

1913 — Contracts polio at the age of six, which left one leg thinner than the other. This early experience with illness begins her lifelong exploration of the body and pain

1925 — A devastating accident shatters her spine, pelvis and other bones. She undergoes numerous surgeries and begins painting when bedridden, using a mirror to create self-portraits

1928 — Becomes politically active and joins the Communist Party, shaping her identity as both an artist and a revolutionary

1929 — Marries the famous mural painter Diego Rivera. Their relationship is passionate, turbulent and deeply influential on her work. They divorce in 1939, but re-marry the following year.

1931 — The couple visit the US. Despite his communist beliefs, Rivera falls in love with America, seduced by its fast cars and industrial might. Kahlo is less impressed, angered by the country’s obsession with money and the extreme poverty she encounters. She describes American high society as boring

1937 — Leon Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, arrive in Mexico after Rivera invites them to stay at Casa Azul. Kahlo has a brief affair with Trotsky, but later distances herself from him. He is assassinated in 1940 by Ramón Mercader with an ice axe. Kahlo is briefly suspected of the murder and is arrested and held for two days

1938 — André Breton visits Mexico. He declares Kahlo a natural Surrealist and helps organise an exhibition of her work in Paris. She rejects the label, saying: ‘I never paint my dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality’

1944 — Paints The Broken Column, depicting her body split open with a fractured spine — one of her most powerful expressions of physical suffering

1954, July 13 — Dies aged 47 at her home, La Casa Azul.

‘Frida: The Making of an Icon’ is at Tate Modern until January 3, 2027

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on June 24, 2026. The box out originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on July 8, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Sarah Corbett-Winder (below) is a fashion consultant, sometimes referred to as ‘The Wardrobe Whisperer’, and founder of Kipper clothing.

She recently moved from London to a historic farmhouse in the Welsh countryside, where she lives with her husband, three children and two miniature sausage dogs.

Gucci mega cuff coat

Obviously a piece from my wardrobe had to feature. It has been very hard to pick (I wanted to say the whole lot), but it would have to be this.

She is a recent friend I picked up from Sign of the Times — so good for vintage finds.

I had no intention of buying, but she fit me like a glove and made me smile so much that she had to come home with me.

I like to wear her in expected and unexpected situations, such as the Monday-morning school drop off or in the supermarket.

Not only does she bring me joy, but also others, and I hope to pass her onto my girls.

Engraved necklace

The day before our wedding day, my husband gave me a necklace. A penny-sized, very classic gold disc on a thin gold chain with ‘N&S 14.12.13’ — our initials and wedding date — engraved on it. I haven’t taken it off since that day.

I cherish it with all my heart and hold it when I need that extra boost or support in my life. A piece that is totally and truly tailored to my husband and I.

Portrait of a Lady EDP by Frédéric Malle

It has become a bit of an inside joke that you can usually smell me before you see me.

I have been wearing this for about seven years now and I am still in love with it. It’s such an unusual, slightly masculine, yet very feminine smell.

I am yet to smell another perfume that gets me like this one. It’s a mixture of rose, patchouli and sandalwood — a real piece of art.

It also comes as a body lotion, which might be my next luxury…

Margaret and Marigold

My two wonderful pooches. Margaret is four years old, my short-haired dappled friend, and Marigold is nine months old, my long-haired dappled friend.

They bring me so much joy and insist on being next to me or with me at all times, like my own private security. There is sometimes a competition to see who can be closer to me… Margaret always wins.

They make me feel so loved and special. A lot of my day is spent admiring my pooches, particularly when they are wearing one of their silk neck scarves (nearly always — they have a rather extensive collection!).

This feature originally appeared in the April 29, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

A company’ muses Gilbert Huph, the vertically challenged insurance manager in Pixar’s The Incredibles, ‘is like an enormous clock. It only works if all the little cogs mesh together.’ His is a statement intended to satirise a culture of corporate naivety. He wants employees to turn a blind eye and bury their heads in the sand so long as they make a profit. Think too hard and they might not.

The same statement, however, can be made of the world’s greatest sports ground without a trace of irony. To see Wimbledon in action is to realise that a company — or, in this case, the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club (AELTC) — is a thing of beauty precisely because it is run like clockwork. What in The Incredibles’ fictional location of Metroville, California, sounds like an indictment of late-stage capitalism rings, in this patch of south-west London, as an ode to collective success. When one thinks of Wimbledon’s shining stars — the people who keep the cogs ticking besides the players themselves — one thinks of the umpires; the ball girls and ball boys; the camera operators; perhaps the wait staff. The ticketing officer may sometimes get a nod, as might the stewards shepherding punters from Southfields station to the grounds.

Behind such public faces, however, is an ecosystem without which the perfection attained by the tournament’s front-of-house staff for close to 150 years could never be reached.

Wimbledon is often lauded for embodying the best of Britain. It is a bucolic marvel, with 50,000 plants spread across 42 acres. It rewards sportsmanship and casts such a spell over the crowd that punters behave almost as gracefully as the players themselves. It is a paean to our past (the UK, after all, invented lawn tennis — and still today all participants must wear white) as well as our future, consecrating our nation as a breeding ground for talent. It is at Wimbledon, where grass courts mean the neon balls travel faster than on any other surface, that people come to watch the greatest games in the world. Matches here are more often discussed in dramaturgical terms than in the traditional language of sport.

Centre Court, the jewel in AELTC’s crown, was said by John McPhee to resemble ‘an Elizabethan theatre’ in a 1968 New Yorker article on ‘The Lawns of Wimbledon’. The tournament’s most renowned finals — between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in 2008, and Federer and Novak Djokovic in 2019 — were more adrenaline-inducing than top action films of the 1990s. This is the stage that gave rise to Björn Borg and Pete Sampras, as well as today’s equally captivating rivalry between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz.

Yet, as all good directors know, a film or play is only ever as good as the sum of its parts. The minutiae, in other words, are as important as the big picture. Without the crew, no one can bring the cast to life; and this crew (its youngest member new to Wimbledon, its eldest a veteran of the grounds) embodies the very qualities — devotion, dignity and perfectionism — that punters come here to celebrate.

The timekeeper — Dan Bloxham

When a player emerges from the locker room and walks onto Centre Court, he is accompanied by a man wearing beige trousers and a white shirt with a tie and AELTC’s signature navy blazer. On his feet are white tennis shoes: the same as those once worn by line judges. Known familiarly as the player escort — and officially as the master of ceremonies — Dan Bloxham has been here for more than 25 years.

His role, on the face of it, looks easy. Yet anyone who’s ever been a personal assistant to the great and good will know that getting them where they need to be on time is no mean feat.

‘Thirty years ago, players weren’t too worried about getting ready,’ Dan says. Today, it’s a different game. ‘Everyone’s in the gym, throwing balls, running, doing exercises right up until it’s time to get onto the court. I have to kick the players out of the warm-up areas, one from one side and one from the other, and there’s always the risk that, when you’re accompanying one player, by the time you return, the other’s not there.’

This comedy of (unforced) errors speaks volumes of the ever-growing quality of tennis at Wimbledon. ‘Nowadays, the quality at the end of a five-hour match is just as good as it is at the beginning,’ Dan notes. This is because players will only compete if they are at their fittest. To many a fan’s chagrin, Alcaraz has pulled out of this year’s tournament due to tenosynovitis. ‘You can’t have so much as a chink in your armour anymore,’ the master of ceremonies states.

Dan assumed his current position about a decade into his Wimbledon years, in 2008. He remembers his first day, accompanying an already seasoned Federer onto the court. It was a stressful first assignment, he says, although he now seems to do this with eyes closed. His predecessor, Steve Adams, had given him only one tip: to ‘take control’. ‘My job is to try to make the players feel special,’ Dan explains, ‘and realise that they’re playing on the greatest court in the world.

‘They are part of a club here,’ he continues, ‘not only a facility. I might introduce them to members and key staff on the morning of their match as they walk down to see the court. It’s an entirely different way of getting there than it is at any other event.’ He is also the club’s head coach (‘when I’m not in my uniform, I’ll make sure I wear my sports kit, so the players know I have a clue’) and jokes about being able to tell a competitor’s nationality by their choice of warm-up (‘Italians tend to run at each other’). Federer, he says, would make his rivals nervous by doing the opposite. ‘He didn’t run around — not at first, although he eventually started doing yoga, throwing the balls around, even some football drills.’

Learning to navigate these differences and approach players when in the throes of preparing for a life-changing match is, Dan says, the most difficult part of his job. Yet it’s one to which he’s risen with aplomb. As well as being a timekeeper, he is also Wimbledon’s chief diplomat. ‘There have been moments where a player’s kit looked great, but they put a tracksuit top on right before walking out onto the court — and it’s not white,’ he laughs. ‘You’ve got their agent saying it’s white… but you know it’s not.’

One aspect of the job he no longer has to worry about is bringing the trophy onto the court. ‘I had to do that for the 2008 final,’ he tells me. ‘First of all, it’s an incredibly heavy trophy — you’re constantly thinking: don’t drop it — and you always end up holding it for a lot longer than you think because the players take five minutes to go into the crowd and come back around.’ As in the parts of his job for which he’s still in charge, patience is key.

The guardian — Christopher Boucher

It’s not only players who need minding — or their time managed. SW19’s more than half a million attendees also need directions, so they know where to be and when. The order of play is sacred and cannot be interrupted: fans are only allowed out of their seats, for instance, during a change of ends or set break.

Enter the stewards, whose military uniforms — often handsomely gilded — dot the grounds with flashes of black, red and gold. It is they who ensure the athletes are fully immersed in a game by keeping crowd disturbance to a minimum. They also look after the crowd itself: the tournament being held in July means it can sometimes get very hot and people can be taken ill. It reached 35.7˚C last summer, Christopher Boucher, the head steward, informs me. ‘It’s our job to attend to them and call first aid if anyone passes out.’

The stewards serve as human compasses for the punters, steering them in the right direction, whether they need food, water, medical assistance, a loo break, directions to their seats or help with spillage. With their uniforms, however, are they not the ones most at risk of overheating? ‘We wear only a short-sleeved white shirt and black trousers inside Centre Court,’ Lt Cdr Boucher reveals, ‘which keeps things a little cooler.’

The stewards — about 25% of whom are now women — number 500 in total. This year, there were 1,400 applicants. They hail from military backgrounds — Lt Cdr Boucher, a serving member of the Royal Navy, shows me the medals with which he has been presented for service in the Gulf and Bosnian wars, together with his Jubilee, Coronation and Long Service and Good Conduct Medals — meaning that some are forced to drop out of Wimbledon at the last minute because they’ve been deployed somewhere on duty. A reserve list makes up the shortfall.

Their job begins on the Sunday before the Championships, with a safety briefing and assignment to a specific team. After that, they get quizzed every day so that they remain up to scratch (‘by day four or five, they’re all over it’) and all take two weeks of annual leave in order to volunteer. A team of 50 mans the Royal Box, greeting each visitor and circulating throughout the day with water.

The year 2021 was particularly challenging because covid was lurking and any steward testing positive meant their gangway of four volunteers had to be replaced with those in the wings. The extra logistical planning, Lt Cdr Boucher notes, was immense. ‘We had about 100 people on standby at once — and can you imagine having to wear a mask in this heat?’

The chronicler — Emma Traherne

No.1 Court was never meant to be made of grass. The 1922 architectural plans conceived it as a hard court before the idea was scrapped. When the new No.1 opened in 1997, it did so as a sunken court for which soil had to be removed and harvested, eventually giving rise to what we now know as Henman Hill.

We know this because Emma Traherne and her team of 12 keep the architectural plans intact — together with the rest of the archive. Emma has been the curator of the Wimbledon Museum for seven years, having previously looked after the historic furniture and decorative arts in the Houses of Parliament. ‘We have more than one million historic assets in SW19,’ she reveals, ‘many of them photographs, as well as 60,000 physical objects, such as clothing, rackets and paintings.’

Among the artefacts in the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum archive, there are some that date back to the sport’s earlier iterations (even before the invention of lawn tennis). On display is a first edition of the first book to mention ‘tennis’, written by Antonio Sciano in 1555, in which the game being discussed is an ancestor of real tennis.

The museum has about 1,000 materials on show at any one time, as well as a dedicated exhibition space that changes every 12 months. Currently on display is ‘A Slice of History: Food & Drink at Wimbledon’, which explores the role of food at the tournament for both players and fans. Alongside strawberries and cream, an entire segment is dedicated to the evolution of player nutrition. Pickle juice, Emma explains, is the modern player’s drink of choice during matches, as it allows salts to return to the body at speed — a far cry from Suzanne Lenglen’s penchant for sipping brandy between games in the 1920s.

Roughly 120,000 people a year visit the museum, which documents the tournament’s evolution, as well as its relentless pursuit of excellence. Some 30% visit in the first two weeks of July; yet Emma observes her job is a marathon, not a sprint. ‘We do a huge amount of work in the four weeks before the Championship and install about 35 displays across the site,’ she explains, ‘which we take down once they wrap mid July. It’s not before early August that we are able to take a break.’

Perhaps the most important part of Emma’s role is the annual trophy engraving. No fewer than 84 trophies and salvers are worked on by five engravers over finals weekend. Emma says the spell-check process is ‘extremely thorough’. Have there ever been mistakes? ‘Not in my time.’

In the event of something going wrong, the situation is salvageable. The magic of Wimbledon, Emma says, is its efficiency. ‘It’s a very short turnaround,’ she explains. ‘As the victors are handed the full-size trophy by The Princess of Wales on Centre Court, the engravers are hard at work behind the scenes, engraving names onto the three-quarter-size replica of the trophy which the winners get to take home.’ Even one mistake, she says, could add half an hour to what should be a 20-minute job. The full-size trophy — the one viewers can see — is returned to the Club post-presentation and is on permanent display at the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum.

If AELTC has anything resembling the Firm’s Operation London Bridge — a contingency plan in case, despite rigorous spellchecks, an error is made during the engraving — all decline to say what this is; although one imagines that Wimbledon’s quest for perfectionism would naturally involve some Plan Bs.

The wingmen — Donna Davis and Rufus

More than any other tournament, Wimbledon strives for perfection. Part of its appeal is how spotless the place is: there is no litter or gum on the floor and, perhaps more importantly, there are no rats or pigeons. This is all thanks to Rufus, the 18-year-old hawk who has been guarding the grounds at SW19 since 2008 — far outclassing his predecessor Hamish’s nine-year tenure.

His handler, Donna Davis, tells me he learnt to fly here at 16 weeks old. ‘We were very lucky,’ Donna says. ‘Hawks can exhibit very different personality traits from one bird to another and Rufus was always great around people.’ His day will begin with a quick turn around the court on Donna’s arm, to do a recce and check what birds are around. Some species, she tells me, should not be disrupted. The grounds are home to little pied wagtails, ‘who are naturally curious and chatter away, yelling at Rufus on the roof’. He has been taught largely to ignore them. When they get truly pesky, he flares his wings at them and they instantly dissipate.

Rufus, who travels from Northamptonshire for the Championships, is only freed from Donna’s jesses when too many birds congregate in one spot (typically, a roof or a balcony). When it’s time for him to come back, she tempts him home using lightly cooked strips of his favourite food: quail. ‘If he doesn’t get it from me,’ Donna reveals, ‘he’s off to the Debenture lounge.’ As Rufus is a Harris hawk, his form and plumage are adaptable to the sometimes harsh conditions of his native America. A bit of rain, therefore, is not a problem, although he is a ‘sun worshipper,’ Donna admits. As for the wind, he can use it to his advantage. Heavy downpours, however, are a problem. ‘He doesn’t like that.’

Rufus hasn’t yet fraternised that much with players. ‘We need to start making some moves in that direction,’ Donna says. ‘I know that Serena Williams doesn’t like him…’ How does one build up trust with a hawk? ‘It comes with time and spending every day together,’ Donna explains. ‘Historically, you had priests train hawks for kings and bishops and get them used to human voices by reading them scriptures. Rufus is used to the sound of my voice, which I don’t think is quite so soothing, but really, it’s about food motivation. He knows he doesn’t need to exert himself too much to have his favourite meal if he’s near me.’

The botanist — Robin Murphy

There are more plants and flowers across AELTC — currently expanding to include a fourth site at Wimbledon Park — than there are in Regent’s Park’s Queen Mary’s Gardens. ‘Our main ethos,’ explains lead gardener Robin Murphy, ‘is to create tennis in an English garden.’ It is a huge part of what makes the Championships so special and lends Wimbledon the heritage quality sought after by punters.

‘Everything we plant is a nod to the English-garden style,’ Robin says. ‘Of course, we have to evolve and change things every year — we follow the principle of “always the same, like never before” — so we replicate a feeling, rather than an actual design.’

There are more than 2,200 trees across the grounds and an additional 1,000 trees and shrubs in stock to be reused in July. To these are added 32,000 perennial summer flowers — ‘to create the tournament overlay,’ Robin explains — and 15,000 petunias that hang on the buildings’ façades. Recent years have favoured pollinator-friendly planting. ‘Nurturing biodiversity is a big part of what we do,’ the lead gardener says. ‘We aren’t afraid to trial new plant species and to roll their number up if they prove successful.’ Still, they try to keep things native wherever possible. Foxgloves, for example, are conspicuously popular.

There are 13 full-time gardeners on the main site, Robin tells me, although they are supplemented in the weeks leading up to (and during) the Championships by seasonal gardeners, as well as more on the parkland across the road and at the satellite location in nearby Raynes Park, SW20. Many of them return each year and have become ‘as integral as the full-time staff,’ he notes.

Robin has been involved in the Championships since 2004, but became employed directly by AELTC in 2014. In 2016, he interviewed for his current position. ‘I stumbled into horticulture, really,’ he says. ‘I trained as a carpenter when I left school, but needed some summer work. My dad, who was a gardener, had a company that had a small contract on site and I came to help out that year. There used to be a lot more contractors dealing with different parts of the site, but it’s been streamlined since then.’ One can ‘absolutely tell the difference,’ he says, since the work was taken in house. There is a sense of cohesion unmatched anywhere else.

‘The weather always presents its challenges,’ Robin notes. ‘Too much heat requires more water, whereas too little sun might slow down flowering. I think the biggest difficulty is the fact that there are so many groups working on top of one another’ — competing cogs, as it were — ‘which makes scheduling work quite an ordeal when you experience delays caused in other areas.’ Much as the stewards attend to guests on court, the gardeners must often help those on Henman Hill.

‘Our most common call-out is when people have dropped their phone or sunglasses in the water feature we’ve installed at the top of the hill,’ he laughs, ‘so they can be fished out.’ Not all heroes wear Nike.

The bouncers — Ben Edwards and Boris, Faye Benson and Moo

It wouldn’t be Wimbledon without dogs. Keeping their noses out and alert to the slightest fracas, SW19’s anointed sniffers travel from far and wide to ensure that everything runs smoothly. That way, spectators and players alike can keep their heads down and enjoy the tennis. Boris, a Russian terrier, has been serving as a general-purpose patrol dog for five years.

‘We walk around the grounds and keep an eye out for anyone trying to gain access or exhibiting anti-social behaviour,’ his handler, Ben Edwards, explains. ‘It rarely, if ever, happens. Boris is big enough to act as a deterrent. We prevent these things from happening before they do, which makes our life easier.’ Boris and Ben travel to the site from their farm in Kent. ‘He’s got quite a deep voice,’ his handler smiles. ‘It’s amazing: any problem and he tends to nip it in the bud.’

For Moo, a 2½-year-old black labrador, Wimbledon is a brave new world. This is hers and handler Faye Benson’s first time at the Championships (the two previously worked at Royal Ascot). ‘She’s quite lively when she’s working,’ Faye tells me, ‘and quite calm when she’s not working. Perfect.’ Unlike Boris, Moo is more highly specialised and looks out for explosives. ‘We are lucky enough never to have found any in real life — only during training,’ Faye says.

Once a month, Moo goes through a refresher course to make sure she is up to speed. ‘We’re also undergoing some extra training here right before the Championships start,’ her handler mentions.

The juggler — Andrew Chevalier

The ball girls and boys are among the Championships’ most recognisable figures. The balls they run to fetch, however, are not distributed at random. There are three kinds of balls pre-sent in any one game,’ says Andrew Chevalier, ball-distribution manager: threes, fives and sevens. These figures are based on the number of games in which each ball has been used.

Andrew is in charge of a team of eight whose job it is to get each ball where it needs to be — both during practice and the Championships themselves. ‘There isn’t enough space to store all the balls used in a match on the court,’ he explains, ‘so these are constantly being replenished.’ Each match begins with 21 cans on the court. Ball girls and ball boys will always have two cans on the go, which translates to six balls. Every nine games, these are replaced as the umpire asks for new balls. A men’s game typically uses 16 cans (or 48 balls) and a women’s game 10 (or 30).

‘Many people don’t realise what happens when a ball accidentally lands among the crowd,’ he says, citing this as one of his principal challenges. ‘We leave a secret tin under the chair of each umpire — one which, according to tracking, has been used for three, five or seven games.’ This is because the quality of the ball needs to match that which has been shot into the crowd. The umpire then drops the relevant ball into the game.

In the background, Andrew grades the balls he collects after the umpire requests a change. At this stage, he assesses how many games they can still be used in; or whether they should be tossed, by looking at the Slazenger logo on the ball and seeing how battered it looks. ‘Rain delays, during which the umpire will sometimes suspend play, pose a particular challenge,’ Andrew notes. When play eventually resumes and players are asked to warm up again, the rule dictates that they must do so using ‘fives’ (they cannot use new balls, which are saved for when the actual match recommences — and the majority of balls collected during suspension have been used up to nine times already, making the more desirable fives hard to find).

‘We need to sift through thousands of previous days’ balls to find these fives,’ Andrew explains. If all 18 courts at AELTC are affected by a suspension (and six ‘fives’ are needed on each one for the reprisal), that means finding 108 such balls. Sometimes, the same court will face multiple suspensions of play within a single day.

Still, Andrew maintains the kind of stoicism that appears synonymous with Wimbledon. ‘If I’m doing my job correctly, no one should notice I am doing it at all.’ He has worked here since 2018 and as ball-distribution manager from 2021. ‘I step into the Wimbledon world for a month every year,’ he says, ‘and forget that anything else exists.’ In his day-to-day life, he freelances as an actor and writer.

As McPhee did in The New Yorker in 1968, he draws an analogy between Wimbledon and the theatre. ‘It’s a load of departments coming together to put on a world-class production,’ he explains. His job is to keep plates spinning ‘and keep my team happily engaged in what they are doing. It’s important for everyone to appreciate how special it is to work here.

‘What I’ve learnt over the past eight years of working here is that the managers of all the different departments are some of the most dedicated people in the country,’ Andrew beams. ‘It’s 14 days of work, non-stop. Every single office and every single member of staff is exhausted by the end of it, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

This feature originally appeared in the July 1, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It must be hard to craft a beautiful poem with ‘a million kids running around’ you, but such is the challenge faced by George Mpanga, better known as George the Poet. The 35-year-old father of two is multi-talented. The spoken-word artist, poet (obviously), author and host of Have You Heard George’s Podcast? began his career as a rapper, signing a music deal with Island Records aged 22.

He turned to poetry and podcasting after taking a step back from music. He is currently doing a PhD at UCL about the economic and cultural potential of black music and has just written an exclusive short story for Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, a Belmond Train, as part of Writers on the Rails. Last year he published a book, Track Record: Me, Music and the War on Blackness. He’s done a lot so far, but he started very young.

Born in 1991 in north London to Ugandan parents, his creative ambitions formed at around 11 years old. ‘I remember writing down: “I would like to be an entertainer with influential ideas” — something like that. I thought I was going to be a singer or rapper, and perhaps also a public speaker — poetry wasn't on my radar,’ he says.

It was through rap music that George’s interest in poetry awakened. ‘More specifically UK grime music,’ George explains. ‘From the age of 15 I was a grime rapper… and I just felt like there were layers that I could peel back when it came to the performance. I felt like I didn’t really need the music.’ He adds: ‘Being a rapper is a little bit like being a professional wrestler, there's a lot of bombast involved, and that’s not really me. The more I started to pull away from those elements, the more I was left with what I could only describe as poetry.’

It was while studying politics, psychology and sociology at King’s College, Cambridge, that George’s career really started to take off. ‘I ended up spending more time off campus because there was a growing demand. One moment I’ll never forget was in my final year. I was supposed to be in the exam hall, and I was filming a poetry special for Formula 1 at the Monaco Grand Prix. I had to write it, memorise it, deliver it to camera, fly back to uni and sit the exam in about 36 hours. At that point I realised that this was probably going to be my career,’ he recalls.

George’s EP, The Chicken and the Egg, was released in 2014 to critical acclaim. His first book of poetry, Search Party, was published in 2015 and, in 2018, he was elected as a member of the national council of Arts Council England. He opened the BBC coverage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding with a love poem and was offered an MBE in 2019 that he declined because of the British Empire’s treatment of Uganda, which he termed ‘evil’.

Perhaps his success is in part due to his wife. He has two children with Sandra Mpanga, who is also his manager and events producer. ‘She’s the best person I’ve ever worked with,’ George gushes. ‘The most successful events that I’ve done have been produced by her.’ The pair have known each other since their school days.

Recently they’ve been enjoying seeing the world together. ‘My wife and I got married not long ago, in 2021, and we started travelling quite a bit. It really did ignite this new passion in me, because obviously it’s a mind-expanding experience. You meet new people, you see different things.’ On his work with Belmond, he adds: ‘There's something about the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express journey passing through all of these different landscapes, from the rural to the urban, that I'd actually never really seen before or taken the time to appreciate. It was such a rich opportunity to write for travel.’

Your aesthetic hero

This is a little bit of a wild card that I don’t think people will expect from me, but probably the pop star The Weeknd. He's a master of aesthetics, in my opinion. When he first came out he had a very unique sound, but he also had a mystique around him, and there was this big question in the early years, as he became a superstar, of how he would navigate that — not being mysterious anymore. However, with every album cycle he reinvents his aesthetic. He's got a concept: sometimes he's looking like a mad scientist, other times he's looking like a parody of a Hollywood has-been. He treats his physical appearance like a canvas as much as his music.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

There’s an artist called Phoebe Boswell. I went to an exhibition of hers some time ago. It was just beautiful art and it really played with the idea of the female body a lot. There's a lot of art that is capturing my attention from Uganda as well. I have an artist that I'm obsessed with called Hatimax, and I also did some very, very, very interesting work with a digital art gallery last year called Frameless.

They're based in London, and they create immersive installations out of classical art pieces. That also left a big impact on me. I wrote a piece to a painting by the Victorian-era artist John Atkinson Grimshaw. It was beautiful, I got lost in that.

The last thing that you bought for yourself

I bought myself a watch. For day-to-day, nothing extravagant.

Your favourite painting

To be honest with you, my favourite painting is not known. It's a piece that I had made about my family. It hangs in our living room and I adore it. The artist I mentioned earlier, Hatimax, made it. I gave it to my wife for Valentine’s Day.

A possession you’d never sell

Apart from that painting I just mentioned, I’ve won a fair few trophies — they would never be sold.

A book you’ve found inspiring

I always come back to Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers. It was a very interesting take. The whole thesis of the book is that there are factors that go into success that sometimes are staring you in the face, but they are not necessarily highlighted when you talk about the great successes, like in the computing or sporting industries. There are things that matter — the way you treat people, the way you pour into your children, the way you pay attention to what's going on around you. I've always found that to be a powerful message.

The music that you work to

The last genre of music that I really used to lose myself to was lo-fi hip hop. It is the most relaxing. Literally, I think scientifically, the frequencies that it hits are the frequencies of relaxation, comfort, nostalgia and warmth. So, I recommend it to anyone out there looking to have something on in the background that they can unplug but still feel free and creative to.

The last podcast you listened to

A podcast that keeps me up to date with Uganda, it’s called ON Uganda.

Who would play you in a film of your life

I feel like it has to be Daniel Kaluuya or Damson Idris, if we’re gonna lean into the ‘heart throbby’ vibe of George the Poet.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

I would need music, so some kind of speaker, and I’d love to take electricity. Also some seeded bread, because I’m fancy, and peanut butter, because I’m really fancy — and a notepad. My middle-class desert island experience would be complete.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

The fact that my kids are screaming. They are one and three. That’s me being a bit tongue in cheek, but literally the knowledge that there is all this life to live with them, and they’re up in the morning and raring to go so, emotionally and practically, that will get you out of bed.

The items you collect

Maybe Air Jordans, but I don’t think of it like collecting. I don’t have a ridiculous number of pairs, but it's definitely more than five.

A hotel you could go back and back to

The Waldorf Astoria, it’s just a classic. If you ever get the chance, go to the one in Amsterdam. It’s a work of art, man.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

I’ll never forget eating snails in France when I was 10, so that was memorable. I didn’t say good, but literally — I will never forget. I think I just prefer them alive. I see a snail, and I feel no animosity towards it. I'm perfectly happy for it to continue being a snail without being on my plate. I don't think I should have that snail. And they leave a trail of slime behind them.

The best present you’ve ever received

It will definitely be from my wife. She kills it with the presents. One time she literally surprised me with a trip and it was amazing. The details are between us, but yeah, she’s the best.

‘Writers on the Rails’ is a new literary collection of exclusive short stories featuring George the Poet. It was launched as part of Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, a Belmond train. Journeys will be departing from now until October 2026.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence of the United States on July 4 (see below), it has to be said that the country’s ‘special relationship’ with Britain is arguably not what it was. Aggressive pronouncements on social media and potentially wounding trade tariffs by the 45th and 47th President, not to mention rising oil prices and the war with Iran, have strained friendship.

This is a pity. The USA — ‘land of the free’ — has long been a byword for aspirational, joyous adventures in big cars in big spaces, rock music, the rollicking Wild West films that inspired childhood games and, as Britain emerged from the privations of war, the glamour of the Kennedys and Hollywood.

We have enjoyed and benefited from American culture, from the 16th-century idea of eating turkey for Christmas — surely better than peacocks? — to the stylish cut of Levi jeans and we finally grasp the obsession with ice and air-conditioning. We have revered Marilyn Monroe as the ultimate symbol of glamour and mysterious tragedy and Snoopy as the wisest, cutest cartoon beagle.

There is the wit of Dorothy Parker and Mark Twain, the plays of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and the novels of Harper Lee, Steinbeck, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Melville, whose 175-year-old Moby-Dick entered Cockney rhyming slang — plus their successors on the book charts Elizabeth Strout, Ann Patchett and the Booker-winning George Saunders.

That’s before we mention the uplifting music of Gershwin and Bernstein, Cash and Chuck Berry, Rodgers and Hammerstein and the velvet tones of Elvis Presley. America has given us the monumental flower paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe and the contrasting art of Warhol and Singer Sargent, the defiant courage of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, played by handsome actors Paul Newman and Robert Redford, the polo logo of Ralph Lauren, chocolate-chip cookies, pecan pie, cowboy boots, Tom Collins cocktails, the bucking-bronco party challenge and line dancing.

We have embraced the tasteful influence of imported figures such as Nancy Lancaster and Jennie Churchill; we still turn to the wisdom of environmentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Rachel Carson; we’re relying on the intelligent commentary at Wimbledon of Billie Jean King and John McEnroe on the BBC; and we still re-create the cool New England aesthetic of Shaker-style kitchens and the wholesome preppy look taken up by Boden and Seasalt.

Above all, perhaps, America has given us that optimistic holiday feeling — think Grease and Summer Lovin’, Carousel and June is bustin’ out all over. Therefore, on this auspicious anniversary, let us give thanks for an open-hearted culture that will endure long after the politics have faded.

This feature originally appeared in the July 1, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Tim Bentinck has been the voice of David Archer in 'The Archers' on BBC Radio 4 since 1982. He has made dozens more appearances on stage and screen, is a prolific voiceover artist, and is also both the 12th Earl of Portland and the 11th Count Bentinck.

Where was it?

Potten End, Hertfordshire

A quick description.

A 1930s detached house with half an acre of land — bucolic bliss. I climbed trees, built treehouses and had a sand pit. When a rich relation came to stay (whereas we were impoverished aristocracy, our relations lived in vast castles in Holland), her comment on seeing the bathroom was: ‘Do you all change in zis tiny room?’

When did you live there?

Between the ages of 18 months and 21, after my parents returned from Tasmania, and before I headed to the University of East Anglia and then Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

How did it come about?

After the war, my father, Count Henry Bentinck, thought there would be nuclear war and he worked out that the last place on earth to have fallout would be Tasmania, hence he moved the entire family (I would be born there), the furniture and the paintings and worked as a jackeroo. His dream of buying a farm was thwarted, hence we all returned to the UK and ended up in Potten End. If not for that, I would have been a real farmer rather than a pretend one on the radio.

Best memory of living there?

Being outside, cycling to school, working on the local farm and shooting things with father’s shotgun. There were sad memories, too, as my mother died there when I was 14.

Biggest indulgence?

I went on holiday to Italy with mum once and on our return father had redecorated my bedroom and built a bookshelf. They did nothing other than redecorate, but after it was sold, the new owners transformed it.

What happened to it?

Father sold Potten End and, with my stepmother, lived off the land on a 10-acre Devon small-holding. After meeting Judy, who would become my wife, we bought a house in Bristol that we renovated, sold and, with the proceeds, bought a house in London, where we still live today.

Timothy Bentinck will appear at selected performances of ‘The Archers: Live at 75’, a national tour celebrating 75 years of BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Archers’, until November 26. See more details here.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Sir Anish Kapoor must be the most beloved artist among London children. His ArcelorMittal Orbit, soaring 375ft above Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Park, is not only the UK’s tallest public sculpture, but doubles up as a thrilling tunnel slide.

Not quite as high, but still monumental are many of the installations on show at a newly opened exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (until October 18) which features new and previously shown pieces, including these:

Descent into limbo (1992–2016)

Tsunami (2018)

Non-Object Black (2018–2021)

Mount Moriah at the gate of the ghetto (2022)

Blinded by eyes, butchered by birth (2024)

For more information on how to visit the exhibition see here

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

What a plant the iris is.

It is hugely adaptable and widespread, with some 300 species living in woodlands and marshes, meadows and arid near-deserts. There are bearded and beardless types, dwarf and standard sizes, hardy and delicate varieties and they sport an infinite palette of colours — iris in Latin means rainbow and is the root of ‘iridescent’. Virgil described this effect when he wrote in the Aeneid about the goddess Iris, the personified deity of the plants: ‘So Iris, glistening dew, comes skimming down from the sky on gilded wings, trailing showers of iridescence shimmering into the sun.’

As befits such a flower, irises have a rich symbolic heritage, too. All of human life is represented in those petals: purple irises have long been associated with wisdom, royalty and friendship; blue with hope and faith; white with purity; and yellow with passion. In 1469BC, the green-fingered King Thutmose III of Egypt cultivated them in his garden, and blue-gold flowers are shown in murals in the temples at Karnak, representing the life-giving flooding of the Nile; in Edo Japan (1603–1868), Samurai warriors drank sake flavoured with iris to ward off evil spirits; and, in 1933, the iris was adopted as the state flower of Tennessee in the USA.

The Greeks, of course, cherished the flowers, too, weaving them into wreaths for orators to ensure their silver-tongued words were polished. Roman legions preferred to persuade via the sword and draped their standards with irises to guarantee them safe passage through hostile lands. However, it was Christian usage that made irises a favourite motif for painters. Even in a religion rich in floral imagery, the flowers were special, their three petals invoking the Trinity, and their old, pagan role as symbols of Iris, a messenger of the gods, made them emblems of the Divine word — especially the Annunciation — brought to mankind, thus associating them with the Virgin Mary.

In about 1480–89, when the great Flemish artist Hans Memling painted the Annunciation, he showed a single blue iris in a jug next to a white lily (symbolising the Virgin’s purity) as an angel arrives in a room very similar to that in Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait and announces that she is to give birth to the son of God. Such is the enormity of the news that she has to be supported by two further attendant angels, but, although she wilts, the flowers stand tall.

Leonardo da Vinci also included irises in his Madonna of the Rocks (about 1483–86) in the Louvre, Paris, although in his later version, now in the National Gallery in London, he replaced the flowers with a Star of Bethlehem plant — a member of the lily family. Leonardo being Leonardo, a standard white lily would not do.

Albrecht Dürer revealed his own fascination with irises when, in about 1503, he painted a botanical watercolour of a blue specimen and about the same time a purple flower. These images fit with Dürer’s intense interest in Nature as an integral part of God’s creation. The flowers sit against plain backgrounds, shorn of associations, and transmit the sense of the artist’s wonder at their perfection. In the same year, he stared just as hard at a clump of turf (and the previous year at a young hare), picking out each blade of grass or strand of fur with exceptional precision. If God could fabricate organisms so small, little wonder he made Man such a complicated creature.

These drawings found further use when his workshop came to paint The Virgin and Child (‘The Madonna with the Iris’), in the first decade of the century, now in the National Gallery. The picture was made by various hands over a number of years and whoever painted it clearly knew the Master’s studio watercolours, as an almost identical plant is shown growing just behind the Virgin and her suckling child.

Some four and a half centuries later, those same images were an inspiration to Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021), the Scottish watercolourist who specialised in softly lyrical and unadorned paintings of flowers. Irises dot her work, sometimes singly, sometimes in wind-blown clusters, the painter’s interest clearly in the ombré shading of the petals and pops of colour. Like Dürer, she painted them on a plain white background, happy to let the flowers take centre stage. There is no subliminal message to Blackadder’s blooms other than a simple — or perhaps not so simple — appreciation of beauty.

This spirit was alive in earlier painters, too. Claude Monet, although primarily thought of as the painter of waterlilies, was an iris lover, too. Indeed, at his garden at Giverny in France they were to the solid ground what the lilies were to his ponds. He was obsessive about his plants and at one point employed six gardeners (one whose job was simply to dust and wash his waterlilies). The flowers, with their long stems and burst of colour, were ideally suited to the fluid and loose handling of his later pictures and in some pictures he combined both plants, such as Irises and Waterlilies, one of some 20 paintings of the flowers he made from 1914–17. In others, he showed them in overstuffed beds, a mass of purple blooms contrasting with the green of the trees. When painting flowers, Monet rarely included a horizon — all his focus, and that of the viewer, being taken up by the plants, a trait even more pronounced when he painted them from above, such as the National Gallery’s Irises (1914–17).

The East Anglian painter Sir Cedric Morris was even more devoted to irises than Monet. He painted them numerous times in his many still lifes and fresh-air floral pictures. Like Monet, he used them in his own garden in Suffolk exactly as he used the paints on his palette — and for Morris, no painting of a bouquet or flowerbed was complete without an iris. He put them front and centre: any background, whether picturesque buildings or distant hills, was something for the eye to register after the flowers and not before.

Morris was also an accomplished plantsman, holding ‘Iris Days’ at which he would unveil the results of his propagation programme. Vita Sackville-West was a regular visitor and took plants back to her home at Sissinghurst in Kent to grow there. Many of the iris cultivars Morris developed at Benton End, the house in which he lived, ran a private art school (Lucian Freud was a pupil) and where he built a horticultural playground, have been propagated at the Beth Chatto Garden a few miles away near Colchester, Essex.

For Vincent van Gogh, by contrast, the allure of irises lay not in their botany, but in their ability to express emotion. Although sunflowers were the plant he chose as a personal motif (‘The sunflowers are mine’, he wrote), the irises that grew in the gardens of the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in France, where he was a patient from 1889–90, had as deep a meaning. He knew the plants from life, but also from the prints he collected, made by Japanese ukiyo-e artists who flourished between the 17th and 19th centuries. Both Hokusai and Hiroshige, the two leading artists of the school, created pictures of individual blooms that had a profound effect on van Gogh.

Shortly before his death, in a letter to his sister Wilhelmina, he recalled his last days at the asylum when, he said, he ‘worked with rage’. One of those late pictures, now in the Getty Museum in California, showed a stand of violet irises (now more blue than purple, because the red pigment he used in his mixture has faded) with a single white bloom among them. It is hard not to interpret that lone flower as a form of self-portrait — an outsider in the midst of a throng. The painting hid a secret, too, discovered by conservators: in the bottom left corner, they found pollen from an umbrella pine stuck in the paint, which conjures a poignant image of the artist at work in the asylum garden as his end approached.

The Japanese prints that enthused van Gogh helped spread a craze for irises as a decorative motif in late-19th- and early-20th-century art and interiors — a fad further encouraged by the pioneering Japanese colour photographer Kazumasa Ogawa, whose Some Japanese Flowers (1896), showing 38 varieties, including irises, was a revelation. Walter Crane, a significant figure in the Arts-and-Crafts Movement, included irises in his wallpaper designs, as did William Morris. American art glass designer Louis Comfort Tiffany used them in his table lamps, stained glass and vases — and in his own paintings, too. They were also a staple in the work of that other great name of Art Nouveau, Alphonse Mucha, whose posters did much to spread European high style to aspiring aesthetes around the globe.

Irises in art, as in botany, thrive in every climate and habitat

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

As I look out of the window one evening across our forested patch of the High Weald, the sky looks almost edible: a whirl of peach streaked with raspberry sauce. The old adage whispers through my thoughts: ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning.’

Since time began, we have been spellbound by the visual spectacle of the heavens glowing a fiery red and we have attached our own meanings to it. According to the proverb dating back to the Gospel of Matthew, for shepherds (or sailors) it heralded a ‘delight’ or carried a ‘warning’, depending on the time of day. In the UK, where weather systems come mainly from the west, it makes sense that a rosy evening sky signals that pleasant weather is on its way. Conversely, waking up to a red sky in the east suggests that the clement weather may have passed and something wetter and windier could soon take its place.

The saying was certainly known to Shakespeare, who uses a red sky in the morning to prefigure disaster. In the narrative poem Venus and Adonis, he evokes ‘the ruby-colour’d portal’ that ‘like a red morn’ brings ‘wrack to the seaman, tempest to the field/Sorrow to shepherds, woe unto the birds,/Gusts and foul flaws to herdmen and to herds’. He returns to the imagery in Henry IV, Part I, weaving a pathetic fallacy that anticipates the violence of the upcoming rebellion. ‘How bloodily the sun begins to peer/Above yon busky hill!’ cries King Henry, as he observes the red blush to the morning sky.

It’s in autumn and winter, when the sun lounges closer to the horizon, that our skies are most apt to turn red, as the light journeying towards us must take a longer route. According to the phenomenon of ‘Rayleigh Scattering’, named after the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Lord Rayleigh, by the time the rays reach us, the blue light has been scattered away from our line of sight and reds and oranges dominate our vision.

Some red skies are manmade. The war years, in particular, lent a terrifying new significance to a red-lit sky, with residents emerging from bomb shelters during the 1940 Blitz to see their cities ablaze and the firmament glowing an eerie red. ‘They are firing, we are falling, and the red skies rend and shiver us,’ cried the apologist writer G. K. Chesterton in The Ballad of St Barbara, penned shortly after the First World War and evoking the violence of the Battle of Marne.

In his science-fiction novel The World Set Free, published in 1914, H. G. Wells would anticipate the horrors of the Second World War’s final chapter, describing skies with a ‘full-bodied crimson glare’ caused by ‘the unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs’.

For writers conveying a dramatic climax, these florid skies have proved irresistible. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, it’s under an oppressive ‘hot and copper sky’ that Coleridge’s sailor realises the ‘hellish thing’ that he has done in slaying the albatross, triggering a curse upon the crew. A century on, the violent conclusion of Joseph Conrad’s pioneering psychological novel Lord Jim (1900) is heightened by a description of a sky that is ‘blood-red, immense, [and] streaming like an open vein’. In 1938, Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic novel Rebecca evokes a glowing red sky, as Manderley (the ancestral estate where the story is set) burns in the distance, signifying the indelible mark the first Mrs de Winter’s murder has left on her successor. ‘The road to Manderley lay ahead,’ reads the novel’s closing passage. ‘There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood.’

Painters, too, have taken inspiration from scarlet skies to communicate an array of emotions. For Monet, it meant hope: a new dawn for France; whereas, for the deeply devout John Linnell, a bucolic idealist, it represented spiritual fulfilment and the divine. Millet was less romantic: his red sky marked the end of a hard day working the land. For some artists, a crimson sky denoted violence and rage. In The Slave Ship, the dramatic red sky chosen by Turner suggests the horror and bloodshed of bondage. For visionaries such as John Martin and William Blake, it signified apocalypse; whereas for the troubled Edvard Munch it meant terror and existential crisis. ‘Suddenly the sky turned blood red,’ he recalled. ‘I felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature.’

Red skies can be amplified by extreme, and often catastrophic, natural events. When the atmosphere is polluted with large quantities of tiny particles caused by wildfire smoke, volcanic ash or dust swept high in the sky from a distant desert, the particles filter out the shorter blue wavelengths of light (a phenomenon known as Mie scattering), painting the skies red instead. A startling example of this was the August 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia, one of the most dramatic volcanic explosions in history. As the volcanic haze slowly drifted across the planet, it coloured evening skies thousands of miles away in the most extraordinary shades of red. It was a sight that Alfred, Lord Tennyson would later draw on in his 1892 poem St Telemachus, describing ‘the fierce ashes of some fiery peak… hurl’d so high they ranged about the globe’.

At the time of the eruption, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was working as a Classics teacher and curate in rural Lancashire. Mesmerised by the vivid, otherworldly skies, which reached England in late October, he made detailed observations of them, noting that the display was ‘more like inflamed flesh than the lucid reds of ordinary sunsets’ and would fade to ‘a faint dusky blush’. ‘It has prolonged the daylight, and optically changed the season,’ he remarked.

Meanwhile, gazing at the phenomenon from the banks of the Thames in London’s Chelsea was the artist William Ascroft, his pastels working at pace on paper as he recorded the rapidly changing skyscapes for the Royal Society. He produced more than 500 sketches to document the splendid sight, giving them evocative names such as Opalescent sunset and Afterglow with a flush of salmon.

Before such marvels could be explained by science, elaborate myths were attached to unusually red skies. According to Viking legend, Sköll, a colossal wolf, dictated day and night by chasing the sun across the heavens. One version of the folklore states that when the wolf closes in on the exhausted sun, the blood oozing from its jaws paints the sky a gory red.

Further south, the Romans looked to the celestial sphere to gauge the mood of the Gods, reading a red-stained sky as an omen of doom. The great poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses feeds on this mythology, with unusual red markings in a night sky prefiguring the assassination of Julius Caesar. ‘Fire-brands were seen, burning in the midst of the stars,’ he writes. ‘Often drops of blood rained from the clouds… and the moon’s chariot was spattered with blood.’

However we seek to explain a red sky, its effect is unavoidably visceral, acquainting Romantics such as Percy Bysshe Shelley with the wondrous and inexplicable ‘sublime’. In his lyrical poem The Cloud, told from the perspective of its namesake, we’re lifted high into the air. We float among ‘the sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes/And his burning plumes outspread’, and are enveloped by its counterpart, sunset: ‘The crimson pall of eve’ that falls ‘from the depth of Heaven above.’

However, from down here on the ground, in my corner of Sussex close to where Shelley was born, I’m gazing at something softer and more delectable. The poet’s cloud is a giant puff of cream, perhaps, in my peach-melba sky.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

If you, like me, were chronically online in the 2010s then you will be familiar with Jim Chapman, or ‘j1mmyb0bba’ as his YouTube channel was then named. Part of the ‘Brit Crew’ — a group of British personalities including Zoe Sugg (Zoella), her brother Joe (ThatcherJoe), Alfie Deyes (PointlessBlog) and Jim’s now ex-wife Tanya Burr — Jim was basically one of the countries best-known influencers, before being an influencer was even a thing.

Born in 1987 and raised in Wilby, Norfolk, as a little boy Jim dreamed of being an illustrator, a hobby he has kept up to this day. He graduated from the University of East Anglia with an undergraduate degree in psychology with a view to studying for a masters (because of a ‘fascination with the way people worked’), until YouTube came knocking. When his work on the platform began to take off, he thought: ‘Oh, this is an opportunity.’ He was earning enough to pay rent to his mum and his mental health was at an all time low, so he decided to quit everything else and focus solely on his channel.

It was a gamble that paid off. Now Jim is an author, illustrator, presenter and model, as well as being an influencer — a term he dislikes being known as. His content, focused on men’s fashion and grooming and family life, now stretches across social media including Instagram, where he has 2.3 million followers. ‘It’s more about betterment than vanity,’ he replies, when I ask about the part of his career that hinges around how he looks. Jim comes across as very grounded. He says doesn’t read his own press, for starters, ‘because here's the thing about my job, the good is never good enough, but the bad really f***ing sucks.’

He goes on: ‘I say this from my ivory tower — I appreciate that — but never have I had enough view traffic, never have I read a thing about me that was good enough. However, if it's in any way negative, I'm like: “Oh, my God, that hurts.”... I just find it better to drop the ego, don't think about it and move on with my life.’

Jim admits that the atmosphere for content creators nowadays is vastly different from when he was coming up on YouTube. ‘Sometimes, people in my world, the ‘influencer’ world, who are young, are the face of what they do, there isn't much they can talk about other than themselves,’ he says. ‘It can be boring, for one thing, but also quite vacuous, and I think sometimes taking a step out of your comfort zone and trying new things broadens your horizons, and then you can have better conversations with people.’

Before his current career Jim had stints working in retail and in insurance. ‘For a while, I was cold calling people trying to sell car insurance. I was the guy who would send the bailiffs after you, for a little while. I'm kind of known as being Mr Nice Guy nowadays, but in that job I was a professional a***hole,' he recalls. Clearly, it wasn’t a good fit for him.

He has two children, Margot and Jesse, with wife Sarah Chapman (née Tarleton) who is a model and influencer, for want of a better word. They are currently renovating their home in the Cotswolds together after having moved out of London in order to be closer to Sarah’s family. ‘Of course, I'm still going back and forth to London quite a lot, so I was concerned that it was going to be hard for me, but actually seeing my family thrive is kind of all I need,’ says Jim, before adding that it was ‘totally worth it’.

Your aesthetic hero

I think, because I’ve been doing this job for a long time, I tend to not have heroes. The more I do it, the more I realise everyone’s just a bloody human being, so no one immediately pops to mind, but I think David Gandy always looks impeccable, and holds himself really well. He’s actually really intelligent too, and has done exceptionally well with his career.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I bought a car that broke down after two and a half days, so I had to return it. I thought I was being smart by buying something that was 10 years old. I thought: ‘I’ll get more car for my money that way.’ Then it broke down on a one-way system in central London. That was unfortunate.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

I can’t think of a specific exhibition, but one of my favourite places ever is the Natural History Museum. To this day, it's so magic for me. I went when I was little, and they still have a lot of the stuff that I remember from that time there now. I'm so fascinated by prehistoric stuff and all the biology that came before us. It just blows my mind.

Recently I took my kids and the massive animatronic T Rex is still there — exactly the same. It used to be terrifying. I will say that both of my kids snuggled in a bit tighter when we walked into that room, so I think it still does have that majesty about it.

Your favourite painting

I'm much more into illustrations, because that's a part of what I do. What I tend not to do in the house is have copies of famous artworks, because I want it to be the real thing and, of course, I can't afford the real thing, so I would rather have slightly more unique pieces from artists that are a bit more unknown.

In fact, I can walk around a fine art museum, and very often nothing really sings to me, but I can pick up a copy of, say Spider Man and see loads of drawings that I love. Fine art doesn’t appeal to me in the same way.

A possession that you’d never sell

I can’t think of a single thing. I am really conscious of how nothing means anything by now. It sounds really miserable, but everything can be replaced. For example, if my house burned down, it’s all insured. I could get another house. So there’s not a thing I can think of that means enough to me that I would never get rid of. I had a bunch of watches, but I sold them all when I had the kids. I thought: ‘Actually, I want more money in my pocket now than things on my wrist’. Some of them were sentimental, but the sentiment was not within the item, it was in my mind.

Who would play you in a film of your life

I get told I look like Andrew Garfield sometimes. In fact, I once signed an autograph as Andrew Garfield by accident. I was at the BAFTAs and Hacksaw Ridge had just come out. I was signing autographs and doing selfies, and then this guy said: 'Sign this'. I didn't realise it was the poster of Hacksaw Ridge. He said: ‘I loved you in the film,’ and then suddenly my heart dropped. I looked over and Andrew Garfield was about 6ft behind me, and I'm much taller than Andrew Garfield — I'm 6ft 3in. He’s very cool, very handsome but very much not me. I was on autopilot so I signed a big ‘Jim’ on the poster. It haunts me to this day.

A book that you found really inspiring

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson — it’s fascinating. I tend to read more facts than fiction.

The music that you work to

When I draw I have music on. I listen to basically the same four albums I've listened to since I was about 16. A lot of Radiohead, Bloc Party's first album, James Blake, Billie Eilish, The 1975 — all the really sad ones. Basically, if it hurts, I like it.

The last podcast you listened to

Good question. I actually recorded one the other day, but I don't listen to anything I’ve done. I mean, I don't read my own press or watch back my own content once I've edited it. I'm my own worst critic. I don't need more ‘me’. For me, it's a really important distinction between church and state — who I am is not what I do. So, I just don't like sitting through something I've already done. I don’t need to watch it all again. But also, I just sit and look at myself and go: ‘God, you blink funny,’ or ‘Your voice is annoying,’ or ‘You mumbled there’. You know, no good can come of it. So I just don't.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

Something really practical like a pen knife. Assuming I don't get bitten by a snake or die of sun exposure, I think I’d quite enjoy it. I love adventure and it would be so peaceful. Your phone wouldn’t be going ‘ping’ every five minutes. I also quite like being on my own.

The thing that gets you up on the morning

My kids. My son is two and this morning he woke up at 6am. Yesterday he came down in his Elsa dress with his big sunglasses on, so it's a good way to wake up.

Otherwise, what wakes me up, in a more sort of metaphorical sense, is that I love existing. I know it sounds ridiculous and really wishy-washy, but I want to touch it all and smell it all, and I want to make sure that by the time my time on this planet's done I've experienced it. Especially because of being in a really bad place years back — I'm so conscious of how little time I have here right now, and so I want to do stuff.

The items you collect

I am a collector of just… bits. My wife will say: ‘What have you bought now?’ It will be an odd contraption of some sort that I think is going to change my life, that I then never use. I also like Lego because I like to make stuff, and sometimes it’s a nice way to relax: to stay in for an evening, have a glass of whisky and make something that is low energy.

A hotel you could go back and back to

I quite like to not stay in a hotel. I like to experience things and explore. I only really stay in one if it's convenient, for example Soho House is handy as it's in so many cities now, so you kind of know what you're getting.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

This one is a tricky one. I don't know my most memorable meal. I do remember accidentally eating snails. We were in France, and they were fine. We were eating these little deep fried things and then we found out that they were snails. Everyone else went, ‘Bleurgh’, but they tasted good. We didn't know it was a problem until they decided it was.

Otherwise, I think it's more about the location. I’ve been to the jungle a few times, when I was working with WWF. And so when you see slop on a plate, that is really exciting, because you're in the jungle. I eat everything. I can't think of much stuff I wouldn't want to eat. I mean, I wouldn’t want to eat brains... but it's more about the company and the location than the food for me, I think.

The best present you’ve ever received

I got a nice watch once, but even that I sold when we had the kids. It was nice at the time, and I think at that point in my life it meant a lot to me, because at that moment success meant money, and so it was a mark of that.

Before Jesse came along, Margot and my wife had made his little book together. It was called Daddy's Magic Hugs, and we had so many bedtimes when I read that to her, and it's now tattered and knackered.

You can keep up to date with Jim on his social media channels, @JimChapman. You can follow him on Instagram here

In 1987, Prince Rainier III, widower of Princess Grace and father of the current monarch Prince Albert II, launched a biennial open-air sculpture fair in the streets, parks and public spaces of Monaco. It included specially commissioned pieces, as well as others from his personal collection — and it was a smash.

Indeed, it was so successful that he decided to leave all of the sculptures in situ and to continue adding new ones with each subsequent edition of the fair. Eventually, more than 200 pieces were on permanent display across the principality.

In 2023, they became collectively known as the Chemin des Sculptures Rainier III. As with the NC500 in Scotland, something that was already there — in the case of the NC500, a network of public roads — was given a catchy name and thus made freshly exciting to visitors.

A website offers maps and information on every piece and you can scan QR codes on or near each sculpture, which will open the relevant page. Organising a visit to Monaco around the Chemin des Sculptures — or simply taking an hour or two to take a quick look at it if you’re there for other reasons — almost guarantees you’ll see things you either haven’t seen before or wouldn’t see otherwise.

The trail can be undertaken casually, partially and with no regard for sequence. Hop on, hop off. It does make a certain sense, however, to start with Kees Verkaade’s 1997 sculpture of François Grimaldi, the founder of the Grimaldi dynasty, who in 1257 seized Le Rocher, the Rock of Monaco, disguised as a monk.

More than 700 years later, a Grimaldi is still calling the shots from the ancient palace in front of which stands this sculpture of a frankly rather slippery-looking, if not downright Machiavellian, François.

Most surprising of the numerous sculptures commemorating royalty along the trail is Manolo Valdès’s Reina Mariana, commissioned for the 2003 fair and occupying a prime position on the terrace behind the casino.

It’s a monumental interpretation in bronze of Diego Velázquez’s 1652–53 portrait of Mariana of Austria, who, a few years earlier, at the age of 14, had become Queen of Spain as the bride of Philip IV, her uncle. Manolo's chunky, body-positive sculpture makes for a striking contrast with Velázquez’s achingly delicate and melancholy portrait.

Monaco is not only steep, but also, these days, as densely stacked up as a Momofuku Milk Bar cake. If you take a few steps away from Manolo's sculpture across the terrace and look directly down, you’ll have a fine view not of the sea, as you might expect, but of the vast, flat roof of the Auditorium Rainier III.

What could otherwise have remained an unremarkable 16,000sq ft expanse of nothing in particular was transformed, in 1979, into a beguiling geometric rainbow by Victor Vasarely, a founding figure, together with Bridget Riley, of the Op Art (optical art) movement. Titled Hexa Grace, it comprises some 24,000 lozenge-shaped enamelled tiles fashioned from volcanic lava, each one rippling and radiant with elemental energy.

Perhaps the biggest crowd-pleaser of the Chemin des Sculptures is just around the corner, in the middle of the Place du Casino. This is Sir Anish Kapoor’s 1999 Sky Mirror. Sir Anish has created half a dozen or so of these large concave dishes in polished steel for different sites around the world, each tilted towards and reflecting a distorted, upside-down view of the sky and immediate surroundings.

Here, the immediate surroundings include the stupendous Casino de Monte-Carlo, the comparably magnificent Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo, the recently expanded Café de Paris and a stand of tall, gracious, immaculately tended Mexican fan palms. Quite the urban panorama, as glossy, ornate, moneyed and quintessentially Monte-Carlo as can be.

If all that’s a bit rich for your taste, simply spin on your heel and walk uphill for two minutes, into the gorgeous oasis that is the Jardins de la Petite Afrique. Although less well known than the Jardin Exotique, home to 1,000 cacti ranged across a sheer hillside, or the two gardens dedicated to Princess Grace, the Roseraie and the Jardin Japonais, it has a charm that’s entirely its own.

There you’ll find Andy Goldsworthy’s Slate Cone for Little Africa from 1991, a lopsided, cairn-like object positioned within a semicircle of trees, together creating a faintly ritualistic, stone-circle-ish and agreeably meditative vibe. The hypercars and selfie sticks suddenly seem light years away.

If the Chemin des Sculptures failed to satisfy your appetite for art, there’s plenty more on which to feast your eyes. The Nouveau Musée National de Monaco is housed in two splendid old buildings, Villa Paloma and Villa Sauber, which are marvellous inside and out.

A lively contemporary gallery scene has emerged — Almine Rech, Opera Gallery, Hauser & Wirth — in tandem with a flourishing Monaco Art Week, now in its eighth edition.

However, if pounding the sculpture trail has given you blisters, swap your pinchy shoes for squishy slippers and check in to the Prince Rainier III Suite at the Hôtel de Paris, which is stuffed with impeccably displayed, museum-quality art. That said, the suite is enormous, so you’ll still have to hobble around to see it all.

Click here for more information on the Chemin des Sculptures Rainier III.

This feature originally appeared in the June 3, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The colourful paintings and familiar bespectacled face of David Hockney have figured largely in the news over the past weeks following the announcement of the artist’s death at the age of 88.

Born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, he moved to London and then Los Angeles, California, in 1964, where his paintings captured a sense of the West Coast American idyll. His rediscovery of his native Yorkshire landscape towards the end of his life helped earn him popular recognition in Britain. His longevity was one foundation of his success.

Another was the remarkable number of times he was able to reinvent himself, repeatedly producing fresh art at every stage in his long career. Bound up with that freshness was an enthusiasm for looking at and exploring colour, shadow (or the lack of it) and perspective.

His fascination with technology was important, too. Most famously perhaps, it was expressed in his use of iPads to produce vibrant images. One such was the design he produced for the Queen Elizabeth II stained-glass window at Westminster Abbey, unveiled in 2018. It has helped further that his work was free from the didacticism that characterises so much contemporary art.

His art was celebratory, rather than politically or socially charged. Hockney was, in addition, a supremely good and highly articulate self-publicist. Some obituaries imply that he was a figure whom we should recall, but it is surely closer to the truth to say that he never went away. Whether through interviews, documentaries or lecturing, he was a continuous public presence over the past half century or more talking about Art.

At the root of Hockney’s success, however, was a real and particular skill: he could draw. His facility in this regard was what allowed him to turn his hand successfully to so many things. No less importantly, his own draughtsmanship gave him an appreciation for Old Masters and their technical achievement. It is surprisingly rare to find contemporary artists who genuinely admire such work. Some, indeed, struggle to conceal their patronising disdain for it. By contrast, Hockney studied it and formulated his own opinions about it.

A case in point — and one that chimed with his own wider interests in technology—was his assertion that Vermeer used a camera obscura to paint. He also drew inspiration from other traditions of art to enrich his own, exploring the use, for example, of multiple points of perspective. Perhaps as important as the work he produced, however, are two ideas that he repeatedly expounded.

The first is that looking encourages us to see things in different ways. It’s one of those observations that is at once blindingly obvious, yet merits repetition because it remains so easy to forget as we race around and see only what we already recognise. The other is that it is enough for art merely to be beautiful. How refreshing that is to hear. Athena wholeheartedly agrees.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

We still do some things well in this country and teaching History of Art is one of them. The subject is offered at more than 100 British universities and, according to the latest independent QS World University Rankings, which compares and rates universities around the world by subject, four of those sit in the global top 10.

In the top spot is the Courtauld Institute of Art, an independent college within the University of London, which boasts the largest faculty of art historians and conservators in the UK and has long been the de rigueur institution for professional art historians. Then come University College London (at three), the Royal College of Art (four) and Cambridge (eight), with Oxford at number 11.

Alas, according to the Courtauld’s own research, this picture is less glowing in British schools, where the story is one of decline. Over the past decade, the number of schools offering History of Art at A level has fallen by 34% — from 122 in 2016 to a meagre 80 today — and of those only 19 are state or non-fee-paying schools.

Depressingly, the subject is offered only in England, with participating schools concentrated in London and the South-East, which means great swathes of British schoolchildren are excluded. This should come as no surprise; the humanities are under pressure in today’s narrowly focused, STEM-oriented education system.

Nevertheless, young people live in a predominantly visual culture, saturated with images on mobile-phone screens, and social-media apps such as Instagram prove that aesthetics — or at least personal aesthetics — matter to them. What art history can teach them is how to decode images, how to understand them and how today’s visual culture, and their response to it, came about. That might not seem sufficient on its own, but art history is not simply about art. Any half-diligent student will do more than look at paintings, sculpture and their makers.

The works of Leonardo and Peter Paul Rubens, Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Henry Moore, Cézanne and David Hockney, who sadly died this month, are the products of particular moments in time and to understand them fully — or as fully as is possible — knowledge of their cultural and historical context is as vital as the niceties of brushstrokes and themes. To study art history is to study history, literature, music, biography, philosophy... an all-round education, illustrated by great paintings.

Art history has economic benefits, too. As a House of Lords report said recently, the music, performing and visual-arts sector is worth £11.2 billion a year to the UK economy. Our museums, galleries and libraries employ 91,000 people and our commercial art market is the second largest in the world. There is more to Botticelli and his ilk than beauty — here’s hoping the Government takes notice.

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

The office of Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen, head of the Courtauld Gallery, London WC2, is a scholarly oasis of books, papers and windows perched high in Somerset House’s northern wing above the central courtyard. Soon, the thuds and beeps of heavy machinery, the screeching of saws and the rattling of jackhammers will shatter that peace — and Dr Vegelin can’t wait.

‘We will be going through a big campus building project. It is about bringing the students and faculty back from their temporary home near King’s Cross. I think for us it is a really historic moment ahead of our centenary in 2032.’ Having its teaching arm relegated to Vernon Square, London WC1 — ‘not the easiest place to reach from the Strand’ — must have been hard for The Courtauld, which is at once a museum and a university.

Ever since Samuel Courtauld founded it in 1932, it has brought together the art of the past with the future of art history, an approach Dr Vegelin credits for the institution’s enduring appeal with philanthropists: the project for the new campus, slated to open in 2029, received a generous donation of £30 million from the Reuben Foundation. ‘People are funding us partly because they believe our students are going to go out and be the critics, run the art galleries, run the museums or be curators, not only for that purpose, but in order to be able to continue to open up the Arts to the widest population. That was exactly Samuel Courtauld’s idea. It’s not language you would use now, necessarily, but he said that The Courtauld had to be a missionary centre, where people could be trained who would go out into the world. It is what I think this institution has done and can feel quite proud of — and needs to continue to do into the future.’

Hence the building work, but how does this quest to spread artistic knowledge square up with The Courtauld’s policy of charging for admission? ‘We do it because we haven’t got a choice,’ admits Dr Vegelin. ‘If a wonderful philanthropist walked in next week and said, “Look, I want to solve that problem for you and endow free admission for everyone”, we’d embrace it, no question.’ Indeed, he passionately advocates against national museums charging for admission. ‘Personally, I believe you can’t send a more powerful message about the importance of art than throwing open the doors and inviting people to walk in freely and with no barriers.’

Nothing matters more to him than this connection between museums and the public, but he believes the question of admission fees and Government funding — or lack thereof — is broader than that. In his view, it can help define British identity. ‘Creating an environment in which culture is seen as something at the heart of the nation is so important: it says it isn’t merely a decorative adornment, but fundamental to how we think of ourselves as people and how we think of the UK in the future. The country of Shakespeare and the country house and parish churches, great museums, contemporary design—that is so much more resonant for me than thinking about, say, AI or productivity. That very materialistic way of defining who we are or what we do is a road to perdition, there is a real impoverishment of the public realm.’

He returns to why Courtauld founded the Institute. He derived great joy from his collection — so much so that the mere thought of loaning a Renoir reduced him to tears — and intended to share that with the nation through his bequest, but he was also a man who had endured the tragedy of two World Wars and that experience shaped his vision: ‘He and many other people were thinking: “What type of society do we want to create when we come out of this crisis?” For him, the answer was a deeply humanistic one, a world filled with art and poetry, a meritocratic society with free education, healthcare and opportunity. He was one of the great captains of industry, but, in many ways, very anti-materialistic. He felt that that spirit and those humanistic values should be at the heart of the world that they were reimagining for the future. I think some of the philanthropists we are speaking to or who are funding the National Gallery’s great programme are thinking about these things.’

Public policy hasn’t (yet?) reached the same conclusions, however, and Dr Vegelin acknowledges the past few years have been rather challenging for the country in general and the Arts in particular. Yet, he firmly believes Britain’s cultural ecosystem remains strong. ‘There’s perhaps nothing that compares, in terms of the quality of the museums, the great collections, the variety and the density of what there is in London; it’s absolutely extraordinary. The fantastic exhibitions, the auctions, the fairs, the galleries, all the creativity in the young people, in universities — that mix is something very remarkable. I’m still convinced that, really, there isn’t any city that does it quite like London and that combination is full of promise for the future.’

If anything, he would like to see the many strands of London’s artistic community working together more closely: ‘There was a wonderful moment some time ago where you had the Monet exhibition at the Courtauld, the van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery’ — the way he says van Gogh in that hissing, guttural way only the Dutch can pull off is one clue that Dr Vegelin originally hails from the Netherlands—‘and Bacon at the National Portrait Gallery, the Frieze art fair was on and I had people say to me: “This is what you should be doing to put London on the front foot. It’s brilliant that you guys have all planned this together.” But we hadn’t. It was good luck and I have often thought that actually, perhaps we’re at a moment where national institutions and others should coordinate more fully, as they do in some other countries.’

The new museum openings of the past year have added to the vibrancy. He mentions the V&A Storehouse in Stratford, E20, as an especially inspiring place: ‘I went again last weekend and I was so moved by this great hymn to the museum enterprise, to preserve and study the past and learn from it. This sort of temple to curiosity is simply wonderful.’

Nor is this cultural energy only a London affair. The urgency to share collections between town and the regions is as strong as ever, but where in the past it might have been perhaps a touch condescending — ‘we will send our masterpieces, so that they can be enjoyed by people outside the capital’ — things have changed for the better: ‘There are great institutions outside London, in cities that have come through some tough times, but are doing brilliant things, and there’s more of a sense that they are equals and peers.’ He mentions as examples the highlights from the collection of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, on show at The Courtauld until the end of August as the Birmingham museum undergoes renovation, and The Courtauld’s own closure between 2018 and 2021: ‘We had a programme of lending to museums in towns and cities where Courtauld’s business used to be and then some things were lent to The Courtauld from these institutions. I think it’s much more a conversation between partners than simply distributing things from London to the provinces — and that’s critical, because there shouldn’t be a situation where it’s all about London. The UK has so much to offer.’

All this — coupled with an underlying faith in British ingenuity — fills him with hope: ‘I think, in the UK, there are still huge ambitions to do fantastic projects in the Arts and culture more widely, not only museums, but design and theatre and music and opera and ballet. I feel very optimistic about what this country can achieve.’ First, however, he can enjoy the chaos of construction.

Earlier this month, Athena visited St Marnock’s Church in the hamlet of Fowlis Easter, Angus. It’s one of a multitude of buildings that the Church of Scotland has listed for closure and sale. Soon, she understands, this Category A-listed building may be available on the market for only £75,000.

The situation raises in extreme form some of the issues and complexities of what’s happening to churches in Scotland. St Marnock’s was rebuilt following the foundation of a college of priests here by the local landowner, Sir Andrew Gray, in the 1450s. The new building took the form of a large box covered by a timber barrel vault. As medieval convention demanded, it was internally divided into a public nave and clerical choir by a timber screen surmounted by a ‘rood’ or image of the crucifixion. In this case, the rood was painted on a panel that filled the curve of the vault. There was also an elevated loft, accessed by a ladder, running along the top of the screen that could be used for lighting votive candles at the feet of Christ crucified.

The iconoclasm that followed the Reformation in the 16th century witnessed the wholesale destruction of roods across the British Isles. At Fowlis Easter, however, the entire screen, loft and rood were cannibalised to create a pew for the local laird. This pew additionally enclosed the high altar and clearly gave the medieval choir fixtures a degree of protection as well. Consequently, when the church was restored in the 1880s, there came to light — in frustratingly obscure circumstances — a unique collection of 1480s church furnishings.

These comprise the only substantially complete medieval rood image in Britain, the doors of the screen, several figures of apostles and saints that probably ornamented the loft, a massive section of the high altarpiece and a carved sacrament house, a repository for the consecrated host. Also in the late 19th century, the font from the church, carved with scenes of the Passion, was returned to the building. All the paintings, which probably date to the 1480s, were mounted on the walls of the restored church, but it’s still possible to see how the building accommodated them with projecting stones to support structural elements and windows to illuminate their imagery.

The proposed sale puts the future of this extraordinary survival into question. If the paintings are removed, they lose the context that gives them meaning. If they form part of the sale, however, they will be conveyed from public to private ownership. As an added complication, how can the building be physically altered without obscuring the coherence of what survives?

A local group, Fowlis Forward, is trying to save the church as a public amenity. Athena wishes them success, but can’t help feeling that the Church of Scotland is perpetrating cultural blackmail on us all by threatening to sell — and therefore compromise — this extraordinary survival. There is clearly a Gordian knot of problems here, but the property market is not the tool that will cut through it properly.

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

1. The Uffington White Horse, late Bronze or early Iron Age

For 3,000 years, the Uffington White Horse has galloped across Oxfordshire, maintained by 150 generations who have added fresh white chalk to its streamlined body. Was it a tribute to a sun god, whose chariot was pulled by horses? It is best seen from the air.

2. The Bayeux Tapestry, 11th century

Although probably commissioned for Bayeux Cathedral in northern France, this embroidery, nearly 230ft long, was made in Kent following the Battle of Hastings in 1066 — and it’s coming this autumn to the British Museum.

3. Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery…, 1766

Wright spent much of his working life in Derby, where he was friends with leading scientists. In this painting, a travelling lecturer demonstrates an orrery, a machine showing the movement of the planets around the Sun. When it was first exhibited, it was praised as being ‘exceeding fine’.

4. Turner vs Constable, Summer Exhibition, 1832

Before the Summer Exhibition opened at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, artists were given time to retouch and varnish their paintings. When J. M. W. Turner saw his breezy seascape Helvoetsluys hung next to John Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, he was worried: his pale boats leaving the harbour did not have the punch of Constable’s river scene, full of red flags and pageantry. He took out his paintbrush and added a vibrant red buoy to the foreground. Constable’s reaction? ‘He has been here and fired a gun,’ he fumed.

5. Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993

In the year Rachel Whiteread won the Turner Prize, she cast an entire terraced house. The bricks were peeled away to reveal an uncanny concrete interior, a mausoleum to all the families who had lived there. It made headline news and was variously described as a ‘bunker’, an ‘eyesore’ and ‘an exceptional work of art’. It stood for about three months.

Leaning on the coast wall, I watch vast waves barrel in: the Irish Sea is buffeting Llandudno Pier in North Wales, yet its pagoda-style pavilion stands defiant against the spray. Earlier this year, Devon’s Teignmouth Grand Pier wasn’t so lucky: Storm Ingrid lashed the 1867 structure, stealing a section into the depths. ‘They’re brilliantly bonkers, but who on earth would build a pier today?’ asks Dr Anya Chapman, author of Pier Review: Sustainability Toolkit for British Seaside Piers. ‘They’re a glorious part of our seaside heritage, but they’ve got to be adaptable.’

The mid to late 19th century marked the boom: entrepreneurial Victorians saw an opportunity to transform functional jetties into promenades of entertainment and respite from choking industrial smog. Visitors flocked to marvel at magicians, comedians, brass bands and orchestras, to savour cockles and ‘penny lick’ ice creams and breathe the restorative sea breeze.

By 1900, there were almost 100 seaside piers dotted around the British coastline, but 20th-century air travel tempted holiday-makers overseas to warmer waters and blue skies. Meanwhile, at home, ever more powerful squalls and fires left cash-strapped pier owners with hefty repair bills.

Today, about 60 seaside piers remain and National Piers Society chairman Tim Wardley has an optimistic view on their future, attesting to their benefit to the local community. ‘Far from being anachronistic survivors of a bygone era, our seaside piers have never been more popular or relevant to the prosperity and popularity of the seaside experience and coastal tourism economy.’

Wales’s Bangor Garth Pier in Gwynedd is exemplary, combining architectural legacy with economic pragmatism. Opened in 1896, this Grade II*-listed, 1,500ft pier has a magical quality: its fantastical, copper-roofed polygonal kiosks and onion-shaped domed pavilion are set against the dramatic mountain backdrop of Eryri (Snowdonia), yet its custodians very much inhabit the real world. ‘Why preserve heritage just to preserve heritage?’ asserts Avril Wayte, chair of Friends of Bangor Garth Pier. ‘It’s got to live. We’ve got to find ways to make it more self-sustaining.’

The pier was designed by J. J. Webster to receive passenger steamers puffing from Liverpool, Blackpool and elsewhere, but it fell into disrepair and closed in 1971 before being purchased by Bangor City Council for one penny. It reopened in 1988 and restoration spend has since topped £2 million. The pier’s 80-plus volunteers raised £40,000 in 2025 — which was match-funded by Bangor City Council — for substructure repairs and plan to raise a further £130,000, also to be match-funded, aiming to build resilience for decades.

By manning the pier’s entrance, they have turned £3,000 in honesty-box donations into an £80,000-a-year income stream. The kiosks champion local art, craft and comestibles, whereas the pier master’s house is opening as a holiday let. A visitor centre and glass-walled café are other ideas. Amid these changes, the pier’s tranquillity will be retained, assures trustee Vanessa Hawkins. ‘It’s not a place where you come for amusement arcades and video games. It has a really serene quality, with views of the Menai Strait and the mountains.’

Designed by Sunderland’s own Henry Hay Wake, Tyne and Wear’s Roker Pier, which opened in 1903, eschews Victorian ornamentation for spartan concrete and granite: it forms a muscular 2,000ft sweep, arching to diffuse punishing North Sea breakers. Volunteers run hard-hat tours of the ‘under the pier’ tunnel, originally built to aid construction before being adopted by lighthouse keepers as a safe route during storms. Guides flash torches through the darkness to illuminate technical drawings and photographs: Wake designed a gigantic steam-powered hydraulic crane, dubbed Goliath, to drop colossal 45-ton concrete blocks into place.

The successful restoration of Roker is a key plank in a multi-million-pound coastal regeneration plan, explains tour guide Maureen McCartney of Roker Pier Heritage Group CIC: ‘Sunderland is on the up. The pier raises the profile of Sunderland and makes it a destination. It’s not only the pier that benefits, it’s the surroundings.’ Proving the point is the upgraded prom, which now resembles a resilient lungomare. There are brightly coloured metal seats, a watersports centre, sculpture, landscaped gardens and new cafés; cycleways knit exhilarating coast-to-coast runs and giant oak pods house businesses.

Encouraging trips between city centre and sea is the next challenge, reveals Sharon Appleby, chief executive of Sunderland BID. ‘We need to be drawing people into our city and our seafront is a huge asset. My job is to try to turn it into a year-round destination. It’s not only about visitors coming from further afield, it’s about local people, too.’ When it comes to sheer dogged survival, a Grade II*-listed structure in North Yorkshire takes the prize.

Designed by John Anderson, Saltburn Pier spanned a proud 1,500ft when it opened in 1869, but lost its seaward end to a storm six years later. A slightly truncated pier reopened in 1877, yet one tempestuous night in 1924 SS Ovenbeg smashed clean through it, creating a 210ft gap, which was repaired in 1930. Gales returned with a vengeance in 1953, 1959, 1961 and 1974: it took a public inquiry to avert demolition and National Lottery funds to put the pier on a solid footing. It is no surprise to discover that, these days, the beach huts here are bolstered by steel frames and are firmly anchored to substrate.

A stroll down to the pier takes in the 1884 funicular railway, a gravity-defying water-balanced tram that trundles up and down the 120ft cliff between town level and pier. The beach is an invigorating eight-mile stretch of shingle and sand and low-tide affords a close look at cast-iron trestles: in 2000–01 each one was dismantled and restored before being re-anchored on new driven piles, creating the sturdy 681ft pier in place today. Stepping under the pier conjures up images of Ron Herron’s experimental Walking City: at any moment towering legs feel as if they could flex and move the entire structure to an even more dramatic setting down the beach.

‘Exposed to the elements and made from iron, the pier is susceptible to corrosion,’ confirms Redcar and Cleveland councillor Carrie Richardson, who adds that regular inspections identify any remedial work needed. ‘The pier is so important to our borough that these challenges will be overcome. In 20 years’ time, it will essentially look the same as it does today.’

On the Kent coastline, a helter-skelter, cheery carousel and sandcastle competitions at Herne Bay Pier provide visitors with a traditional seaside day out. Yet powering attractions on this 1873 pier is modern technology: a 55yd canopy of solar panels. The pier uses 80% of the generated power, and trustees hope the £60,000 array will fully pay for itself this year, a mere six years after installation.

‘I think the whole thing is ground-breaking,’ enthuses trustee Sue Halfpenny. ‘I believe we are the only pier in the country with solar.’ Looking ahead, wind and wave energy are being explored. The pier also generates income from laser shows, live music and television and film shoots, starring in Netflix’s Black Mirror and Indian action thriller Jagame Thandhiram. ‘You need visionaries,’ adds Ms Halfpenny. ‘You need a vibrant business plan that’s going to point the way forward.’

For a ringside seat on the coastal environment, the Porthole Room in Somerset’s Clevedon Pier is difficult to beat: cormorants can be spotted diving for wrasse and eels and waves slap the glass during blustery spring tides, testament to the Severn Estuary’s 48½ft tidal range.

The under-the-pier vista of sweeping arches is astounding; engineers Richard Ward and John William Grover created a minimalist and graceful design to limit the impact of the elements, recycling wrought-iron tracks from Brunel’s South Wales Railway in the process. The 1869 structure is rightly deserving of its multi-million-pound restoration, Grade I listing and Sir John Betjeman’s ‘most beautiful pier in England’ endorsement.

Interactive displays abound in the visitor centre: cargo ships are trackable on radar and visitors can witness pier construction in a Victorian-style peep show. A bracing walk on deck clears the head and littoral fossils tell the story of millions of years of continental drift. ‘Increasingly for everyone’s wellbeing, green and blue spaces are important and we have those here in bucketloads,’ says Clevedon Pier learning and outreach volunteer Ali Camp, who plans to connect with broader audiences over the coming years. ‘We will create more experiences that inspire learning, reflection and connection.’

When ticket sales dwindled at Bournemouth Pier’s theatre in Dorset, it was time for drastic action: out went 850 seats and in came an adrenaline-fuelled reinvention, comprising 20-plus colourful climbing walls and the world’s first pier-to-shore zipwire.

The pier continues to evolve, points out group marketing manager James Balcazar: ‘People don’t merely want a view any more; they want a reason to dwell.’ A walk along the 1880 structure reveals plenty of evidence: a photography exhibition celebrates a litter-free shoreline and a ‘selfie’ butterfly mural courtesy of Iain Alexander’s Floating Love is impossible to resist. Tribute acts and Gen Z-friendly dance anthem sessions pack the calendar. Such forward thinking has spread to surrounding golden sands: boards set out surfing etiquette and municipal electric barbecues are strategically placed to discourage the use of disposable trays.

Looking ahead, the pier is exploring virtual reality and shaping a regenerative-tourism strategy to cut waste and contribute more to local communities. Surveys spot upcoming trends, adds Mr Balcazar: ‘We are always going to nod to the Victorian past and British quirkiness, but it’s about making sure that the British pier still feels as relevant in 20 years as it does today.’

For more information visit the National Piers Society's website here

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

The loos at Wilderness festival are probably nicer than the ones in my own home, which is not to say that I live in squalor, but rather that the organisers are acutely aware of the needs of their clientele and what it takes to convince them that standing in several fields in Oxfordshire for hours on end is a fun thing to do.

You can tell a lot about a festival by its loos. At Wilderness, they smell like hope. At Glastonbury, they smell like a Premier Cru of thousands of hours of bad decisions that have been left to brew in the sun for days, because that’s exactly what’s in them. What unites them isn’t necessarily music, but graffiti. Glastonbury is scrawled with diatribes of capitalist downfall, struggle and injustice. At Wilderness, we are asked to support trans rights, while also being informed that ‘Erin Figg is a [sic] wart hog’. No matter the location, lineup or ‘curated fine-dining experience’, creativity will always manifest itself on the walls of a cubicle in marker pen.

I’ve been going to music festivals since I was 16 and, regrettably, I am now 33. In the fields of Reading, Pilton, Oxfordshire, Powys, Essex and Suffolk, I have found every slice of society, split open and presented like a geode and all usually worse for wear. I have seen people in a shade of pink that would make Chappell Roan blush. I have seen people slide through the mud like Uruk-hai. And in between it all, people having fun in the countryside.

The pinnacle of it all, of course, is in Somerset. The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, to give it its full name, has been a cornerstone of the British summer experience since 1970, when Michael Eavis invited 1,500 people to his farm for the princely sum of £1 each. Since then, it has grown into one of the largest and best festivals on the planet, with 200,000 attendees, prime-time coverage on the BBC and the biggest names in music, comedy and theatre. It is, to use a well-flogged cliché, like nowhere else on earth.

That being said, while it is for everyone, it is not for everyone. As discussed, the loos are diabolical. Showers exist, but require an early start and queueing, which is not conducive to a cider-induced hangover. There are very few trees, plenty of dust and, if it’s been raining, plenty of mud. Agoraphobes will find the seething mass of humanity that ping pongs around the 1,500 acres overwhelming and everyone smells bad and is on drugs. Despite the almost bi-annual presence of Coldplay, it is understandably not everyone’s cup of tea.

Wilderness Festival, in Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire, exists in stark contradiction to the ethos of Glastonbury. It is a festival, in that it exists outside, in the summer, and there is music and cider. But that is just about where the similarities end. Rather than a dusty field in Somerset, we are in gorgeous Cotswolds parkland. Instead of burrito bowls and Somersby Cider, we are treated to curated dining experiences, champagne and craft ales. Where Glastonbury is a sea of ravaged Argos tents that stretches for miles in every direction, Wilderness is the very definition of ‘glamping’, with amenities that would make most hotels blush. It is a festival in the way that an armadillo is a basketball: it’s round and you can probably bounce one, but that’s about where the similarities end.

There are plenty out there who might suggest that Wilderness is not a ‘real’ festival. That it does not eschew the values of peace and love that were the guiding ethos of the Sixties and manifested themselves at institutions such as Glastonbury and Woodstock. It is too ‘corporate’, they would say, pointing at headline sponsorships with Audi and charging stations provided by Vodafone (pointing out that Glastonbury is also sponsored by Vodafone would be a churlish thing to do, so I won’t). Perhaps they have a point. Wilderness is very much a polished version of the festival experience, made for those who enjoy the finer things in life and want to let their hair down a little (but not too much, and have access to a shower and drier the very next morning). When I visited last year, the headliners were Air and Orbital; it would be strange to imagine a world where Kneecap would command a crowd in this part of rural England. In the crowd, which was busy but polite, young mothers and fathers without a speck of mud on them bobbed their heads, often clutching young children to their chest with noise-cancelling headphones offering protection.

Outside of the music, vintage clothing shops with eyebrow-raising prices are eagerly browsed by attendees who are feeling underdressed. There is plenty of glitter and facepaint. In one corner is an adults-only area called ‘The Riddle’, where entry is granted only on the condition that the camera of your phone is covered by a sticker. What was to be found beyond the door? A writhing mass of hedonistic flesh and oil? Ritual sacrifice? A little bit of both? Alas, it was just another DJ and a cocktail bar, where be-chinoed people reclined on sofas and beanbags and discussed KPIs. If it’s true that the elites of our society are engaging in some Eyes Wide Shut-style behaviour while playing with the weather, disappointingly, they aren’t doing it here. Instead, my dinner is prepared in the Audi Haven by Masterchef Monica Galletti and it is fabulous. Delightful cuts of beef and freshly cooked vegetables. What Wilderness lacks in free love it makes up for in fibre.

Now this all might make you consider whether Wilderness is a festival, or a rally for some of the most annoying people on earth. The truth is simpler, which is that it is both, and so is every festival in the country. Everywhere you go, whether it be Somerset or Oxfordshire, will be replete with people who take life too seriously. At Glastonbury, it can be hard to move for people who yearn to show you their crystals and who simply must take a bath. At Wilderness, it is Hugos from the world of finance and real estate, performatively reading the Guardian. At their essence, they are gatherings of people who want to drink too much, listen to live music, and write screeds on portaloos. The only difference is that the ones in Oxfordshire flush and haven’t run out of roll.

If there is a spectrum of festivalness, Wilderness and Glastonbury can be found at almost opposite ends. The music is better in Somerset, but the food and scenery is better in Oxfordshire. Choose your poison. All you can guarantee is that you will likely be sharing it with irritating people, but that is the contract we sign when we are a part of a rich and diverse society.

That we have such a rich exposition of culture and that it can cater to everyone is something to celebrate. Imagine if all the Hugos went to Glastonbury? What if Cornbury Park was infiltrated by people with hair on their feet? How pleasing it is to have a seemingly endless à la carte menu of music and venues and elite catering that we can choose from at will. The countryside is a rich and varied place, and the wealth of festival experiences on offer is just another example.

It could be worse, it could be Coachella, where Instagram rules supreme and the idea of dust and dirt is avoided like a live hand-grenade. Whatever we might think about each other, at least we aren’t Them.

Being English means always having to say I’m sorry. I apologise to the doctor for bothering him, even if parts of my body are falling off. I say sorry if I bump into somebody. I even find myself apologising to the table if I bump into it — it’s ridiculous, but it’s a small price to pay for being English.

Being English to me means knowing my country from top to bottom, side to side. I’m grateful that broadcasting and writing, gardening and giving talks have taken me all over England. I have visited every county. ‘No one comes to Spalding,’ said the couple whose garden I was making over. I did. I can conjure up a mental picture of Norfolk and Cumbria, Dorset and Kent, Leicestershire and Northumberland and I’m pleased about that, not proud. I can’t actually give voice to the words ‘I’m proud of myself’. It’s a phrase that has, so far, never passed my lips. My parents would have had no truck with such a sentiment. ‘Pride comes before a fall’ — it’s simply too smug.

Being from Yorkshire is akin to being English with knobs on. There is pride, I admit, in being from a county that is so beautiful even if, at times, it is a little too strident about its own individuality. I cherish the story of the Yorkshireman who went walking on the moors during the covid lockdown. It’s said he bumped into God, who was taking a stroll among the heather, and asked: ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘Working from home,’ replied God.

Being English means believing that to take my job seriously is imperative, but to take myself seriously is disastrous. It means being embarrassed about doing too well. The aim at school was to blend in; to be 15th in a class of 30, to be happy finishing well down the field in anything sporty and to sing in a choir rather than performing solo. I was small at school (I’m only 5ft 8in now) and soon learned that being funny would distract the bully about to floor me, as it’s difficult to land a punch when you’re laughing.

I like my tea strong and my aftershave weak. I polish my leather shoes and keep a clean handkerchief in my left-hand trouser pocket. For my dad, being English meant going to a Chinese restaurant and ordering a mixed grill. A plumber, he would visit the house of a customer in a jacket and tie, topped with a flat cap, which would be taken off as he crossed the threshold. Period-drama directors, please note.

Being English means I must always walk on the outside of the pavement when accompanied by a woman. Should we cross the road, she will wonder what the dickens I’m doing as I take a sidestep behind her to reposition. I will open a door to allow her through in front of me and offer her my seat on a crowded train. It’s good manners. I’m English. Sorry.

For what being English means to Tom Parker Bowles, click here

For what being English means to Sir John Major, click here

This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

Formerly a fashion journalist at Vogue and Tatler, Pip Durell has gone on to build a fashion empire of her own — With Nothing Underneath (WNU), her luxury womenswear brand which was inspired by men’s tailoring.

The idea came to her when she was at Vogue. She was frequently wearing men’s shirts to work, due to a lack of good options for women. ‘People would always be like: “I like your shirt”… and then I decided to make a shirt, and it went from there,’ she recalls, with a cup of tea in hand in her south London office.

The business began when Pip was 27. She will be 35 this year, and it has only gone from strength to strength. Last year, WNU was named by The Sunday Times as one of the top 100 fastest growing private companies in the country. A lot of her success is down to the Meghan Markle effect, Pip thinks. ‘That was crazy. It was when she was in the Royal Family and still very popular in this country… she basically wore three of our shirts in quick succession and I think it pushed the brand on about three years because of the cash flow that she allowed.’

The first time Meghan wore a WNU shirt Pip received 700 orders. ‘I was probably doing 100 orders a year before that.’ Other celebrities followed, including Cara Delevingne, Florence Pugh and The Princess of Wales. ‘As a British brand, to have anyone in the Royal Family validate you on the kind of global scale that they do is unbelievable.’

As a child, Pip’s mother was an estate agent and her father had a catering company. Growing up in the Kent countryside, she was always desperate to escape to the big city. ‘We would go up to London maybe once a year. I think I just always thought it was a lot more exciting than Kent... the irony is, now I live in London, I'm desperate to get back to the countryside.’

Pip was set to attend the University of Bristol to study history of art, before she changed her mind. Instead she did three weeks work experience at the, now defunct, Condé Nast title Easy Living. ‘Then basically, they were like: “We've got a PA role that we think you might be good for. Do you want to interview for it?” So I did that, and got the job.’

After her role as a PA she became a fashion assistant at Tatler. ‘I can't really remember, but basically — and I don't even know if magazines still work the same way, because it's probably illegal — but everyone was on fixed term contracts to make sure that they didn't pay you very much. I'm pretty sure I was being paid £12K a year,’ she recalls. ‘Tatler was a really fun place to work, because it was pretty silly.’ Her next job was as an editorial coordinator, a role which she went on to do for Vogue straight after. ‘That was amazing. That was really high pressure, very stressful — so much learning.’

She left, returning to Tatler when she was offered the role of jewellery editor. ‘Obviously it was such an honour and so amazing to get to become an editor and have freedom and be able to make decisions. But then, to be totally honest with you, there was actually very little creative freedom, and it was all about advertisers… I wasn’t very fulfilled.’

Now WNU has four stores, three in London (Belgravia, Marylebone and Notting Hill) and one in Devon. The brand is also stocked in Liberty and Harrods. Pip lives in Battersea with her husband, who works in risk and security (‘it’s like a proper job’) and their two-year-old daughter, with another child on the way. She’s come a long way from being a teenage PA at Condé Nast.

Your aesthetic hero

I think it’s somewhere between Charlotte Rampling meets Jane Birkin meets Carolyn Bessette.

A book you’ve found inspiring

Oh, so many. I think on the whole I prefer collections of books, when the story is played out over a longer space. I love Nancy Mitford and Jilly Cooper — I love the richness of the storytelling and the character evolution and the descriptions of the countryside and Britishness.

The music that you work to

We're probably more likely to work to an audiobook than music, which sounds quite weird. But I love Westlife. Westlife is probably what I'm going to put on.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

The Marie Antoinette one at the V&A Museum. It was amazing — really beautiful. I think the curation was astounding, I liked the colours, the use of storytelling — it was really first class.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

I think I would take a Jilly Cooper book.

The last podcast you listened to

I really go through phases. I love How I Grew My Brand by Piper. Fashion People, that’s another good one.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

The cry of a toddler.

The items you collect

I guess I collect antiques — but this is where my habit has actually been really well looked after by our stores. Because we have a tiny house, my husband was like: ‘You can't bring any more antiques in here,’ so I collect antique furniture and put it all around our stores.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

A fur coat at a vintage market in Paris.

A hotel you could go back and back to

The Bequia Beach Hotel in the Caribbean. It’s a really small island no one’s heard of and we went a few years ago.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

My husband is an incredible cook and when he cooks at home and does something like steak, that has got to be it for me.

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

Oh God. I don't know. Someone annoying?

The best present you’ve ever received

Whenever we open a new store my husband gives me a gift, and for the Notting Hill store he gave me a framed print of a Slim Aarons picture, which we have up in our house.

Your favourite painting

As a genre I love the Impressionists and I think the Musee d'Orsay has the best collection. If I could own one painting maybe it would be one by a British landscape artist, like a Constable or a Turner. I think it would have to depict an English scene.

A possession you’d never sell

Lots of things.

For more information or to shop With Nothing Underneath, see their website.

Of course, I would make the case for the V&A Museum as the very essence of Englishness. First of all, thanks to the engaging modesty of our monarchs, the museum was initially christened the South Kensington Museum and Queen Victoria had to be convinced by courtiers to rechristen it in their joint name (she only wanted Albert to be honoured). Not for us the grand royal, then state collections of Paris, Madrid or Vienna; instead, an incremental, iterative, constitutional settlement based upon consent and civil society. In many ways, a museological reflection of our relative political stability.

The V&A, too, was built from the profits of one of England’s great gifts to global culture and commerce: the Great Exhibition of 1851, on which so many world fairs have later been based. Held in Hyde Park beneath Joseph Paxton’s 19-acre steel and glass Crystal Palace, it brought together 34 nations and more than 100,000 designed products from almost 14,000 exhibitors.

With its focus on an English trinity of free trade, cultural exchange and international law, it sought to promote the circulation of goods, people and ideas. Every World Expo since then owes a debt to Prince Albert’s Hyde Park extravaganza.

Then come the remarkable V&A collections. From Nottingham alabaster to the Dacre beasts of Northumberland to the Elizabethan miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard to the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron to the fashion of Alexander McQueen to the paintings of Frank Bowling, here is all the brilliance, eccentricity, liberty and craft skill of the English.

As our current exhibition star, Elsa Schiaparelli, once put it: ‘I love the English, because they are mad, mad, mad.’ All of these treasures are enclosed in a typically English architectural medley of curious additions, organic growth and public spiritedness.

The initial fabric of the V&A was composed of old boiler rooms from the Great Exhibition, then a red-brick and terracotta courtyard overseen by the Corps of Royal Engineers, followed by the English Baroque entrance on Cromwell Road and, most recently, our porcelain courtyard on Exhibition Road — the design of which envelopes both the Royal Coat of Arms and preserves the bomb damage from the Second World War, which certainly still shapes English identity.

However, this is a story of English radicalism, as well as royal tradition — for the designing and decorating of the early V&A was handed over to a cadre of young artists and craftspeople, who saw the importance of museums as civic spaces in an era of growing democratic rights. Leading the charge was William Morris, who had been appalled at the mass-produced ugliness on show in the Great Exhibition and, instead, developed a counter-cultural world view of harmony, fellowship and beauty. His designs for the museum’s tearoom — what could be more English? — put that philosophy into practice with an Arts-and-Crafts aesthetic, which would later inform his willow wallpaper patterns and, in the process, define such a celebrated English household idiom.

Today, with sites at V&A Dundee and the Wedgwood Collection in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, the V&A is also a proudly British institution, showcasing art and design from across the UK. Yet we remain forever and proudly alert to those English characteristics of individuality, eccentricity, creativity and incremental iteration that are particular attributes of this wonderful country and its people.

Sir Tristram Hunt is a historian, author and director of the V&A Museum, London SW7, and a past Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent

For what being English means to Tom Parker Bowles, click here

For what being English means to Sir John Major, click here

This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

Remembrance Sunday in the Anglican church in Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad, Iraq, not long before the biggest military attack in human history: in the congregation, a couple of dozen bitter-end Brits, some Indians and a small selection of Arab Christians. ‘How’s it going, Yousif?’ I asked one of the latter, after we’d belted out the hymns with surprising enthusiasm. ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘mustn’t grumble.’

Kipling wrote: ‘And what should they know of England, who only England know?’ What he meant is that the notion of Englishness stretches much farther than most Brits realise. ‘If you give me your word as an English gentleman, I’ll let you through,’ said a Namibian border guard to me, after a drunken soldier guarding a bridge in neighbouring Angola had chucked my passport into the river below.

For many people around the world, English-ness has real meaning. A lot of it is to do with humour — Mr Bean, Monty Python, Paddington Bear. The Royal Family is much admired (mostly, I’ve noticed, in republics), although Margaret Thatcher still has a following among older Russians. If I may say so, some of it is because of BBC world news and football, too. Supporting Chelsea (not always an easy thing to do) has gotten me out of trouble in China and Nigeria and singing Blue Is The Colour won me new friends in Brazil.

You can come across an appreciation of Englishness in surprisingly hostile territory. ‘I regard him as the very finest type of English gentleman,’ said the gaunt-looking Dáithí Ó Conaill, chief of staff of the Provisional IRA, when I interviewed him about a newly appointed Northern Ireland Secretary; sadly, those words were off camera.

Only a year or so earlier, I’d narrowly escaped execution as a British army spy in republican West Belfast; I was wearing a pair of elderly, but well-polished, Tricker’s brogues. They might not have liked the Brits, but the IRA could spot decent footwear when they saw it.

What’s the essence of Englishness? Nowadays, alongside the humour and the Royal Family and the rest, it seems to me to be our inclusivity. Some of the strongest defenders of this country I know are — well, let’s think: Germans, Poles, Spanish, Afrikaners, Syrians, Afghans, Japanese… it’s largely because the Brits are happy to let you live your life as you choose. We even have an expression for it: laissez faire. Characteristically, it’s French.

This extends wider than to human beings. I’ll finish as I began, in church. Recently, by pre-arrangement, I took my Irish terrier to Holy Communion. ‘He’s so well-behaved,’ I gushed. Directly the first hymn started, Colonel Cody raised his head to the hammer-beam roof and howled far louder than anyone else in the congregation. At the end, I apologised grovellingly to the vicar. ‘Not at all, dear sir,’ he said. ‘In the book of Psalms, we are enjoined to make a joyful noise unto the Lord, and it doesn’t specify what kind of noise.’ My idea of Englishness exactly.

John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor. His programme ‘Unspun World’ is broadcast weekly on BBC Two, the BBC News Channel and BBC World Service

For what being English means to Tom Parker Bowles, click here

For what being English means to Sir John Major, click here

This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

Stonehenge and Tess Durbeyfield’s tragic fate, a Cumbrian lake echoing to Nancy Blackett exclaiming ‘Shiver my timbers’, the Yorkshire moors stalked by a vengeful Heathcliff — the infinitely varied English landscape has not only given impetus to writers’ imaginations, but, in places, has become defined by the books. These include Hardy, Brontë and Lorna Doone country, Dickensian London and Beatrix Potter’s Lake District, where Mrs Tiggy-Winkle and Peter Rabbit scuttle about their business.

Fiction merges seamlessly with history, so that the reader may forget which came first: touristy Jamaica Inn (still standing) on bleak Bodmin Moor, titular setting for Daphne du Maurier’s 1936 novel after she was stranded in bad weather at the remote pub, really was once a nucleus of smuggling skulduggery; charming Oare church on Exmoor has become inseparable from R. D. Blackmore’s dramatic scene in which the violently jealous Carver Doone shoots Lorna on her wedding day. Brontë pilgrims trek to Top Withens, a ruined, isolated farmhouse on the Pennine Way four miles from the writers’ family parsonage at Haworth, for its association with Wuthering Heights as the inspiration for the Earnshaws’ home.

An unassuming airing cupboard at Jacobean Asthall Manor, Swinbrook, Oxfordshire, where the gardens are open to the public, was a place of longing in fact and fiction: Linda Radlett and her siblings gathered in the Hons’ Cupboard in Nancy Mitford’s semi-autobiographical The Pursuit of Love, just as the writer and her sisters would recline on the shelves as they dreamed of running away or falling in love.

Moorland and madness

Open moorland, with glutinous bogs quivering to the treeless horizon and the wind whistling eerily, can be a frightening place: Wuthering Heights opens ominously with Mr Lockwood getting snowed in with his weird landlord, Heathcliff, and having a nightmare about a ghostly woman. All three Brontë sisters based their most famous stories on the moors. Charlotte wrote part of Jane Eyre when staying in the Peak District, adopting a nearby house, North Lees Hall, as Mr Rochester’s Thornfield Hall. Handily, it was owned by a widow named Mary Eyre, who recounted tales of an incarcerated mad woman.

Dartmoor, renowned for phantom hounds and skulking beasts, prompted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write perhaps the ultimate scary moorland story. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes and Watson, investigating reports of a ghostly dangerous dog, discover that it is terrifyingly real. Fog and an escapee from Dartmoor Prison — all realistic — add to the creepiness. Agatha Christie used a snow-bound Dartmoor — and a prisoner on the loose — for The Sittaford Mystery, in which a rich bachelor’s past catches up with him as he is lined up for a top government job.

Dartmoor and Exmoor have served well for wildlife fiction. The Ballad of the Belstone Fox (Belstone is a real Dartmoor village) by David Rook, a tale of the quid-pro-quo relationship between a huntsman and a rescued orphaned fox cub, ends painfully amid the bleak tors. Hound and quarry is at the centre of Henry Williamson’s best-known novel, Tarka the Otter, set on the rivers Taw, Torridge and Lyn of north Devon, where the author moved after the Second World War. Williamson, who also based Salar the Salmon there, understood well the nuances and realities of wildlife’s place in the countryside. Tarka is remembered with a sculpture in Bideford and has a local railway line and cycle path named after him.

The timeless traditions of the West Country are central, too, to Moorland Mousie (1929), a favourite of The Queen, in which Golden Gorse (real name Muriel Wace) tells the story of an Exmoor pony that has a much happier time going staghunting than pulling a grocer’s cart.

Drama on the Downs

Watership Down, where rabbits roam and racehorses gallop, is high on the North Wessex Downs in north Hampshire. The book of the same name evolved from the stories Newbury-born Richard Adams (he is buried at nearby Whitchurch) told his daughters on car journeys. Adams mentions other real places: Sandleford (a golf course), the River Enbourn, the 17th-century farmhouse Nuthanger and Newtown church. Publisher Rex Collings remarked: ‘I’ve just taken on a novel about rabbits. Do you think I’m mad?’ Watership Down sold some 50 million copies.

Rather less bucolic is Stella Gibbons’s take on the Sussex Downs in Cold Comfort Farm, her interwar send-up of overwrought tales of rural life. The Starkadder family’s farm — home to Aunt Ada Doom and a bull called Big Business — sits on ‘a bleak hillside’ surrounded by fields ‘fanged with flints’.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Downs loosely run from the South-West up to Oxford (for which read Christminster in Desperate Remedies and Jude the Obscure). Dorchester, county town of Dorset, is the titular town of The Mayor of Casterbridge, Bockhampton, where Hardy was born and is buried, is Mellstock, setting for Under the Greenwood Tree, Sherton Abbas is Sherborne (The Woodlanders), Slingers is the Isle of Portland (The Well-Beloved) and Budmouth in Far from the Madding Crowd is Weymouth.

The Berkshire Downs around Lambourn (known as the Valley of the Racehorse) is the atmospheric backdrop to several racing thrillers by former champion jockey Dick Francis, including Crossfire and To the Hilt, and his son Felix, who convincingly set his 2025 novel Dark Horse in the village. Mavis Cheek lived not far south-west of Lambourn; among her downland novels is the comic The Lovers of Pound Hill, which involved a rude West Country chalk figure.

The screenwriter William Nicholson, creator of Shadowlands and Gladiator, lives near his birthplace of Lewes, East Sussex, and has brought the South Downs to fictional life. His bestselling tale of village life and love, The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life, set in Edenfield (loosely based on Beddingham), was turned down by several publishers for being ‘too middle-class’. It was originally titled Countryville because: ‘We’re nearly all urbanites living in the countryside and often commuting to the city.’

Time and tide

The Cobb, Lyme Regis’s famous harbour wall, is often perilously slick with seawater. It was the undoing of Louisa Musgrove, as she slipped through Capt Wentworth’s hands and fell down in Jane Austen’s Persuasion. More than a century later, John Fowles (who lived in the Dorset town) made it a scene of wistful longing where Sarah Woodruff would brave the wind-tossed spray and prurient local gossip to stare out to sea in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

Enid Blyton spent her holidays along the Dorset coast, on the Isle of Purbeck, where the Famous Five would ‘lie on heathery beds listening to sounds of the night’, smell honey-suckle and feast on ham rolls and ginger- bread, washed down by lashings of ginger beer — nearby Corfe Castle appears as Kirrin Castle; Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour is Whispering Island.

Only one village in the UK has an exclamation mark in its name: Westward Ho! on the north Devon coast. The village is named after Charles Kingsley’s tale of derring-do on the high seas; the expression originates from the call of water-taxi men on the Thames. Kingsley lived at Bideford when he wrote the book, his most successful, in 1855, describing the ‘wide expanse of hazy flats, rich saltmarsh’ in the estuary where the Taw and Torridge converge. He was said to be furious at the adoption of Westward Ho! as the name for a new resort.

Arthur Ransome’s ‘Swallows and Amazons’ stories are forever associated with the Lake District, where he lived on and off and eventually died in 1967, but at one point he moved to Suffolk, to the banks of the River Orwell. Here, instead of reinventing local geography as he did in Cumbria, he began to cite real landscape features, illustrating the stories with maps. In We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea, the Walker children (the Swallows) are inadvertently left on a boat on the Orwell that slips its moorings and drifts out into the North Sea, ending up on the Dutch coast. As research, Ransome sailed his Nancy Blackett over to Flushing in the Netherlands.

Cornish cream

Cornwall’s mining history and wild cliffs and creeks redolent with smuggling history have reaped literary riches and lucrative filming deals. This is notably thanks to Rosamunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers (hugely popular in Germany), Susan Howatch’s Penmarric, Winston Graham’s ‘Poldark’ novels (each of which is subtitled A Novel of Cornwall) and the books of du Maurier, whose family bought a house in Fowey in 1926. ‘There was a smell in the air of tar and rope and rusted chain, a smell of tidal water… Here was the freedom I desired,’ she wrote in the non-fiction Vanishing Cornwall. Menabilly, du Maurier’s rented home near Polkerris, which had been deserted, was famously reinvented as sinister Manderley in Rebecca, Kilmarth, her final home a few miles away, became the backdrop for The House on the Strand, Frenchman’s Creek was named for an inlet on the Helford estuary where she spent her honeymoon and The Birds emanated from her observance of menacing seagulls. Pilgrimages by readers to ‘du Maurier country’ started in her lifetime and she was said to be dismayed by it — although that was how she met her husband, Frederick Browning, who read The Loving Spirit and was moved to visit its setting around Fowey: ‘Perhaps I’ll have the luck to meet the girl who has written it,’ he said.

A less-mentioned, Cornwall-centred novel is The Feast (1950) by Margaret Kennedy, a darkly funny story about the guests and workers in a north Cornish hotel, which becomes submerged by a collapsed cliff. It powerfully evokes the austerity of postwar seaside holidays at the same time as pre-empting 21st-century concerns about coastal erosion and it ensures that, as in all the best moral tales, the good people escape.

Moving west in the county, the contemporary writer Patrick Gale, who lives on a farm near Land’s End, often sets novels locally. These include A Perfectly Good Man, about a parish priest in the village of Morvah, and Mother’s Boy, a fictionalised account of the life of the Cornish poet Charles Causley, who lived in Launceston.

Middle England

Industrial Nottinghamshire, where the author grew up, is not what springs to mind first with D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, yet the contrast between the pleasant country estate and the struggles of inhabitants of an ugly coal-mining village adds to the steaminess. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) was born at South Farm on the Arbury estate in Warwickshire, a rural idyll now surrounded by a tangle of motorways; Middlemarch, considered her masterpiece, is thought to be based in Coventry.

Bournville, a village outside Birmingham created in 1879 by the Cadbury brothers for their chocolate-factory workers, is where Jonathan Coe, who was born in the city, set his 2022 novel of the same name. It charts England’s history over the past 75 years, as seen through the eyes of a character based on his mother, culminating in the covid pandemic. Coe’s Middle England, also set in the Midlands, reflects topical national discontent away from London and is a riveting, and even-handed, account of the bitter divisions caused by the Brexit debate.

More rural stories of central England include Wild Lone: The Story of a Pytchley Fox by Denys Watkins-Pitchford, or ‘BB’, the Northamptonshire-born author, naturalist and artist; Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell’s gossipy, episodic novel based on the market town of Knutsford, Cheshire; and Mary Webb’s tenderly romantic Precious Bane, set in her home territory of rural Shropshire. Flora Thompson published her trilogy Lark Rise to Candleford, about changing village life in the late 19th century in her home territory of Oxfordshire/Buckinghamshire during the Second World War. It was adapted as a play in 1978, described by our theatre critic Michael Billington as ‘one of those rare theatrical occasions with a genuine healing quality'.

London Rules

Charles Dickens’s humorously dark images of the capital — the muse he described as his ‘magic lantern’ — spawned an entire tourist industry and formed as much a character of his novels as Oliver Twist, Amy Dorrit, Mr Pickwick and Ebenezer Scrooge.

The contemporary writer Mick Herron, who based Slough House, hideous workplace of the Slow Horses, at Aldwych for his series about failed spies, also sets mood by giving personality to the city. As with Dickens’s memorable ‘Fog everywhere’ riff from Bleak House (‘Fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats… fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper…’), Herron has snow ‘with a job to do, snow that would cause everything to grind to a halt’, dawn arriving in ‘safecracker’s gloves’ and howling winds sending empty crisp packets flitting down desolate alleys.

The Thames in all its guises — sinister, filthy, romantic — is a much-used character. Dickens’s final novel, Our Mutual Friend, opens with the slap of water against a boat as a father and daughter pull a body from the river to pilfer its pockets. A century later, Penelope Fitzgerald pre-empted the 1960s with her 1979 Booker winner, Offshore, about a community of houseboat owners at Battersea Reach, where the author herself lived on a barge.

Modern London’s diversity is rich meat for novelists, notably in John Lanchester’s Capital, about the ruination of a banker, and Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road, on the cancellation of an art critic, both of which feature scammers. In Monica Ali’s satirically funny Love Marriage, first-generation Indian culture meets the in-laws in white Hampstead. Another closely observant author is Amanda Craig, whose new book High and Low, out last month, is set in north London where the local literati get stuck in a writers’ café as a terrifying riot spreads out from a local housing estate.

However, for a portrait of the capital as seen through an arrival’s eyes, look no further than Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear. He lived between Notting Hill and Maida Vale and enjoyed browsing in Portobello Road, pottering along the canal in Little Venice or causing chaos on the Underground and is immortalised by a statue in the train station where he met the Brown family.

Will I meet the Queen when I get to England? That was the question on my mind when I arrived in Southampton on September 2, 1960, from Trinidad aged 10. At school, I had been taught everything about England — its poets, writers, politicians and its sprawling history — so I was full of excitement. The steam train from Southampton pulled in at the majestic London Waterloo station, where thousands of Caribbeans — now known as the Windrush Generation — arrived full of hope and expectation before dispersing across England, working in the NHS, on the railways and in factories.

Little did I know that, 62 years later, as a baroness, I would be in charge of establishing the magnificent National Windrush Monument. It stands mere yards from platform 19 where I first stepped off the train in my prettiest frock clutching my little suitcase or ‘grip’ as we called it. I was finally in the land I had loved from afar… England!

That train journey to London did not disappoint, as we sped by green fields dotted with cows and sheep, alongside farmhouses and villages marked by elegant church spires, before the vast, grey, smoky skyline of the capital came into view. We had been told the streets of London were paved with gold and the autumn leaves that covered the ground lived up to that image. However, soon trees stood naked, like skeletons exposing every limb in the freezing fog.

When I saw snow for the first time, I fell in love with it. Later, the spring blossom took my breath away and the smell of freshly cut grass in the summer was intoxicating. I am always amused by the way the English continue to sit in the rain when having a picnic in summer. Marmie, my mum, used to joke that the English constantly talked about the weather because there was simply so much of it.

Another puzzle is the unique way the English say ‘sorry’ when they have nothing to apologise for or dutifully take their place in the queue. These days, of course, I find myself absorbing these quirks. What I really love, however, is the great divide as to whether clotted cream or jam goes first on scones or the debate over putting the milk in the cup before the tea (a cup of tea is always offered in a crisis). For the record, I’m cream first and I adore the tradition of scrumptious afternoon tea, especially at The Ritz. I often imagine owning my own teashop overlooking a village green, where cricket is being played.

One of my favourite books, England their England by A. G. Macdonell, famously takes half a chapter to describe a single cricket stroke. It sums up the English beautifully — their humour and sense of irony. My husband, who is half Lancastrian and half Yorkshireman, playfully describes himself as ‘mixed race’. In a way, that’s true, and I adore the way those who live in that region of the country embrace me in their own down-to-earth special way.

Social history tells many stories and not all are good; but, in this confusing, chaotic and changing world, the English are still the most stoic, decent and charitable people and it makes me so proud and happy when I receive messages of love and affection from my ‘Play School Babies’!

Sixty-six years ago, this new world felt alien and harsh. It was a struggle to adapt, but I gradually got used to England and the English and grew to love all their eccentricities and peculiarities. Now, I embrace what I hope is the very best of Englishness. Oh, and I did meet the late Queen… several times.

Floella, Baroness Benjamin is a Trinidadian-British actress, author, television presenter and Liberal Democrat peer, best known for the BBC children’s programme, ‘Play School’

For what being English means to Tom Parker Bowles, click here

For what being English means to Sir John Major, click here

This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

We all know the shape of Antony Gormley. Life-size iron sculptures based on casts of his own body navigate the quicksand on Merseyside’s Crosby Beach and wade through the Water of Leith in Edinburgh. Solitary sentinels from his 100-strong series Another Time stand around the world, from the hillsides of the Kunisaki peninsula in Japan to the subaqueous loading bay of Folkestone Harbour.

Now, in Antwerp, Belgium, another three figures based on the sculptor’s own body look out over the city. But these are nebulous as clouds, mere whispers of bodies. As they stand overlooking Antwerp’s River Scheldt and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts (KMSKA) the city and sky permeate them, connecting the figures directly to the fragile world they inhabit.

These three Domain sculptures are part of Gormley’s wide-ranging exhibition at KMSKA, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. While they were made specifically for Antwerp, the show also features some of his earliest works from his student days at the Slade School of Art in London. Christov-Bakargiev is an expert on Italian Arte Povera and she teases out Gormley’s early interest in materiality; land art and ecology emerge as early progenitors too.

Gormley’s first works used materials to explore his relationship to the natural world. In Flat Tree (1978), a slender larch has been sliced thinly into a carpet of concentric wood circles, while in Exercise Between Blood and Earth (1979/2026) the outline of a running man in red chalk expands like tree rings across the gallery wall. Gormley soon began to use his own body as a mould, creating a snug tomb out of sliced bread. He took plaster-casts of himself in order to make lead and iron sculptures that asked us to consider our own place in the world.

Since the 1970s Gormley has listed air as one of the materials he works with. It fills the interior of his lead body-cast Tree (1984) and was one of the three components in Land Sea and Air I (1979). These stone-shaped lead sculptures are variously filled with rock, water and air. Gormley asks us to contemplate volume and mass in this impossible game of three-card monte, and to think about what is known and what can only be imagined. Which holds the rock? Which is filled with air?

It is Gormley’s early interest in air, our invisible life force, that occupies him again today. His sculptural casts have morphed from solid bodies, such as the Angel of the North (1998), to those constructed from slender steel spars. The Domain sculptures that stand under Antwerp’s wide skies are barely there. They are lit only by the sun and so as dusk approaches — what Gormley calls the ‘magic hour’ — the figures dissolve into the cityscape. Weather and air currents pass right through them as they observe the Scheldt, Antwerp’s wide, deep river on which the city’s 16th-century fortune was built.

These sculptures are based on Gormley’s own body, but it is your body as a viewer that is activated in this exhibition. The first work you encounter is Orbit Field III (2026), a room-sized mass of looping aluminium tubes. Gormley’s lifelong fascination with what it means to be a body in space is passed on to the viewer as you physically climb through it. The activation of your body culminates in the last room, where you are confronted by the 42-ton Cave. First created for his 2019 exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, this monumental sculpture is a supine body made of interlocking geometric forms. It is architectural in scale, a breathtaking mass of weathering steel. And you are invited to venture inside it.

Bent double you enter through the ‘foot’. It is dark — solidly so — and you have to grope your way along until you reach a small chamber with a slender shaft of light. It is like entering a prehistoric passage tomb, where light only reaches inside on the solstice. You bend lower, walking further into the body. You are deeply aware of your own heartbeat, your lungs breathing in and out. Suddenly the walls dip away and you are standing in a lofty void, looking up through the bent ‘knee’ towards the light. You can see the exit; your breath settles.

As you leave you have to pass again through Orbit Field. The air now seems charged somehow. You become aware of it passing through the sculptures outside, passing over you. The exhibition reminds you in a very physical way that everything in this world is connected, although sometimes the bonds are invisible.

'Antony Gormley: Geestgrond', is on until September 20, 2026. Visit the KMSKA website for more information and to book tickets.

‘I’m tired and scared,’ says Sally Phillips, after a day of rehearsals for Relics, the new play she will be performing in at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre in London from June 18. ‘It’s my first time on stage in 20 years,’ she elaborates, ‘and I am finding it hard to learn the lines.’

Of course, a seasoned pro like Sally will have no issue when opening night arrives. From playing Bridget Jones’s foul-mouthed journalist pal Shazzer, to Miranda Hart’s irritatingly posh school friend Tilly in Miranda (‘Bear with, bear with’), she’s a beloved face of British acting.

Born in Hong Kong in 1970, it was the sketch comedy TV show Smack the Pony that really catapulted Sally into the spotlight in 1999. Alongside Fiona Allen and Doon Mackichan, the Channel 4 show saw Sally’s silly side, cultivated at the renowned French clown school École Philippe Gaulier, thrive. Roles in Jam & Jerusalem, co-written by Jennifer Saunders, I’m Alan Partridge and Armando Iannucci's satire Veep (where she played the prime minister of Finland, of all people) also put her on the map.

You could argue that the most notable role she’s played was her one-woman show performed while at university, Benadetta, the Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, for which she covered herself in animal blood (she told The Guardian this experience was so foul that the next time she had a period she felt physically sick). But I think more people have probably seen Bridget Jones.

She’s also a passionate advocate for better understanding of, and support for people who have, Down’s Syndrome. Her 2016 documentary A World Without Down’s Syndrome? Explored the ethics of pregnancy screening and was inspired by her son, Olly.

In Ben Ockrent’s new comedy Relics, she plays Liv, the eldest daughter in a family of four siblings who reunite intent on sorting out their deceased mother’s home before a family secret sends everyone spiralling. ‘With the four siblings, each one is behaving as per the birth order,’ Sally explains. ‘So, the eldest is pretty bossy — that’s me, bonjour,’ she says, almost slipping into her Miranda character for a second, ‘the youngest is unspeakably cool and a bit diffident, the second oldest is a bit of a rebel and the final sibling is the peacekeeper/doormat.’

Sally has two younger brothers herself. Like me, she is the eldest daughter. I ask if she thinks she’s an atypical eldest child. ‘I think all eldest children think they’re atypical,’ she says, sagely. ‘I do have a sense of responsibility, definitely and I try not to be bossy, but I probably am,’ she admits.

The one role that has followed her around the most throughout her career has undoubtedly been Shazzer in the much beloved Bridget Jones films, which spanned from 2001-2025. It finally finished last year with Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy. ‘I always make the joke that, in the Bridget Jones films, I was the one who didn’t get to snog Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Patrick Dempsey, Chiwetel Ejiofor or Leo Woodall, and so my character spent 30 years swearing in frustration,’ she says. When they wrapped last year she burst into tears, as did Renée Zellweger. ‘Lucky me, that’s all I can say. It could so easily have been someone else.’

Of course, it could have. But with her trademark zany mannerisms and all round sunny cheerfulness, I doubt another actor could have said ‘f**k’ so many times with such persistently loveability. Let's all just cross our fingers that her next role isn’t another where she stars along three of her character’s siblings, that way it may bring with it the many snogs with handsome men she was so denied in Bridget Jones.

Your aesthetic hero

That’s really hard to choose. I love Joanna Hogg, the film director. I love her work. It hits a part of me that other things don’t reach. I think she’s amazing, and also, she dresses really well — but if I was talking about just how people dress then I’d probably say… can I have the flexibility of looking sometimes like Katharine Hepburn and sometimes like Drew Barrymore in ET? [‘And of sometimes looking like ET too?’ I suggest]. Yes, that’s good. Drew Barrymore and ET by day and Katharine Hepburn when I’m trying to pretend to be a grown up. There would be something amazing about actually being ET. Just going: ‘I don't care,’ blanket wrapped around head, sitting in the basket of a Lime Bike, demanding to be cycled across the sky.

The possession that you’d never sell

None of my photo albums. We used to do this thing with the boys called ‘slidey painting’, where I’d get a big sheet of paper in the garden, squeeze paint on to it and the boys would slide up and down over it [she shows me the picture in question]. I also have an amazing one of my son. Jennifer Saunders had said: ‘Have you ever put your baby in a wig? It’s hilarious.’ [She shows me the photo. It is indeed hilarious, a tiny baby with a mass of curly brown hair perched atop his small head]. Renée also gave us a lovely photo of the four of us [Bridget, Jude, Shazzer and Tom] on set for the last film.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

I really love going to art galleries, it’s how I chill out. I particularly like going to the National Portrait Gallery. I think I like going there, because in a way it's a bit like what I do, in how an artist melds with the subject to create something else. Recently, I just loved the David Hockney exhibition at the Serpentine. I love the way that he's keeping on discovering, and how his work is really about the process. He’s always asking the question: ‘How do you make people feel?’

A book you found inspiring

This Is Not a Pity Memoir by Abi Morgan. She is a really amazing screenwriter who co-wrote some of the Bridget Jones’s. Her husband had a reaction to some medication that he was on, which they hadn't been warned about, had a seizure of sorts, woke up, and recognised everyone except her. He thought that she had been sent by the government to spy on him, and so she had a year of being in hospital trying to care for this person who thought she was a spy, and getting cancer because of the stress of it all, at the same time as having to parent the kids. It’s clever as she also explores the idea of how the film of your life that’s happening in your head isn’t at all like real life. It’s generous of her to share that.

Your favourite painting

Probably one my kids did. Tom is 14 now, but when he was 10 he had to leave school for various reasons — he’s neurodiverse. It was a very tricky year for him, and he spent the whole year painting our four dogs. They were pretty good paintings. I also collect postcards when I go to exhibitions and I use them to create characters, and put them on a board in my dressing room. I have a Martin Parr one of a boy and a girl both with Mr Whippy’s. They’ve got it on their noses and the girl’s dress is blowing in the wind.

The music that you work to

I don't actually work to music, but I like a dance break, and then I like silly music, things like Manu Chao. My cousin was in a band which split up years ago called Pete and the Pirates, they have some good sort of silly pop things too.

The last podcast you listened to

Now, this I have a funny answer for. Because of the play, I listened to a podcast called Tree Lady Talks — an entire episode that was about a tree protection officer.

The last thing of note you bought for yourself

Probably a print of a Peter Doig painting called Imaginary Boys.

Who would play you in a film of your life

I mean, obviously it depends if it's a good film or a bad film. I love Jessie Buckley, like everyone on earth does. She's just got a light energy, and she's amazing. She was my favourite actress even before Hamnet. If it was a bit of a low-budget film, and by this I mean a made-for-TV thing, playing young me I could do a lot worse than Charly Clive, who’s recently been in Rooster. She’s extremely cool and really funny. I also love Elf Lyons. She’s too tall to play me, but she’s properly out there. Like a cross between a pixie and a giraffe who’s very funny and very likable.

What you’d take to a desert island

A pop-up spa and a speed boat.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

The dogs and fear, a bit at the moment. I’m scared of journalists and theatre reviewers. I’m not really scared of the public, they’re really nice. With the reviewers, it’s not the same. It’s often about them, you know? It used to be the fact that you could console yourself with the fact that it was just fish and chip paper, but now everything exists forever, so your bad review will be there for your great-grandchildren to find.

The items you collect

Moomin mugs. I love them. Also, I think, if you're under house arrest with children, as it were, they depict family scenes, so I noticed myself having quiet commentary on who's being what at the moment. For example, if someone's having a tantrum, I might give them a Little My mug where she’s [here she mimes having a tantrum]. They don’t even notice.

A hotel you could go back and back to

I do go back to the Hotel Kung Carl in Stockholm a lot and they have sponsored a friend and I who are writing a film — they let us stay there for super cheap. They also sponsored the first Down’s Syndrome arts and culture festival in Stockholm, so they’ve been really great. If I can have two I would also have the Casa Monti Hotel in Rome, because I used to live in the city. It was not a dive exactly, but not glamorous. I accidentally lived in a brothel. It was a building that had various flats and there were rooms which were used by prostitutes. There were these madams on the door all day and all night, so it felt very safe, because I was working in a bar late at night, and when I’d come home at 3am they'd be guarding the door. If anyone was looking for sex or anything, they could get it elsewhere — they weren't going to bother me. This area now is a really shi-shi artist area where this super deluxe hotel is. I would like to go there and relive my youth.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever had

My partner had a, I won't say midlife crisis, but he went and trained at Leiths as a chef. He didn’t become a chef, but he has just won a medal in the World Marmalade Awards. Anyway, we did a couple of supper clubs, which never made any money whatsoever, but the first one of those we called ‘Fond of Mushrooms’. We held it near the Cricket Pavilion at Kew Gardens which is where the Fungarium is. Lee, from the Fungarium, came and gave a lecture and a mushroom band, called The Fun Guys came and one member of the band's dad was actually the mushroom warlock of Glastonbury. Inadvertently, we also recreated the feeling of taking hallucinogenic mushrooms and Ronni Ancona and I did mushroom readings and mushroom-based jokes. There was also a five-course mushroom menu. It was absolutely insane and so much fun.

The best present you’ve ever received

Can I do top three? My friend gave me a surprise night out at Secret Cinema at my lowest ebb to see Moulin Rouge with 10 of my closest friends. My partner had a painting made of us walking the dogs, but at number one, it has to be when my youngest son made me a Monopoly board by hand. It must have taken him weeks and weeks.

Relics runs at Lyric Hammersmith Theatre from June 18 to July 18. For tickets see the theatre's website. Sally will also feature in The Hairdresser Mysteries which will air on BBC One soon.

When asked my nationality I reply ‘British’, but within that label is an instinctive Englishman, for many English characteristics are British ones, too. We share patience. We abhor bad behaviour. We tolerate, with affection, the outlandish and the offbeat.

We self-deprecate, are fascinated by steam trains and old churches. Most still value the playing of sports games over the winning. We British are essentially a kindly nation, with decent instincts and an affinity for charities. Millions care for those in need, work for them and donate for them. This support is a natural gift that keeps on giving. However, there are various eccentricities that are, without doubt, inherently English.

Our patron saint, St George, never visited our country, nor spoke our language. Nor did he kill dragons or rescue maidens. If he tried to visit England today, he would probably be refused entry by the Home Secretary. We love the underdog and quietly enjoy the discomfort of the mighty. Families are our natural unit and children the best additions — although dogs and cats can run them a close second.

As a tribe, the English are obsessed with sport, gardens and the weather. We play sport, tend our gardens — and talk of the weather. We love our changing seasons: our spring, summer and autumn, when our gardens come alive, thrive and then fade. In the bleakness of winter, we prepare them for the year to come. Gardens offer comfort and relaxation. As a very small boy, a narrow, unkempt garden was my personal fiefdom. I loved every inch of it.

In mid-life, my wife, Norma, and I became the proud owners of a house in the country, with scope to create the garden we had always wished for. It was a lengthy process — not only because Nature so often is, but because improvement depended on time and resources. Year upon year, borders were dug, trees were planted, lawns were laid and quiet seating areas created. The effort has brought huge reward.

Spring is an annual joy — and a time of hope: the hope being that we might enjoy a good summer. Then, slowly, summer is upon us, bringing a kaleidoscope of colour. All too soon, the more subtle hues of autumn appear, with our trees adopting a softer palette, before their leaves fall to create a rich carpet of colour. For 40 years, my garden has been a solace and a sanctuary. I have walked around it, relaxed in it and sat in it, contemplating how best to tackle domestic problems, political crises, terrorist atrocities and more. It has the ability to clear the mind and soothe the soul.

So has cricket, that most elegant of English pastimes. Cricket is a game for the brain, as well as the sinews. It combines the sight and scent of fresh-cut grass, the sound of bat on ball, of appeals, of gentle clapping that — for me — is quintessentially English and as relaxing as a good book with a glass of rosé. For all its frustrations, this is where I wish to live. I feel blessed to be British — and thrice blessed to be English.

Sir John Major KG CH was Prime Minister of the UK from November 1990–May 1997

For what being English means to Tom Parker Bowles, click here

This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

Last week, the issue of audience behaviour in the theatre raised its head again. In a widely reported episode, the actress Rosamund Pike walked back onto the stage after the curtain call of a performance of Inter Alia by Suzie Miller at Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End.

She had been playing the part of a judge whose son had been accused of a rape and expressed her distress at seeing someone in the front row of the stalls texting on their phone during the emotional climax of the play. She refused to identify the person responsible, but she optimistically hoped that the text was of great moment. Perhaps, she speculated, the person on their phone was a doctor saving a life? It seems unlikely.

Whatever the truth of the matter, however, the thrust of her reported comments rings true, that the performance — its narrative, message and the underpinning rapport between actors and audience — were punctured by this simple action. Athena completely sympathises and is not surprised that her words were applauded. In the long history of theatre, merely fiddling with a phone might seem a modest distraction. Compare that with the competition between stage and audience in Shakespeare’s Globe, the latter cracking and munching nuts through performances, or the famous excesses of Georgian opera, with rival singers encouraged even to fisticuffs by their supporters in the audience. The use of a mobile phone may be less dramatic, but it is perhaps more insidious.

These amazing devices allow us to carry our worlds with us and that’s a double-edged sword. In positive terms, it places us in easy and immediate connection with our friends. Less attractively, it links us inescapably to our work, responsibilities and problems. Yet, in either respect, by keeping us in touch with so much, they blunt a central purpose of art, which is to offer fresh perspectives on our world.

That’s particularly explicit on the stage, where the theatre demands that the audience suspend its disbelief and enter into a parallel universe with different narratives, realities and perspectives. That suspension of disbelief demanded of the audience by a play can fail for all kinds of reasons, of course, not least because the script is poor or badly acted. Responses might reasonably extend from allowing the mind to wander to leaving the auditorium. The individual who turns on their phone, however, is advertising their disengagement. Shining out in the darkness, the device distracts everyone from what is going on. That’s hard for the actors and it’s hard for the other members of the audience.

Yet the fault of allowing distant concerns to intersect with present concerns through the medium of phones is not a fault restricted to selfish individuals in theatre audiences. We all do something similar when a social-media exchange interrupts a conversation or a meal. Depending on their context, these distractions are not necessarily bad. Small wonder, however, when they occur so commonly in day-to-day life, that some people think them acceptable during a play.

This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The English, unlike the Inuit, may have only one word for snow, but, when it comes to the old-fashioned insult, no one else comes close. What other language has 100 words for the wrong ’un, a joyous cascade of slander, slights and the just plain rude. The English art of the witty put down is unmatched anywhere on Earth and is every bit as complex and codified as any concept of fin amor. It’s all about context and nuance, words that can both wound and warm.

To the outsider, the difference between a wally and a prat, say, is negligible, but we all know the former is a term of endearment, the latter less so. The same goes for plonker and berk or flibbertigibbet and bellend. They may all sound frightfully rude, but the Devil is, as ever, in the detail. We would cross the street to avoid a lout, hooligan or thug. But what about a rogue, rake, rotter, scoundrel or cad? All of the latter perfectly describe Rupert Campbell-Black, Jilly Cooper’s handsome hero, yet we love him all the same.

Although a dedicated follower of fashion would have no problem being called a dandy or swell, they may baulk at being described as a fop, spiv, dandiprat or peacock. An intimate understanding of the endless idiosyncrasies of the well-honed insult is something that makes us uniquely English — together with our propensity for taking nothing too seriously at all.

Shakespeare, of course, leads the charge. ‘Away, you starvelling, you elf-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, bull’s-pizzle, you stock-fish!’ roars Falstaff at Prince Henry. Kent, in King Lear, goes better still. ‘Thou art a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave,’ he cries at the unlucky Oswald, ‘a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mungril bitch.’ And that’s only the start. Things don’t get any more simple when it comes to swearing.

I’ll spare your blushes with any particular examples, but swear words can express both rank disdain and utter adoration. Take the most offensive swear word of all, you know the one, a brutish, one syllable grunt. It becomes a very different creature after a few jars in the pub, when you express your undying love for your oldest mate. ‘I love you, you old…’ The Americans, of course, take a rather more puritanical view of this most medieval of cusses. It all depends on who you’re with and how you say it.

Talking of medieval, there’s a whole dastardly treasure trove of invective to be found back in the Dark Ages — churls and knaves, scolds and drivellers, fustilugs, fopdoodles and curs. These glorious slurs roll off the tongue with slanderous aplomb. The Victorians were also masters of the onomatopoeic insult, with their gollumpusses and fussocks, skilamalinks, flapdoodles, hornswogglers, foozlers and sapheads. In this ever more sanitised age, we should not shrink from the prettily profane, rather embrace it. All hail vim and vitriol, one of the insolent glories of the true English tongue.

This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

This year, Sotheby's Geek Week auction includes a T-Rex, whose name is Gus. The mounted skeleton in the New York sale, which will take place on July 14, is being termed by the auction house as ‘one of the largest and most complete T-Rexes ever discovered’.

The T-Rex is 67 million years old and the most valuable dinosaur offered at auction, Sotheby's say. They estimate it will sell for between $20-30 million (about £14.8-22.30 million) — the highest estimate ever for a dinosaur at auction.

Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby's vice-chairman and worldwide head of science and natural history says: ‘Gus is the culmination of years of rigorous excavation and preparation under some of the most challenging field conditions imaginable.’ She adds: ‘Tyrannosaurus rex is the most iconic prehistoric species in the fossil record, and Gus stands firmly among the greatest examples ever found.’

Gus’s skeleton is approximately 63% complete by bone count and 75-80% complete when it comes to the total mass of the skeleton, which is impressive when it comes to dinosaur skeletons consisting of only one specimen.

The first dinosaur ever sold at auction was by Sotheby's in 1997. Sue, also a T-Rex, sold for $8 million and now lives at the Field Museum in Chicago. Sue is about 73% complete by bone count and 90% when it comes to the total mass.

In 2024 Apex, a stegosaurus and the most expensive dinosaur fossil ever sold at auction, went for $45 million. Apex can now be found on long-term loan to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Gus will be available to view at Sotheby's in New York from July 1 until the sale.

Thomas Heitkamp, the president of Theropoda Expeditions and the discoverer and excavator of Gus says: ‘This specimen took three years to excavate, with the team sometimes working four weeks straight without finding a thing.

He adds: ‘It really does feel like tackling the world’s hardest puzzle, except we have to find all the pieces first. All those bones separated for 67 million years that we can now, almost magically, fit back together. There’s something deeply satisfying about that.’

Dana Licking, owner of the ranch in South Dakota where Gus was excavated, says: ‘It will be exciting to see how many others will get to enjoy this spectacular discovery.’ Gus was named after Dana's late husband Gary ‘Gus’ Licking, who she owned the ranch with and who died one year into the excavation. It was Gary who had suggested the area for excavation where Gus was discovered.

The ethics of dinosaur auctions are complicated. For individuals specialising in a distinct genus of dinosaurs, a private auction can be devastating beyond comprehension. ‘As with all science, we like the raw material to be available for all people to use it to verify those results, and unless there's a guarantee that you can go back to those skeletons over and over again — because one person might have got something wrong or missed something — then we're not capable of doing the science properly,’ said Professor Paul Barrett of The Natural History Museum in London when I spoke to him last year regarding a similar sale.

‘Most of the scientific journals will not allow you to publish on a specimen that's in private hands, because of that problem of reproducibility, essentially,’ he added. ‘So everything that is a significant specimen that goes into a private collection in the short term, at least, is a loss to science.’

When I spoke to Hatton of Sotheby's, also last year, she said: ‘​​I think we can all have great ideals, but the reality is that [dinosaurs] are personal property. In the United States, you own your property. If your fossil comes off your property, you own the fossil and you have the right to sell it.

‘So there's a difference between what you think would be a perfect world, and what is the reality. And frankly, if we don't excavate the dinosaurs, they're lost. So it is because of the commercial trade that we have found so many.’

Gus the T-Rex will go under the hammer on July 14 with Sotheby's — visit their website for more information.

Revisit our feature on the ethics of dinosaur auctions, here.

Mark Rothko was too busy gazing into the abyss to engage in small talk and throwaway lines. Yet every now and then he came up with a zinger. ‘A painting is not an image of an experience,’ he once declared. ‘It is an experience.’ Well said, sir. Though I suppose, if you were to split hairs, you might reasonably counter that there’s no reason why a painting can’t be both an experience and an image of an experience.

The perception is particularly pertinent to the magnificent new retrospective of the artist’s work, Rothko in Florence, on display at three venues in the city until August 23. The show raises all manner of interesting questions, one or two of which follow directly from that rare zinger of his. Does it matter where the art experience is experienced? And if so, why?

Most of the 70 or so paintings included in Rothko in Florence are on display at Palazzo Strozzi. They span the artist’s entire career and are presented chronologically: the figurative works of the 1930s; the ‘mythomorphic’ and ‘multiform’ works of the 1940s; the signature-style colour-field works of the 1950s and 60s.

The vast, grand and gloomy palazzo makes for a splendid showcase for Rothko’s vast, grand and gloomy paintings — though one of the most striking features of the exhibition is the manner in which it reveals the variation in Rothko’s emotional and chromatic palette.

The strange radiance of the late black-and-grey paintings, for example, is as irresistible as it is unlikely — trumped only, perhaps, by the final works, created shortly before the artist took his own life in 1970, in pale blue, tan and terracotta. These are beautifully hung in a smaller room that has been configured to recall the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Hats off to the curators — the artist’s son Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna — for orchestrating this ravishing, uplifting finale to the exhibition.

Even if that were — so to speak — all, Rothko in Florence would be a remarkable exhibition, one that allows you to see the work of a familiar master in the round and from a fresh perspective. An experience, certainly — and one that is further enriched by the smaller displays at the two other satellite locations.

Rothko himself had little interest in travel. ‘His paintings travel much better than he ever did,’ as his son put it to me. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to overstate the importance to the artist of his three visits to Italy, in 1950, 1959 and 1966, or, having seen the new exhibition, to deny the bearing they had on his work.

The vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, or Laurentian Library, was conceived by Michelangelo in the decade or so before he quit Florence for Rome in 1534. It was, and remains, a uniquely disconcerting space: claustrophobic, despite its high ceilings; locked-in and seemingly without issue, despite its fine staircase; disorienting, despite its simplicity. There’s something almost occult about its oddity. Rothko loved it. ‘He achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after. He makes viewers feel they’re trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the walls.’

For Rothko in Florence, two preliminary studies for the Seagram Murals project have been hung at the foot of the library stairs. Though relatively small by Rothko’s standards, they reverberate in this setting with the force of a double thunderclap.

I happened to be standing alongside Christopher when I stepped into the vestibule and, after casting my eyes about for a minute or two, caught sight and took stock of the paintings. Like finding a loose pair of eyeballs on the back seat of a taxi. I turned to him and remarked on their disproportionate impact in this setting. Did he, I asked, have a Plan B, in case for any reason these particular paintings didn’t quite work in situ? ‘This is Plan B,’ he laughed. ‘Plan A was to use different paintings in different positions. But when I got here to hang them yesterday, I realised that wasn’t going to work, because of the angle of the light from the windows in the west wall. Luckily I’d packed some spares, and it turns out they work pretty well here.’

A gentler, but no less arresting, effect is achieved in what is now the Museo Nazionale di San Marco, formerly the monastery where, roughly 100 years before Michelangelo, the Renaissance master and Dominican friar Fra Angelico worked (though didn’t, as is often supposed, live full-time; he bunked down at San Domenico, in the nearby hill town of Fiesole).

Rothko came to San Marco twice in two days in 1950 and once again in 1966. Five of his works have been installed alongside Angelico’s frescoes in five of the now vacated monks’ cells — tiny, with irregularly shaped whitewashed stone walls, some with small windows, others illuminated only by Angelico’s exquisitely rendered scenes from the gospels.

‘Think of it as if you were overhearing a respectful conversation between two masters,’ Elena Guena suggested. Simply to set the Rothkos alongside them in this fashion invites the viewer to look for similarities between the two artists, not only in terms of colour and tone, though these can be readily observed, but also in terms of attitude and intention.

The differences between the two artists surely outnumber their similarities by a gigantic margin. Yet the comparative exercise is not without value. Later I spoke to Carl Streckhle, an art historian, curator and authority on Fra Angelico, who agreed with Elena's notion of dialogue, only adding — with a poetic flourish — that this is a dialogue which occurs ‘not so much across time but in a world without time’.

I was in Florence as a guest of the Hotel Savoy — a marvellous hotel in hotel terms and an active participant in the city’s cultural conversation. I’ve stayed at the Savoy often over the years and can attest to the seriousness of its commitment to the Arts — a commitment expressed not only in its partnerships with high-profile institutions such as the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, but also through its own programme of talks, workshops and events.

Thanks to the relationships the hotel has fostered in the artistic community, the access it can provide to guests is fantastic (you have only to ask and arrangements will be made and doors will creak open on their ancient hinges).

Moreover, its Artists’ Suites are among the finest hotel rooms in Florence (my own favourite is number 403, from one of the several balconies of which you can see Palazzo Strozzi across the Piazza della Repubblica) — and its impeccable, whimsical little Bar Artemisia (named and decorated in honour of the immortal Artemisia Gentileschi) is likewise one of the city’s best.

After a full day’s worth of Rothko in Florence, it was to Bar Artemisia that I repaired for a glass of something chilled and interesting. ‘What have you got for a weary art-pilgrim with sore feet and a head full of Abstract Expressionism?’ I asked the genial head barman, Federico Galli. ‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘perhaps I could interest you in one of the cocktails on our new Maestro of Colours menu…’ Of course — I should’ve known they’d come up with a special menu of half a dozen cocktails ingeniously mixed to mimic paintings in the Rothko show.

I went for the Nocturne Vermillion, a blackberry-enhanced variation on the classic Negroni, which, in its meticulously suspended blocks of moody colour, did indeed bear an uncanny resemblance to Rothko’s Untitled: Red and Black 1953.

At dinner in the Savoy that evening I sat next to Arturo Galansino, director general of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi. This was a couple of days ahead of the opening of Rothko in Florence, but already the talk of the town was of little else and it was perfectly clear that the show would be a smash hit. I congratulated Arturo on his string of successes at Palazzo Strozzi over the past few years — Tracey Emin, Angelico, now Rothko. The sequence, he insisted, was important: something challenging, something safe, something challenging. He said his intention was to ‘wake Florence up gently, one jolt at a time’.

After dinner, despite the lateness of the hour and the soreness of my feet, I took a long stroll. For me, there are few cities more agreeable by night than Florence. Emptied of tour groups, its stony streets throng instead with friendly ghosts. In Florence, you don’t have to be a Rothko-sized genius to commune with the shades of Michelangelo and Angelico — whether you like it or not, there’s simply no avoiding them. Was there ever a city so densely populated by brilliant minds, so tightly packed with bright ideas as quattrocento Florence? Or one where the gap between present and past is so narrow and so apt to vanish altogether?

I can think of one, though only one: Cambridge, another small, beautiful, compressed city on a river that flourished spectacularly in the 14th century as both a transmitter, incubator and a repository of art and ideas.

Vladimir Nabokov devotes a few droll chapters of his memoir Speak, Memory to his time at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the early 1920s. Though distracted by girls and football and his own sense of émigré dislocation, he was far from oblivious to his surroundings. ‘I thought of Milton, and Marvell, and Marlowe, with more than a tourist’s thrill as I passed beside the revered walls,’ he writes. ‘Nothing one looked at was shut off in terms of time, everything was a natural opening into it, so that one’s mind grew accustomed to work in a particularly pure and ample environment, and because, in terms of space, the narrow lane, the cloistered lawn, the dark archway hampered one physically, that yielding diaphanous texture of time was, by contrast, especially welcome to the mind, just as a sea view from a window exhilarates one hugely, even though one does not care for sailing.’

Sail on to Florence, then, and take in the stupendous sea view of Rothko’s work that is presently on offer there, in the company of Michelangelo, Angelico and that astonishing city’s whole heavenly host.

'Rothko in Florence' is at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Museo di San Marco and Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana until August 23, 2026.

Rooms at at the Hotel Savoy Florence start from about £600.

The problem with being involved in an Abdication is that anyone can and will say anything. Every possible rumour and innuendo was attached to the Duchess of Windsor by the press — even that she was a man. Conspiracy theory biographers such as Charles Higham had a field day — endless lovers, special ways learnt in Shanghai, the infamous Chinese dossier that clearly never existed, to name just a few. Some of these were encouraged by the Royal Family; the Queen Mother blamed her (unfairly) for causing the Abdication and thus hastening the death of the King. Princess Margaret took that line, while Elizabeth II did her best to keep on gentle good terms with her ‘silly uncle’ (as she sometimes called him).

The biggest misconception is that Simpson was ‘the woman who stole the King’. On the contrary, there is extensive evidence that the Duke of Windsor was unhappy with his lot in early life — see his letters to Freda Dudley Ward. He wanted to go. He did not want to be King. Surely he must have realised that the various Governments, not to mention the British public, would not accept Wallis Simpson as Queen? He would have denied it, as he would also have denied that he ever regretted his decision. By abdicating, he turned Simpson into the world’s most hated woman, something which greatly upset her. And he realised this — that he had let her down. He minded about her not being a Royal Highness and he minded about her not being accepted — or received — by his family.

I have been studying this story for more than 60 years and my conclusion is that Simpson enjoyed being the King’s friend (and I don’t mind what connotation is put on that word), but in no way did she want to become his wife, or to cause a major constitutional crisis. She held some sway over him, but due to threats on her life, she was sent to the South of France. Thus the King was on his own in his fort, and made the decision to abdicate, which she might possibly have prevented.

By abdicating, the Duke moved into the past tense. Many of the Royal Family wrote to him, pretty much saying goodbye. At one time, Queen Mary compared him to the men who gave their lives in the First World War, and told him she was askance that he was not prepared to make a lesser sacrifice. George VI became increasingly fed up with his brother’s demands. Queen Elizabeth took a Tammy Wynette role — standing by her man, taking a position if ever the Windsors threatened to encroach.

I was brought up on the idea that Simpson was an awful woman. Then one day I saw a photograph of her going round the World Fair in New York in 1964. I was 12 years old then, but two thoughts struck me — first, why would a newspaper bother to print a photograph of this so-called harridan? And secondly, she looked elegant and smart — or ‘rather nice’, as I would have put it at that age. Soon afterwards, early in 1965, there were daily photographs of the Duchess coming in and out of the London Clinic, visiting the Duke as he recovered from his eye operation.

By then the emphasis on her story was changing. Aware that the Duke would die one day, the Royal Family needed to effect some kind of public reconciliation. In June 1967, the Windsors were lined up with Elizabeth II and Royal Family at Marlborough House for the unveiling of the memorial to Queen Mary, ironically the most obdurate member of the family in not receiving the Duchess. In May 1972, Elizabeth II visited the Duke in his house in Paris, when he was near death. There were photos of the Duchess with her and the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales, but significantly not the Duke, on the steps of their house in the Bois de Boulogne. The Duke died 10 days later.

By this time, I was convinced that the Duchess had been dealt a bad hand in history. I was sent to see the Duke’s Private Secretary, John Utter, on the day before Elizabeth II’s visit (in connection with a reference article in Burke’s Guide to the Royal Family). On this occasion I expressed that sympathy, something which Johanna Schutz, their multi-lingual Swiss secretary, noted. To cut a long story short (but told in forensic detail in Behind Closed Doors), years later she enabled me to tell the story of what happened to the Duchess after the Duke died, and also to begin the process of re-assessing the Duchess — her role and her character.

After the Abdication, the Duchess had to look after a man who had once been fully occupied and now had nothing to do. For the next 35 years, she served him more delicious food in more beautiful surroundings than he had experienced in his early life. She did her stylish American best to keep him entertained. One of the crucial differences I discovered was that the world had adored the Duke, while those who worked for him had serious reservations, whereas the world hated Simpson, but those who knew her and worked for her held her in great respect.

At the time of the Duke’s death, Cecil Beaton, normally acerbic, wrote: ‘She is a good friend to all her friends. There is no malice in her. There is nothing dislikeable.’ He also wrote: ‘During these days of death, she has behaved with extreme dignity. She has by the simplicity of her silhouette made the rest of the Royal Family appear dowdier than ever…’ Here perhaps was her one mistake. Lady Diana Cooper said that if she had taken him on, she would have made him be a cowboy in Wyoming, but Wallis turned herself into the epitome of a royal Duchess, yet more elegant than the extremely elegant royal princesses we had in England — Princess Margaret, the Duchess of Gloucester, Princess Marina, the Duchess of Kent and Princess Alexandra. She created for the Duke a miniature court in exile — with coronets abounding, servants in royal livery etc. Maybe that is what he needed, but maybe not?

Her Swiss secretary said that when the Duchess went to the hairdresser, she came downstairs, and was it not marvellous that the Duke came down in the lift to see her into the car? And was it not also marvellous that when she came back, there he was to open the car door? I know what she meant, but it has an air of claustrophobia, the feeling that he followed her about like a spaniel. Schutz also said that when the Duchess travelled after the Duke’s death, they did not put her name on the list of ship’s passengers. Occasionally she came into the dining room and everyone immediately turned. I naturally said: ‘They recognised her.’ She said: ‘Some recognised her. Others didn’t. But they knew she was someone.’

She ran the house in Paris and the Mill in Gif-sur-Yvette to perfection. Monsieur Martin, who stayed with her at the house till the end, said: ‘Until the Duke died, she knew everything. After the Duke died, she knew nothing.’ Almost by radar, she would have known if someone broke a plate at the Mill, even if she was in Paris. After the Duke died, something snapped. She no longer had to perpetuate the myth of the greatest love story of the 20th century.

I started my book already very much on her side, not to mention horrified by the fate that befell her in her widowhood at the hands of her sinister lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum – all of which will soon hit the big screen as My Duchess with Joan Collins as the Duchess and Isabella Rossellini as the lawyer. Visiting her house over the years, I was impressed that her taste was more Elsie de Wolfe than chintzy Waldorf Astoria. As a hostess, she made sure that no one was left out. The food she served was delicious and inventive. Lady Cooper pointed out that she brought out the best in people. They sharpened up when she came into the room. She was quick witted. When it was suggested she should look up her old friends, she responded: ‘Look ‘em up? Dig ‘em up!’ Her taste in clothes was exceptional, and her jewellery stylish, though interestingly, the Cartier flamingo only became iconic after her death.

History has certainly treated her badly. I ended my research impressed by the quiet dignity with which she handled a tricky situation, by her care of a man she almost certainly had not wanted to marry, and by the respect in which she was held by those who knew her — in stark contrast to the cruel tabloid image created around her.

Hugo Vickers is the author of 'Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic untold story of Wallis Simpson', which was reissued on June 4, 2026.

Lady Anne Glenconner has lore like no one else I’ve known. She is like Jilly Cooper on steroids and with a royal connection. Is it possible to have lived a more colourful, fascinating life? Perhaps. But to talk about it with as much vim and mischief as Lady Glenconner does aged 93? Impossible. She’s mad as a box of (extremely well-heeled) frogs.

Born in 1932, the daughter of the 5th Earl of Leicester served as a maid of honour at the coronation of Elizabeth II and was a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret from 1971 until her death in 2002. She was married to Colin Tennant, 3rd Baron Glenconner (who, incidentally, took her to a brothel on their honeymoon in Paris — see what I mean about Jilly Cooper?) and her 2019 memoir Lady in Waiting was a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller.

Born Anne Veronica Coke, she was the eldest of three girls. Their father was equerry to George VI and a soldier in the Scots guard, which meant that the young children went wherever he was posted. She was nearly seven when the Second World War broke out and her parents moved to Egypt. Her father was fighting and her mother worked for the Red Cross. The children went to live with their great aunt, after which they moved to Holkham Hall in Norfolk. She remembers it fondly and, in true ‘Lady Anne Glenconner’ style, with a bizarre twist that is a publicist's worst nightmare: ‘We had great fun. Always climbing trees. My sister and I had a pony and there was a prisoner-of-war camp in the park. We had Italian prisoners, first of all, and then German prisoners who weren't so friendly and nice. The Italian prisoners were lovely.’

The young Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret were often visitors, as Sandringham was nearby. ‘We saw them a lot, because when we were small like that, Queen Mary was a great friend of my grandmother,’ she says. Of herself and Margaret, she admits ‘we were quite naughty then. Elizabeth always had an eye out for us’.

At the age of 18, Tatler named her ‘debutante of the year’. She had an engagement to Johnnie Althorp (the future father of Diana, the Princess of Wales), but it was broken off. Being a lady-in-waiting came after Lady Anne had children with Lord Glenconner, three boys and two girls. ‘I knew [Princess Margaret], I was always a friend. We got on terribly well and I found her quite easy to, sort of, manage,’ she recalls of that time.

Lord Glenconner, who died in 2010, ‘was wonderful, magical, clever — everything like that, but he had a flip side, which I have written about. His temper was very difficult,’ Lady Anne says. She was a sufferer of domestic abuse. Living in Mustique, their privately owned island in the Caribbean, with him was ‘fantastic,’ nonetheless. ‘We had it for 12 years on our own. No electric light, no water, nothing.’ Her life has been marked by extreme highs and extreme lows. She has lost two of her sons, Charles and Henry, to illnesses, but says that letters from fans who have also lost their children make her feel ‘very humble’.

Her latest book Manners & Mischief has done well. Her publishers want her to write another book, she says, ‘but I don’t know if I can. I will be 94 at my next birthday’. She still attends plenty of events and gives talks — and clearly loves it. ‘My fans are wonderful. I’m a gay icon in America. I have a lot of young male fans there,’ she boasts. She also spends time bird watching, on the beach and in the local park, particularly after recovering from a rather nasty broken back. She enjoys ‘all those things that I didn't really have time for’ before.

‘Colin and Princess Margaret, although they were wonderful to write about, they needed my attention. I spent my whole time looking after them in some respects and now, sadly, they've both gone, but I can think about myself for the first time, really. And, I’m really enjoying myself.’

Your aesthetic hero

Well, being brought up in a war, [Sir Winston] Churchill was the person I most admired as a child. He was wonderful. All the talks he gave to people, how he encouraged people and how he won the war. So I think, for me at my age, Churchill.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

Tutankhamun. I went with Princess Margaret to Egypt, and we saw an exhibition about him. And the other thing was seeing the Terracotta Warriors from China. I thought that was great, too.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I don't buy very much. I hate shopping. What helps me with my writing, however — because I didn't keep diaries, really — is that I took a great many photographs. I've got 100 photograph books, and I had them made in Italy. They're absolutely lovely, with lovely end papers and beautiful leather. So often I buy one of those. They’re terribly heavy and I'm not quite as strong as I used to be. I do find that a slight problem.

Your favourite painting

My great-great-great-grandfather [Thomas William Coke] painted by Batoni when he went on the Grand Tour to Italy. I really love seeing that picture.

A possession you’d never sell

My coronation dress and my coronation brooch. The night before the coronation, one of the Queen’s pages arrived where I was staying in a flat. He brought over a lovely little red box, and inside was a diamond brooch and a note, in the Queen's own handwriting, saying: ‘I hope you will wear this tomorrow’. Of course, I did.

A book you found inspiring

I love books. One I really did enjoy very much was Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies. I thought she wrote beautifully. But it is so difficult to choose just one book. I mean, it’s an impossible question.

The music you work to

I like classical music, and if I’m not working I love listening to opera.

The last podcast you listened to

I don't look at podcasts! Perhaps I’m missing out?

Who would play you in a film of your life

I gave a talk the other day and somebody asked that question. I couldn’t help laughing. I thought it was so funny. The girl that played me in The Crown was rather good — Nancy Carroll.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

A book about how to build a boat.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

I am a morning person. I wake up, get up and always want to see what the day is like.

The items you collect

I used to collect things. I had a big sale the other day, I gave up my flat in London as I wanted to raise some money for my youngest son who had a motorbike accident. He’s quite badly disabled. I used to collect a type of china made in Scotland, but I have sold quite a bit. I also used to collect green glass.

A hotel you could go back and back to

The Portobello Hotel in London, now that I no longer have a flat there. It’s an absolute joy. If I had a grand choice I suppose I would say The Ritz, because when I had my second born son he was huge (11lbs) and I could hardly move. I was absolutely depressed so Colin said: ‘Stay at The Ritz until Henry is born.’ Unfortunately we only had three days, but they were the most luxurious wonderful days. Also, it has the best dining room in London. Margaret used to like going there too.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever had

One or two on Mustique were wonderful. Colin was great at parties. We used to have wonderful dinners outside along the beach, it was all beautifully done. It didn’t really matter what we had to eat too much, the setting was so lovely. We had West Indian food. Chicken and coconut soup and mangoes or passion fruit made into soufflés — that sort of thing.

The best present you’ve ever received

The brooch the Queen gave me. Or a beautiful tiara, with eight stars, that Colin gave me for a state visit dinner at Buckingham palace, because I didn’t have one. That was the most marvellous present I had.

Lady Glenconner’s book ‘Manners & Mischief' is available in all good bookshops.

Polo of the popular imagination is all Champagne, beautiful women, fast cars and impossibly handsome Argentinians — a ritzy, wild world of Jilly Cooper-esque, high-octane fantasy. However, away from the prestigious tournaments that draw thousands of spectators, where super-wealthy patrons battle for bragging rights, there is a whole sub-culture of matches minus the crowds where love of the game is paramount.

There are some 70 polo clubs in England and the lower leagues still attract players who are competing professionally (most players on a team are usually paid by the playing patron). Even at the higher levels, there is no real prize money in polo and players must generally run their own string of ponies (or rather horses, which retain the ‘pony’ name from the 19th century, when they were much smaller); a lower handicap player might have 12 or so ponies in his or her string, with more needed further up. Professionals will have little left over once they have paid their grooms, lorry expenses and vet fees and it is hard for an English player to ascend the rankings sufficiently to earn enough through match fees alone. Many of them have sidelines producing horses, teaching and umpiring, so something as simple as an injured finger can threaten their earning potential, as the large overheads remain. Nevertheless, there is plenty of fun to be had, quietly going on all around the country.

All this is possible thanks to polo patrons and their love of the game. For a patron to play in a match of reasonable standard and to be competitive at the lower end, he or she (polo is a mixed sport) will need to hire professional players to make up the team. The professionals will be paid per match, but will nearly always be contracted for a whole tournament, if not the whole season. As well as providing a living for players, a patron’s munificence will support an entire ecosystem of grooms, farriers, feed merchants, lorry mechanics, horse masseurs (yes, really), vets, equipment suppliers, stick makers, groundsmen and caterers. Even at the lower levels, as many as 50 ponies may be involved in one match.

Individual players are handicapped from -2 (the lowest) to 10 (the best). Low goal tournaments include 2-, 4-, 6- and 8-goal tournaments: the total handicaps of the four players cannot add up to more than the tournament handicap. For instance, an 8-goal tournament could have one 4-goal player, two 2-goal players and a 0 (patrons are often 0, or sometimes 1 goal). The King, incidentally, played off 4 goals and The Prince of Wales 2.

There are about 2,500 players across 70 clubs that vary greatly in size and membership. The majority of members are 0 goal or below and Pony Club polo is also thriving. As Anna Hall, CEO of the governing body, the Hurlingham Polo Association (HPA) explains: ‘Low-goal polo is competitive, fun, and above all, it embodies the camaraderie and community that sit at the heart of polo in this country.’

The director of polo

'Last year, 750 matches were played at Guards Polo Club in Windsor Great Park and 500 of these games were low-goal games,’ reveals Antony Fanshawe, director of polo at Guards Polo Club. ‘Most people start in the low goal. It’s an insanely fun sport to play — sometimes, there are 30 teams in a tournament and there can only be one winner.’ Fanshawe advises that budding players need ‘easy’ ponies, rather than a sizeable string. ‘Ideally, six horses that are easy to hit the ball off, easy to stop and turn and that are sound — if you have that, then you are a very lucky person.’

Running a string of ponies is expensive, but, for some, it is impossible to live without. Playing in the low-goal league is similar to playing club tennis; the club assesses the player’s skill level and puts the player in at a suitable level, ‘unless [he or she] makes millions and wants to step up the levels, but the main point is that it’s about enjoyment and self-improvement’. The value of good jockeys (as in all equestrian disciplines) is unparalleled and anyone who is good on a horse ‘should stick at it,’ as this is becoming an increasingly rare skill, and will only get ‘more valuable,’ believes Fanshawe. ‘People see a good player and think “wow I can do that, I want to do that,” yet have little understanding of how difficult it is to be even averagely good. The time and discipline required to get beyond 3 or 4 goals is huge.’ Finding where you fit in life is not easy for many people, but there is nothing like a soaking wet day and a needle match in the Archie David 8 Goal tournament, going into overtime, to test your mettle.

The young player

Rufus Uloth, 21, first played polo when he was asked to join the most junior team of his local Pony Club branch, aged nine, on his very small pony, Harry Potter. He grew up near Cowdray Park, West Sussex, one of the biggest clubs in the country, which enabled him to be ‘spotted’ in his early teenage years and he was asked to play in adult club teams.

With support from his school, which allowed him to play polo instead of cricket during the summer, and from the HPA, which gave him extra training and sent him on training camps in South Africa, Rufus was able to build up a string of ponies and has made himself available as a gun for hire. He has also played in Argentina, India and New Zealand, now off a handicap of 2. Some of his ponies were given to him by generous benefactors who saw his potential. Another came from Newmarket as a two-year-old colt after the trainer had advised the owner that ‘this horse needs another career’. He was turned away for a year, then it took three years to retrain him ready for matches. In his first season, Pudding won Best Playing Pony in the Park House Cup tournament.

Others were ponies that had been a problem for previous owners, which — ably assisted by his groom Leo — he was able to train up and improve. Rufus has represented his country and now plays regularly at Guards Polo Club and Cowdray Polo Club — the two biggest in the country — for different patrons in different tournaments. Last season, he played 63 matches in 4-, 6-, and 8-goal tournaments. ‘I know it is very difficult to make a living long term,’ he notes, ‘but while I am young and single and I have the time, and people want me to play for them, I can’t imagine a better way to fill my days.’

The pony

Bella is a very special mare,’ declares Nick Clague, who has played polo professionally for 20 years. Bred for racing, Bella enjoyed a brief career on the track before being retrained for polo by the talented young horse-maker Telmo Maidana. Clague bought her as a six year old and she is now 16. ‘She has been my standout horse for a decade,’ he says. ‘She combines extraordinary speed and power with a very good mouth, making her easy to ride and hit the ball on. I save her for the final chukka, when the game is won and lost. She has won many Best Playing Pony awards — recognition she so richly deserves. When she finally retires, I hope to breed from her as I think she will make an incredible broodmare.’

The groom

Martha Emeney, 32, has been a polo groom for eight years since graduating from the University of Plymouth, where she studied illustration. She has groomed for professional players in New Zealand and Australia, as well as England.

Life for a polo groom usually starts at 5.30am. Typically, a groom is responsible for five to 10 horses, but this can vary from job to job. ‘My love for horses is what initially attracted me to the job, but I also love the social life and team aspect of working in polo.’

At the games, grooms are responsible for preparing the ponies to play by bandaging their legs, tacking up, screwing studs into their shoes for grip and plaiting their tails. The ponies are then warmed up one by one before it’s their turn to take to the field. When a pony has finished playing, it is quickly stripped, washed down and walked to allow their bodies to recover. ‘It can be extremely hard work, but very rewarding when the ponies and games go well.

‘Patrons who play in the lower levels enjoy it a lot,’ says Emeney, ‘as they are able to contribute more during the game than they typically would in the high goal, although this varies on the level and skill of the patron. Those who play in the higher levels are motivated by the recognition and prestige of winning the big trophies, but the lower levels can be equally as fun and competitive, often with a much more enjoyable atmosphere.’

It’s true that ‘polo grooming is not for the faint hearted,’ she reveals, ‘but once you get the bug, it’s pretty hard to shake! It has taken me all over the world and I’ve had some incredible experiences and met special people. I’d recommend it to any young person who wants to combine their love of horses with travel and parties’.

The patron

Peter O’Rorke, 70, started playing polo in 1987, initially on bicycles. It was low key and low cost. He gradually assembled a string of ponies ‘of a sort’ and started to play low goal at clubs across the country: Ham, London, then Kirtlington, Oxfordshire, followed in succession by Inglesham in Wiltshire, Cirencester in Gloucestershire and now Cowdray in West Sussex.

‘Churchill said: “No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle,” notes O’Rorke. ‘To sit on a polo pony, on any of the beautiful grounds in the country, and to play the most demanding, complex and exhilarating game with honourable (mostly!) fellow players and team members is a unique privilege.’

As for playing low-goal polo, O’Rorke is very clear: ‘Working out what level one can play at is relatively easy because of the increase in cost as you go higher in low, medium or high goal. At each level, there are different demands on pony quantity and quality, professional fees, entry fees and so on. Most players in the UK play very low-goal polo and have the time of their life every weekend. I know because I did that for 20 years at least. Now, I play 8-,10- and 12-goal polo at Cowdray because that provides much of the competitive nature of medium or high goal, but remains a little more fun, grounded and achievable — and just a little less serious.

‘Winning trophies is fantastic, but what I really treasure is a competitive game, my ponies coming off sound, post-match banter and nonsense with team-mates, friends, wives, family and our wonderful grooms,’ he continues. ‘Generally, I drive home incandescent with happiness after polo. Lows are rare, but losing a pony, that just breaks everyone’s heart.’

O’Rorke confirms that polo is a ‘massive commitment,’ but remains incredibly rewarding nonetheless. This is also true of the cost implications: ‘I certainly wouldn’t be working still if I didn’t have polo to pay for. It is also true in terms of dedication to fitness — I would not go to the gym or drink less if I wasn’t scared of falling off or letting down my team.’

The photographer

'Many years ago, I watched The King play at Windsor, but it was only after the Covid lockdowns that I returned to polo, this time at Cowdray — and was instantly hooked. I quickly realised that low-goal polo, in particular, is a compelling sport to photograph,’ says Hampshire-based lensman Paul Grove, 56. ‘As a photographer working towards professional distinctions, I was struck not only by the speed and athleticism, but by the warmth of the welcome. Players, patrons, grooms and the Cowdray team create a community that is both dedicated and deeply supportive.’

Grove reflects on the levels of the sport and believes that low-goal polo has an immediacy and camaraderie that is wonderfully authentic — families get involved, young players develop, and friendships are forged through shared effort.

‘What draws me back is that human element: the concentration before the throw-in, the exchanges between chukkas, the pride of emerging players finding their stride,’ he reveals. ‘To capture those moments feels a privilege — and I hope the photographs will become lasting records of both sporting ambition and community spirit.

This feature originally appeared in the May 27, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Monaco’s proclivity for partying belies its bijou size. Long synonymous with glamorous gatherings, the Principality has transformed its social scene over the decades, from aristocratic balls to yacht blowouts, via the Casino di Monte-Carlo and velvet rope nightclubs. It’s a reflection of Monaco’s unique blend of heritage and no-holds-barred.

To celebrate the publication of Country Life’s special Monaco issue (on newsstands June 3), we’ve selected some of the most unforgettable moments in the country’s history.

What? The Royal Wedding

When? April 19, 1956

Perhaps the greatest string of moments in the country’s history surrounds the marriage of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III. These included an engagement party, a gala supper for 120 people to celebrate Kelly’s arrival in Monaco (red and white carnations were dropped from a plane), the civil ceremony and subsequent garden party on April 18, and, finally, the wedding itself on April 19, 1956. 700 guests were invited to the ceremony and wedding breakfast; a further 30 million watched proceedings on their televisions.

What? Frank Sinatra’s first appearance in Monaco

When? June 1958

A friend and frequent collaborator of Grace Kelly’s, Frank Sinatra was known to frequent the Principality in the decades that followed Kelly’s coronation. His first visit in 1958, pictured here, shows the legendary crooner playing an impromptu tune on an acoustic guitar during one of the many gala dinners Kelly would go on to host during her reign.

What? The inauguration of The Hall of The Americas

When? March 1969

Hot on the heels of the 16th Cannes Film Festival, the Principality’s Société des Bains de Mer held a celebration to inaugurate The Hall of the Americas, a newly renovated portion of the central casino. To mark the occasion, they opted for a Bal des Têtes theme, requesting guests don elaborate hats and headwear. Grace Kelly and Sofia Loren opted for these soaring, intricate fascinators.

What? Grace Kelly’s 40th birthday Scorpion Ball

When? November 15, 1969

To mark her 40th birthday, Grace Kelly invited just 60 guests — Elizabeth and Rock Hudson among them — for a dinner celebration at the Hotel Hermitage. The catch? The guests had to be a scorpio, like Kelly, or married to one. Everyone in attendance was instructed to wear ‘scorpio colors’ (red and black), and served by a troupe of waiters in powdered wigs and red velvet suits.

What? The opening of Jimmy’z

When? July 9, 1971

Still the de facto dance club in Monaco, Jimmy’z first opened its doors in 1971 to much fanfare. Founded by French crooner Régine Zylberberg, or ‘Queen of the Night; as she was christened by her partygoers, Jimmy’z was the Cote d’Azur’s answer to Studio 54.

What? Estée Lauder’s garden party

When? August 1981

Estée Lauder’s subdued garden party was one of Monte-Carlo’s less ornate celebrations. Nevertheless, it earns its place here for the fact that it was photographed by the legendary Slim Aarons. During this 1981 visit to Monaco, Aarons also organised photoshoots on Italian Count Hannibal Scotti's yacht, Scotland Cay, and in Princess Caroline’s winter garden, at her home on the palace grounds.

What? Ivana Trump’s yacht christening party

When? July 30, 1995

A few years after her divorce from Donald, Ivana Trump was back in high spirits alongside her third husband, Riccardo Mazzucchelli, christening their 32-meter yacht in Monaco’s harbor at the peak of the high summer season. The boat’s name? Ivana, of course.

What? The 3rd Push World Championships

When? September 15, 1996

Fun fact: His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco was an Olympic medal contender. An avid athlete with a long resume of sporting hobbies including cross country, javelin throwing, handball, judo, swimming, tennis, rowing, sailing, skiing, squash and fencing, his shot at gold came as a member of the country’s bobsleigh team in the 1988, 1992, 1994, 1998, and 2002 Winter Olympic Games. He retired in 2002, but often hosts events related to his competitive past.

What? The opening of the Amber Lounge

When? 2003

Founded in 2003 by Sonia Irvine, the sister of former Ferrari Formula One (F1) driver Eddie Irvine, the Amber Lounge was the first foray into the nightlife circuit that now goes hand-in-hand with Monaco’s Grand Prix weekend, and F1 racing around the world.

The first night of business, in 2003, saw guests including Bono, The Edge (of U2), Helena Christensen and Heidi Klum walk through the doors. Years later, Amber Lounge debuted their own fashion show, one of their ‘most celebrated and media-friendly events’ (their words). A who’s who of the F1 grid has walked the Amber Lounge runway — showcasing designs by Hugo Boss, Tommy Hilfiger and Armani — including a 19-year-old Charles Leclerc (above).

What? The Star Wars Red Bull Grand Prix party

When? May 21, 2005

This early-2000s fever dream of a party was the culmination of a collaboration between Red Bull Racing and Star Wars to promote Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. The team featured themed car liveries, while the pit crew wore Stormtrooper helmets during stops. Perhaps best of all though, while Star Wars creator George Lucas and star Hayden Christensen mingled with the crowd at the party, Chewbacca took the dance floor by storm.

What? World Music Awards

When? November 4, 2007

Held at Salle des Étoiles, the city’s grand ballroom complete with a retractable roof, the 2007 World Music Awards was perhaps the largest gathering of celebrity names in recent history. Celine Dion, Patti Labelle, Justin Timberlake, U2 and Ciara all took home awards, as well as Rihanna, who was crowned with the Entertainer of the Year accolade after performing her 2007 hit tune Umbrella.

What? The Surrealist supper

When? December 12, 2017

The 2017 Surrealist dinner, charged with an over-the-top showmanship of a bygone era, is the closest thing Monaco has seen to the soirées thrown by Grace Kelly. Full sections of the casino were decked out in red and white harlequin-patterned fabric as part of an installation by artist Charles Kaisain and waiters sported Hitchcock-inspired bird cage headpieces. Catherine Deneuve and Caroline, Princess of Hanover were in attendance.

What? The Monte-Carlo Sporting Summer Festival

When? August 6, 2018

The Sporting Summer Festival has been around since 1974 (past performers including Elton John and Tina Turner), but 2018 was a particularly special year with Ringo Starr and Grace Jones, pictured here, taking to the stage.

What? The Red Cross Gala

When? The last one was held on July 12, 2025

One of the most revered fundraisers in Monaco, the Red Gross Gala, or Gala de la Croix-Rouge, has been held since 1948. Each year, black tie-clad donors are treated to dinner and a show, but perhaps most exciting is the tombola raffle. Prizes usually come in the form of diamond baubles, noisy cars and trips to faraway lands. Last year’s performer, Billy Idol, had guests dancing until 2am.

'Independent taxation, which took effect on April 6, 1990, offers all married women the opportunity to enjoy independence and privacy in their own tax affairs,’ proffered Margaret Thatcher’s business secretary Peter Lilley in Parliament that July, announcing the long-awaited policy that is now considered a cornerstone of women’s suffrage.

Eighty years before, Sophia Duleep Singh, one of the original movement’s architects, was marching to Westminster as part of the Women’s Tax Resistance League (WTRL, slogan: ‘No vote, no tax’). The march on November 18, 1910, of some 300 Suffragettes, frustrated by news of an imminent General Election that would scupper the bill to allow women the vote, became known as Black Friday for its police violence.

As the third daughter of Sir Duleep Singh, the last maharaja of the Sikh Empire, and Bamba Müller, the illegitimate child of a German merchant banker and his Abyssinian mistress, few historical figures have sat at such a rich and fascinating juncture between power, empire and progress.

The Princess was born in west London in 1876 and spent most of her childhood at Elveden Hall in Suffolk. Her father had called Britain home from the age of 15, five years after he was deposed from the Sikh Empire and the East India Company seized control of Punjab. Queen Victoria took a shine to the young maharaja and, after he abandoned his family in 1886 and Müller died of renal failure a year later, she gave Princess Sophia, her goddaughter, a grace-and-favour residence on the Hampton Court estate.

Thirteen years later, the Princess would join the WTRL and campaign for her right to vote, causing a scandal by selling copies of The Suffragette newspaper outside the former royal residence she called home. Her move into activism was prompted by a trip to India in 1907, where she became disillusioned with the British Raj after witnessing extreme poverty. This pushed her to challenge the establishment and, by 1911, one of her diamond rings had been impounded by bailiffs as recourse for non-payment of tax. It was later bought back at auction and returned by a fellow member of the League.

Princess Sophia died in 1948, 42 years before her dream of women’s financial independence was finally enshrined into law. An exhibition focused on her life, and her sisters Catherine and Bamba, ‘The Last Princesses of Punjab’, runs at Kensington Palace until November 8. It features her spoilt 1911 census record, on which she wrote ‘No Vote, No Census’.

Away from the campaigning, during the Second World War, Princess Sophia joined the Voluntary Auxiliary Detachment Service as a nurse. She was also a keen rider, hockey player, cyclist and dog breeder and trainer, taking her Pomeranian, Jo, on her tour of India in 1906. Borzois were her second favourite dogs.

This feature originally appeared in the May 27, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.