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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where was it?

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

A quick description

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

What made you rent it?

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

How did you find it?

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

Any grumbling about the landlords?

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

Favourite aspect?

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

How did you make the cottage your own?

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

Why did you move?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Electric Palace, Bridport, Dorset

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

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

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

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

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

The Birks Cinema, Aberfeldy, Perthshire

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

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

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

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

The Parade Cinema, Marlborough, Wiltshire

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

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

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

Aldeburgh Cinema, Aldeburgh, Suffolk

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

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

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

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

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

Corfe Castle, Dorset

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

The Taybank, Perthshire

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

Campbeltown Picture House, Argyll & Bute

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

The Magic Lantern, Gwynedd

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

The Kinema In The Woods, Lincolnshire

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

Alnwick Castle, Northumberland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is it?

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

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

A quick description.

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

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

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

How did you find it?

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

What sold it to her?

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

Was it a smooth purchase?

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

What do you love about the area?

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

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

Favourite aspect of the house?

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

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

Best memory of living there?

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

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

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

Biggest indulgence?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your aesthetic hero

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

An exhibition that has really impressed me

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

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I bought some pink birkenstocks for the summer.

A possession you would never sell

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

Your favourite painting

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

A book you found inspiring

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

The music that you work to

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

The last podcast you listened to

I listen to The Rest is History quite religiously.

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

Jeff Goldblum.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

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

The thing that gets you up on the morning

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

The items you collect

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

A hotel to could go back and back to

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

The best present you’ve ever received

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

The most memorable meal you've ever eaten

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sticky fingers

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

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

Architectural ironies

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

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

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

You reap what you sow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Deep breath)...

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

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

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

Those more likely to commission a portrait than buy an abstract painting are probably already queuing outside the door of Jonathan Yeo (b. 1970). It was from his studio that The King’s huge red official portrait emerged in 2024.

However, many English artists painting today are not interested in producing a specific likeness. Rather, they are drawn to the possibilities of the figure itself.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977) paints swiftly and assertively. Her black bodies, on show until September 17 at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhillon-Sea, East Sussex, as part of the Hayward Gallery touring exhibition ‘To Improvise A Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates’, dance, leap, ponder, read or pose in socks and underpants.

All make their presence felt, despite being drawn from her own imagination, as do the figures of American-born Chantal Joffe (b. 1969), who has lived in England since the age of 13. She works from life (and from photographs of her own family), but her paintings of mothers and children are not intended solely to represent specific individuals — rather, they consider the complex states of motherhood and parenting.

English painting has had a long and fruitful relationship with artists born overseas — one-quarter of the founding members of the RA came from abroad, including the Swiss-born Angelica Kauffman and American Benjamin West. They brought with them new ideas and styles and joined forces with English-born artists to debate and exhibit great art.

Today, England is an important world centre for figurative painters who were born overseas — the late Paula Rego (1935–2022) moved here from Portugal in 1976 and stayed until her death more than 45 years later. London is also home for Celia Paul (b. 1959) and Kudzanai-Violet Hwami (b. 1993), born in India and Zimbabwe respectively. Paul’s solitary self-portraits speak of an introspective life; Hwani’s explosive colours fuse family snapshots with accumulated images from a digital life.

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

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

You’d be hard pressed to find a contemporary television character more likely to be a loyal subscriber to Country Life than the 13th Duke of Halstead. Theo James’s aristocratic Barbour-clad, gun-toting lead in Guy Ritchie’s Netflix hit The Gentlemen is exactly who most people picture our average reader to be (drug-selling side hustle aside). He returns today in the show’s much anticipated second season.

Speaking from Los Angeles, from his ‘little place in Venice Beach’, it’s easy to imagine Theo’s lifestyle is not far removed from his incredibly wealthy on-screen persona, until he admits: ‘I am sitting in my car because there’s a playdate happening with the kids, as well as a cleaner and other stuff happening in my house, so I thought I’d just get out of there.’ Perhaps, not so glamorous after all — although still good for a speedy getaway.

This is a love he shares with his on-screen character. ‘Most things that I own, I can get rid of, except for cars,’ he says. ‘I've always been into cars.’ So much so that ‘car’ was the actor's first word. ‘I seem to keep hold of them, which is a really middle-aged thing. Being a 40-year-old, I'm like “Is it cool? Or is it just that I'm becoming a middle-aged t**t?”’ He doesn’t look like any of the middle-aged t**ts that I know, that’s for sure.

Fast cars aside (there are plenty of them in The Gentlemen), in this season the Duke shows more of a dark side, ‘which was always the plan,’ Theo says. ‘You need to, as much as it’s entertainment, push people’s expectations a bit.’ The actor thinks that the fascination with the British countryside on screen — one need look no further than Rivals, Clarkson’s Farm and the upcoming Pride and Prejudice film for further proof — is down to the fact that ‘it’s an emblem of hyper wealth colonial Britain at a time of its peak, which no longer exists’.

‘Now, it’s a form of class structure that is fascinating, because it’s so archaic in many ways. Also these houses are beautiful and the grounds incredible.’ Much of the action was filmed at Badminton House in Gloucestershire, the Grade I-listed Palladian building which gave its name to the racket sport. It was also recorded in the Domesday Book. ‘Guy Ritchie likes, you know, “land porn”,’ says Theo. ‘The Gentlemen is a celebration of the quirks of Britain.’

It’s a far cry from another film of Theo’s that celebrates ‘the quirks of Britain’, and what I like to think of as his breakout role — The Inbetweeners Movie (2011) in which he played James, an obnoxious night club rep. However, it is a lesser cry from his most memorable turn as the rich but meddlesome Cameron Sullivan in the second season of The White Lotus (2022). Theo also starred in the dystopian Divergent film series.

Now that he has two children with the actress Ruth Kearney, he admits that he’s less keen on recurring projects. ‘Since early on in my career, when I was kind of trapped into coming back for multiple films, I’ve always been super allergic to returning to something because of that experience, but it was much more pleasant this time.’ Something about The Gentlemen has kept him coming back for more. He is very fond of working with the cast and crew. So, will there be a third season? ‘I hope, if there is more, that we will be able to evolve it even further.’

Your aesthetic hero

My touchpoint for dress was always my grandfather. He was Greek from Athens and a highly cultured man. He was a doctor, but not someone who would tell anyone about it. He loved classical music, painting. He was a very classy man. My touchpoint is a picture of him on the streets of Athens when he was 22. He has a thick moustache, impeccable hair and he’s wearing a blue double-breasted suit with small sunglasses.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

My wife and I got married in Tuscany and our honeymoon was spent driving back to London. We took our time and stopped on the way, and when we were in Paris for a couple of nights there was a tiny exhibition of some of Picasso's lesser known works. I have always loved him and was super taken with that.

The music that you work to

I don’t work to music. I love music, but I find I listen to lyrics too much and it’s distracting for me.

Your favourite painting

It’s like saying ‘Do you have a favourite album?’, I think it’s impossible to say: ‘Do you have a favourite painting?’ I like Georgia O’Keeffe’s stuff, we’ve got lots of her books around the house, but in terms of a favourite singular painting I couldn’t say.

The last podcast you listened to

I listened to the latest episode of The Rest is Politics and I have been listening to the audiobook of London Falling, by Patrick Radden Keefe.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I remember what I bought yesterday, which was a small toy dog for one of my kids. In terms of buying something for myself, I’m stumped.

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

F**k knows, and I apologise in advance.

A possession you’d never sell

I have a signed picture of Jimi Hendrix, playing in 1969. I got it from a friend when I was in my twenties, someone classier and who had more dough than I did, and it has been with me since I was 19 and travels to every different place. I wouldn't get rid of it because, although I don't think it's worth that much, it was the first possession that I had that I felt had not only monetary value, but also staying power.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

A pair of pliers.

A book that has inspired you

Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I loved travelling as a young man, and I still do. But you know, you have different expectations in life about being able to get off the grid. But both of those books, in different ways, are about a singular journey into complicated times.

The Old Man and the Sea is one about a man against the elements, and I love the ocean. Heart of Darkness is about a descent into chaos. I've always been fascinated by the Congo, and hopefully I might go next year. Obviously, that book is also about the problems of colonialism and pillaging of other cultures. Given that we’re still in a world which is very much dominated by a different form of colonialism — be it oligarchical or American, European, Chinese or Russian — it’s still very much a part of our culture, so that’s a fitting choice.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

My children.

The items you collect

I have some old cars, and they’re the bane of my life because they’re constantly breaking down, but I am addicted to the smell of them, the way they look and the memory of the past they came from.

A hotel you could go back and back to

Hotel Il Pellicano, in Tuscany.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

I opened two restaurants, one is in Hackney, Ornella, and the chef makes a burro e parmigiano — tagliatelle with butter and parmesan — which is quite simple but that’s one of the best dishes I have. Even though it’s, you know, my restaurant, it’s simple but beautifully made.

The best present you’ve ever received

My brothers, for one Christmas, gave me the impression that they were going to get me a remote control car and they wrapped up a bunch of rocks. When I opened it they were laughing hysterically, so that’s probably the best Christmas present I’ve ever got.

You can stream season two of ‘The Gentlemen’ on Netflix now.

Almost exactly 960 years ago, on October 14, 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, emerged victorious from the hard-fought Battle of Hastings. It was a confrontation he regarded as a trial by ordeal for the throne of England, bloodily fought out as part of a wider three-way struggle — don’t forget the formidable Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, whose brief invasion underlines England’s ties with Scandinavia — in the neat span of a single year.

In 2026, the anniversary of the battle coincides with the much-publicised display of the 11th-century embroidery familiarly known as the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum. The Tapestry is a compelling work of art with a distinctive visual language that makes it instantaneously and universally recognisable. It is a foundational document of our history.

The narrative of the Tapestry now concludes with the flight of the English from the battlefield, a section of unknown length having been torn off at some point. In some ways, that lost ending is appropriate because the legacy of the battle itself — and the Norman conquest that it secured — remains open to widely contrasting interpretation.

One view has been that the Norman Conquest is something to celebrate. By some in the 19th century, it was even characterised as a crucial step in the nation’s march towards global dominance. In reaction to this positive assessment, there has been a romantic characterisation of the Anglo-Saxons as an honest population cheated of their rightful inheritance by brutal and corrupt foreigners.

Alternatively, there have even been attempts to try and write the Conquest out of history. By this analysis, one social elite was replaced by another leaving society at large unchanged. A simple characterisation of the Norman Conquest, however, is impossible. Not least because it entirely overlooks the longstanding role of the Battle of Hastings as a national foundation myth.

Never has there been conflict in which so many people wished to claim an ancestral presence, but only on the winning side. It became, indeed, to popular late-medieval English sensibility what the Tudors have become to us; a historical horizon beyond which everything was obscure.

This week’s issue of Country Life takes advantage of the popular interest catalysed by the display of the Bayeux Tapestry to revisit the legacy of the Normans. At this distance of time, we are not obliged to take sides. Nor should we allow the pain and destruction their conquest of England undoubtedly caused to blind us to their achievement. In terms of the castles and churches that stud our landscape, and even some of the language we use, 1066 still casts a shadow. We would all do well to know more about this fascinating and tumultuous period.

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

Cruz Beckham made his Reading Festival debut this bank holiday weekend, North West appeared on the latest cover of Dazed magazine and Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere are starring in the new 80s-themed Disney+ series The Shards. 2026 is the summer of the nepo baby.

The life of a nepo baby, however, can be a win-win or a lose-lose. You could profit from a successful career without any talent of your own, riding on the coat-tails of a famous family. Or, you could be talented in your own right, but no matter how successful you become people will always accuse you of not having ‘earned’ it.

Our obsession with celebrities' children has only increased in recent years with the rise of social media. An increasingly difficult job market, too, has thrown their success under the spotlight. You’d be within your right to assume that Emily Roux may have lived to rue the day she entered the family trade. But fear of nepotism allegations has not deterred the granddaughter of Albert Roux and daughter of Michel Roux Jr. Her Michelin star restaurant, Caractère, now nearly nine years old, has been going from strength to strength.

The fine dining restaurant in Notting Hill, which the 35-year-old co-owns with her husband, chef Diego Ferrari, previously of Le Gavroche, is immensely popular. With hospitality struggling amidst the cost of living crisis, Caractère’s success cannot be put down to the Roux surname alone. Although it may have helped her to get a foothold in the industry, it has taken years of grit and determination for Emily to step out of her father and grandfather’s towering culinary shadow.

That shadow began with Albert Roux, the renowned French chef, who opened Le Gavorche in Mayfair with his brother Michel. It was the first restaurant in the UK to gain three Michelin stars, and was taken over by Albert’s son, Michel Jr, before its closure in 2024.

‘The passion for food, eating out, has always been there,’ Emily says. In her early teens she spent a few evenings at Le Gavroche. ‘It opened my eyes to the camaraderie and little family that you had in the kitchen. I’m an only child, and I thought, I quite like these older brothers and sisters. It seemed like a lot of fun.’

Combined with a phobia of ‘sitting down and being behind a computer in an office’, cooking soon became ‘the only thing [she] wanted to do’. Her father is now 66, and enjoying a life away from the day-to-day business of running a world-renowned restaurant. This means he is regularly free to babysit Emily and Diego’s young children.

It’s clear that he couldn’t be prouder of his only daughter. ‘I think it was fairly obvious that she was going to end up in the hospitality industry,’ he says, although he is quick to add, ‘We never pushed Emily into cooking, that’s for sure.’

‘She was always interested in food… at a very young age she already knew flavour profiles and what was good, what wasn’t good.’ Michel Jr remembers going to restaurants with Emily as a little girl aged six. She would give him feedback after each meal.

‘On the way back home we would talk about it and she would make a note and say: “This one deserves a star, this one doesn’t.”’ Little did she know, she’d one day have a star of her own.

Emily decided not to take on the family business, and instead strike out on her own. Michel Jr says: ‘I took some advice from my father, but it was always more inspirational, and I think my father was always putting his nose in my business, so I tried not to do that with Emily.’ He adds: ‘It was a struggle in itself because he never really let go, and the actual business was struggling immensely. It was not making money. In fact, it was losing money — loads of money. So it took a long time for me to address that and to make it back into a profitable business. But Emily and Diego started from scratch.’

Emily adds: ‘He’s always a phone call away,’ and recalls how, during covid, she was on the phone with her father every other day, discussing how their restaurants’ respective landlords were reacting and how they would organise things to ensure the future of their businesses. ‘There’s always been help in the background. Always,’ she says.

When Emily studied at the Institut Lyfe in France as a young chef, she enjoyed anonymity — Roux is a much more common surname in France. ‘It was ideal,’ she says. ‘I was Joe Bloggs, and treated like everyone else. Most of the places that I worked never knew my family history or where I came from, probably until the time I was about to leave. It was perfect. I just lived my young commis chef life as anyone would.’

The pair agree times have changed since Michel Jr started out in the industry. ‘I think my team has a good work/life balance at the moment… I think that wasn’t the case when I started out in my career,’ says Emily. Her restaurant is shut on Sundays and Mondays, as well as for the Christmas and New Year period — ‘It’s a time when I want to be with my family, and I think everyone wants to be with their families’.

They also close for the last two weeks of August to coincide with the Notting Hill carnival and grant a reprieve for those with children, and are only open for lunch on Fridays and Saturdays. ‘We have lunch when they arrive. We have dinner together,’ she adds, about her staff.

Michel Jr says: ‘I worked 100 plus hours a week when I was training, and Emily probably not far off the same, at times. We have to do better than that. But I certainly don’t look back at my training period with any anger or ill feelings.’

Now his daughter is a parent to young children, does he reflect on his life as a busy chef with a young family? He is certainly on duty as a grandfather a lot of the time these days. Emily’s eldest son, a precocious six-year-old, enthusiastically interrupts our interview a few times, clamouring for his grandad’s attention, or perhaps a Michelin-starred snack.

‘Emily was put into a nursery and daycare as a child, so it certainly didn’t stop us working,’ says Michel Jr. ‘I tried my best to spend as much time as possible with Emily, because I felt that my father didn't spend enough time with me when he opened Le Gavroche, but it wasn't easy. I was still working ridiculous hours.’

For Emily, things were slightly different. ‘We already had the restaurant when the kids were born and they adapted to it as we did… but we make a really good effort to spend a wonderful day with them on a Sunday when we’re all together at home, and on Monday afternoons.’

What about that adage about ‘too many cooks’? Especially considering Diego, Emily’s husband, is in the mix too. ‘It works very well,’ Michel Jr says. ‘They’re coming over to France very soon and Diego might do a barbecue, I might do the vegetables, Emily might do something else.’ Emily adds: ‘It’s very natural and very easy. If there’s three of us, well, there’s three more ideas and three more hands to do something.’

Rivalry would not be unexpected in such an accomplished family, especially in a business that can be measured in awards. For Emily and Michel Jr, however, working with food brings them together.

The only downside seems to be that Emily’s children have a distinguished palette, like she did as a young girl. They eat the same food as the adults in her household. ‘He’s never had a dull pasta,’ she says of her eldest. ‘So when we go to a restaurant at an airport, for example, inevitably he won’t enjoy it and will be very disappointed.’ Ditto grandma’s homemade pizza dough, Michel Jr relates sadly. But, if this is the only problem, it seems the family are doing very well indeed. In this instance, too many cooks don’t spoil the broth, or in this case, the roux, at all.

Emily and Michel Jr will be collaborating on a Christmas menu at Caractère. Visit their website for more information.

'Unmitigated England’/Came swinging down the line/That day the February sun/Did crisp and crystal shine’, rejoiced Sir John Betjeman in Great Central Railway, Sheffield Victoria to Banbury as he rode the ‘trail of glory’ of the Victorians’ last mainline railway.

For writers such as Betjeman, railways — especially steam engines — have offered endless inspiration. Pioneered by the British, they denote national pride and nostalgia, as well as providing the perfect metaphor for the narrative journey. David Lean’s 1945 film adaptation of Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter delivered one of the most memorable scenes in cinema history when Trevor Howard removed the grit from Celia Johnson’s eye. The railway station where they meet, and where Howard’s character departs by train, marks the beginning and the end of the story and their short, but tender affair.

Train journeys make terrific plot devices. Together with the jeopardy of missing a stop and arriving somewhere unexpected, they are also a place to encounter strangers. A train supplies a cast of characters in a series of rooms, each with a different motive for travel, which is partly why Agatha Christie’s 1934 classic murder mystery Murder on the Orient Express works so splendidly, spawning numerous adaptations with star-studded casts. In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 thriller The Lady Vanishes, an avalanche strands the rail passengers, cleverly containing the drama. The film stars Margaret Lockwood as socialite Iris Henderson, whose carriage companion, the elderly governess Miss Froy, disappears, prompting Henderson to question everything and everyone around her, as well as her own sanity.

In film and literature, railway travel means leaving the past behind and embarking on something new. For the excited young wizards of J. K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ series, waiting for the Hogwarts Express at London King’s Cross station, it’s the start of a new term that promises adventure. Yet boarding the school train, we learn, requires a leap of faith: ‘The tricky part was getting onto platform 9¾, which wasn’t visible to the Muggle [non-wizard] eye. What you had to do was walk through the solid barrier dividing platforms nine and 10. It didn’t hurt, but it had to be done carefully so that none of the Muggles noticed you vanishing.’

Rail travel is about possibilities. ‘In between the stations, things flitted past so isolated from their context that each seemed to promise some unearthly happiness if one could but have descended from the train at that very moment to seize it,’ writes C. S. Lewis in the 1945 sci-fi novel, That Hideous Strength. A similar feeling is imparted in Edward Thomas’s celebrated 1915 poem Adlestrop, with its surprisingly lovely unscheduled train stop in the Cotswolds. ‘Yes. I remember Adlestrop,’ he begins wistfully, recalling its ‘willows, willow-herb, and grass,/And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry’, and the blackbird who serenaded the passengers pausing there.

By contrast, Dickens, writing at a time of rapid rail expansion, conveys the railway’s irrepressible force. ‘Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped… enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up,’ reads his 1848 novel Dombey and Son. ‘In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement.’

The steam engine’s unprecedented power is also emphasised in the galloping meter of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1885 children’s poem From a Railway Carriage, which describes it, with more wonder than fear, ‘charging along like troops in a battle,/All through the meadows of horses and cattle’.

By the turn of the century, the railway was often cast as something heartwarming and familiar. In E. Nesbit’s 1906 novel The Railway Children, and its 1970 film adaptation, watching the trains and talking to the railway staff distracts the children from the sadness of being separated from their father. One special train, the Green Dragon, travelling to London, where they last saw him, symbolises the hope of being reunited. ‘Why don’t we ask the next train to take our love to Daddy?’ suggests Phyllis, the youngest child, in a poignant moment in the film.

Sometimes the railway station is associated with beloved characters, such as Paddington Bear, and sometimes the locomotives themselves are the characters — the cheerful Thomas and haughty Gordon in Revd W. V. Awdry’s ‘The Railway Series’ books, for example — whose displays of strength and speed to demonstrate that they are ‘Really Useful Engines’ invariably end in disaster.

‘I don’t think it’s the speed that matters,’ stresses Betjeman in the 1970 documentary Railways For Ever!. ‘It’s the release from tension; the thrill of seeing real country… And for some of us, there will always remain memories of the hiss of steam, the sudden roar, the triumphant scream of the whistle, smuts, and the grimy majesty of the whole thing.'

This feature originally appeared in the December 24, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

As summer travellers return home from their final trip to Europe, the conversation has shifted once more in favour of the continent. What is it that we love about it? The pace of life? The food? Density of attractive people?

I would like to submit a more left-field answer: the signage. The street names, shopfronts and various insignia decked out in sexy font and sexier colours: streets full of mom-and-pop eateries emblazoned with Art Nouveau typeface.

Hey: that's just me. Or is it? Branding, whether corporate or personal, has become one of life’s key success indicators. In today’s hypervisual culture, a company’s choice of font (for its logo, copy or storefront, say) can easily make or break it.

Imagine, then, the fury incurred by Britain’s luxury cigar retailers when they found out about a provision in the Government’s Tobacco and Vapes Act (in consultation until October 2) that would mandate plain packaging for all tobacco products. This means, in essence, that the same font and pictures of mangled feet found on a pack of Benson & Hedges could soon appear in lieu of Cuban crests on a case of Montecristos.

Anti-branding of the sort would unwittingly dissolve the distinctions between handmade and mass-market cigars — which, per Jimmy McGhee, commercial manager of tobacco merchant James J. Fox, ‘is like putting a bottle of Château Yquem 2015 into the same bottle as a Blossom Hill’. In doing so, the Government is betting on the notion that Cohibas (‘the Macallan of cigars’) are often indulged purely for show — and that an inability to be seen ordering these will be, for many, enough of a deterrent.

It’s fair to think about the benefits — for one thing, it might keep the posers at bay — but Jimmy notes that modern packaging, which is likely to be cardboard, will be fatal to the cigars themselves. ‘Traditional boxes are about more than branding,’ he remarks. ‘They are lined with Spanish cedar, which allows the tobacco to breathe, whereas cardboard is more porous and absorbs more moisture.’

Benevolent observers might congratulate the Government for seeing through its commitment to fighting carcinogenics. Those more cynical, however, will note that cigars are not the same as cigarettes (only one of them is chain-smoked) and that we would do well to address more rampant problems, such as vapes. (The Act's provisions for the latter are as follows: vape adverts banned by June 2027, free samples abolished and no more sale of the item via vending machines by October 29, 2029.)

They will also observe that replacing traditional cigar packaging comes with additional risks. The labels appearing on boxes at the top end of the market, for instance, tend to incorporate hidden micro-printing and UV-fluorescent inks for authentication. ‘The provision is a counterfeiter’s dream,’ Jimmy quips.

It also betrays the state's attempt to muscle into a cultural vogue for homogenisation. So much of modern life is built on sameness: the same cars; the same interiors; the same cosmetic surgeries. I ask you, whether smoker or not: is that really what we want? Also, some of us like the smell. Just leave this one alone, please.

This feature originally appeared in the August 26, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Jeremy Vine is on his bike. ‘Hold on, I am cycling past a building site,’ he says, when he picks up my call. I check that he’s not cycling his penny-farthing, which resulted in a recent nasty injury. Just a regular bike for him today, he confirms. ‘Cycling is riddled with those sort of problems, isn’t it?’ I say empathetically.

‘I never like the words "riddled" or "problems" connected with cycling,' he replies. 'Cycling's mainly full of joy and solutions. Car driving is riddled with problems. Car driving has destroyed our cities and our countryside in many ways, but that’s a conversation for another day.’

Bicycles aside, he has been enthusiastically giving me his recommendations for Appledore, a historical fishing and shipbuilding village in North Devon. These include the Flame Factory, a pizzeria and burger house; The Crowbar, a pub and restaurant; and Jack Sprats, a bistro. ‘I love it,’ he gushes. He is a patron of the town’s book festival, which will be running from September 18-27, and also holidays there each summer.

It is also near where his new murder mystery book is set. The second in a series, Turn the Dial for Death follows the Sidmouth-based murder-solving local radio broadcaster Edward Temmis, who’s ‘maybe past the peak of his career and is worried about the next generation.’

Jeremy pauses.

‘Not that that’s me, you understand?’

It is his listeners on BBC Radio 2 that keep him grounded. ‘I used to think I was going to tell them the news, and now I realise they tell me.’ His television program on Channel 5 also keeps him busy. ‘I do them every day. I do two hours of TV and two hours of radio and I have never been more professionally satisfied than I am now, at the age of 61.’

Ann Widdecombe was a regular guest on his show until her death on July 8. ‘I was very upset. She really almost felt like a friend,’ Jeremy says ‘It was such a powerful connection between me and Ann, Ann and the audience and the audience and me. Sort of a beautiful triangle. And it's so tragic that we’ve only really seen it because of this awful thing.’ He agrees that people have parasocial relationships with famous personalities, particularly radio presenters.

‘I’ve had a couple of stalkers, and that’s no more than any other broadcaster. I’d say I’ve probably had three. I mean, stalking is the industrial disease of broadcasting, it unfortunately comes with the territory,’ he says. Alex Belfield, who stalked Jeremy, was recalled to prison in February this year for breaching his licence conditions.

‘It creates this wonderful illusion, particularly radio, that you’re having a personal conversation. But if you create that connection, I suppose the change in the modern world is that the person on the other end, if they have bad intentions as with Ann Widdecombe, they are able to come back.’ Does he regret becoming a well-known personality then? ‘I don’t regret it. I love having my audience. It’s the best thing in the world to do the job I do.’

Jeremy has worked at the BBC now for 39 years. ‘When I arrived I just thought everyone looked like I do now, 60-year-old blokes. Now, though, I look around and I’m so proud to work in New Broadcasting House — somewhere so many different people are doing different things.’

He has two children, aged 19 and 21, with wife Rachel Schofield, who is also a journalist. It is her he credits with his love of nature. ‘Actually, she said she wouldn’t marry me unless I was a member of the National Trust, which is the most middle class thing that’s ever happened to me.’ He is still a member. He lives in London, near the Thames, and although he sometimes dreams of moving to Devon, I think he’s far too enamoured with his life in the London media circus.

Your aesthetic hero

Oscar Wilde. He was so funny. He would have been massively famous now if he lived today, but the fame would have ruined him.

A possession you would never sell

I could never sell my penny-farthing. I bought it for £1,200 from Roger in Stockport, and ever since I bought it, for some reason, a lot of people have gotten very excited about riding penny-farthings. Roger now has a three- or four-years-long waiting list. So I know if I ever sold it, I would probably never manage to get another one.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

The Marilyn Monroe exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. I just think it really gave you an insight into her life. She was quite fragile, and all the issues that we see with people who became famous in the early days were not ready for what fame did. Elvis being the other classic example.

There was one photo where she was posed on this sort of velvet curtain, and she was topless. She'd done it for $40 for a calendar, and she forgot all about it. And then when she got her first movie, somebody found it and said, ‘Oh, how can this woman be in the movies when she's a topless model?’ And she came out fighting and said, ‘I had to do that because I had nothing to eat.’ I was so impressed with her. You know, she had some agency.

A book you’ve found inspiring

The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary. It changed my life. He was a Spitfire pilot whose plane blew up. He fell into the sea and his face had been blown off. He was then repaired by an amazing cosmetic surgeon in East Grinstead called Archibald McIndoe. I begged the publishers to read it for Audible. I didn’t really want to be paid or anything, so I gave the fee to RAF charities and they let me read it.

A hotel you could go back and back to

The Hotel Du Vin in Glasgow, because when I used to present Eggheads I always stayed there, and it was so lovely.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

Sadly, I had to buy a new smartwatch, because I lost mine.

The music that you work to

As I am writing my books I have to concentrate, so I will listen to the Calm Music playlist on Spotify.

The items you collect

My daughters’ drawings.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

It’s got to be a radio, hasn’t it? One on which I could listen to all my favourite DJs from the past 50 years.

Your favourite painting

I used to go to the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow on my days off from Eggheads and I always went to see the same painting, which is the Salvador Dalí painting, Christ of Saint John of the Cross. And I'm so inspired by how the hell he had done this painting and what it's all about that I then wrote a novel about it called The Diver and the Lover.

The last podcast you listened to

I was just listening to one about Fred and Rose West, actually. I am quite a true crime person.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Writing 400 words of my next book.

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

Jason Isaacs from The White Lotus.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

I went to Nairobi on the job, as a correspondent in Africa, and I went to a place that served amazing steak and meat. It was a once in your lifetime thing.

The best present you’ve ever received

My daughter gave me a cartoon, which I think was in The Times, that had me in it. Also my mum is 87, so anything she gets me, I always treasure.

There was, in my mind, only one kind of gardener. They feature in this magazine; cultivating, planting and maintaining various acres of this green and pleasant land. Always on land. But then I met Titouan Bernicot.

Titouan gardens in a wetsuit off the coast of French Polynesia. He doesn’t grow tomatoes, tulips or trees, but organisms that predate the dinosaurs by 250 million years. His crop is coral.

Titouan’s horticultural career did begin on dry land: ‘I had my tomatoes, a little lettuce and stuff,’ he says. But, aged 16, when he was surfing over a bleached and dying reef, he discovered the crop that will likely consume the rest of his life.

Coral reefs are the ocean's great overachievers — they cover less than 1% of the ocean floor, yet shelter a quarter of all marine life and provide food security and livelihoods for more than one billion people. They also act as natural breakwaters, underpin tourism economies and, rather importantly, help to produce a about half of the oxygen on Earth. Coral polyps host microscopic algae called zooxanthellae. These algae convert CO₂ into energy and release oxygen as a byproduct.

Humanity has a nasty habit of ruining the most useful parts of the natural world and reefs are no exception. Live-coral cover has roughly halved since the 1950s and we are currently experiencing the aftermath of the worst mass-bleaching event on record: between January 2023 and March 2025, heat stress hit 84% of reefs across 82 countries. Rising ocean temperatures is the primary driver, compounded by pollution, coastal development, overfishing and coral-eating starfish outbreaks. The economic case for acting now is stark. Unchecked coral loss could cost $500 billion a year by 2100, against a fraction of that to protect ocean health today. There is a simpler, more urgent case too: our own survival. ‘No reef, no ocean, no air,’ concludes Titouan.

The environmentalist was still a teenager when he founded Coral Gardeners, which restores the ‘rainforests of the sea’ by growing coral in underwater nurseries — mostly on suspended rope structures — before transplanting mature fragments back onto degraded reefs. Rather than rushing the polyps into deeper water, the organisation deliberately lets them mature for up to two years in the nursery, prioritising resilience, species diversity and connectivity so the restored reef can function as a genuine ecosystem. ‘Nature loves diversity — a resilient reef has a lot of different coral species, not just one,’ says Titouan.

Since 2017, the company has planted 221,212 corals across 103 species and restored 25,100 square metres of reef — 20 Olympic swimming pools' worth — across 12 active sites in French Polynesia, Fiji and Thailand. And the team’s patience pays off: despite 2024's catastrophic bleaching event, their corals have maintained an average survival rate above 80%. The team combines hands-on gardening with in-house scientific research (CG Labs), AI-powered monitoring tools and partnerships with brands and institutions to fund the work and raise public awareness of reef decline. ‘We know restoration alone can't save reefs at the rate we're losing them,’ he says, ‘which is why we focus also on storytelling and building a movement, since real change starts when people understand how much we depend on the ocean.’

I visited Coral Gardeners' headquarters on Mo'orea a few years ago. It is not a subtle island. Nature does not so much exist as loom large in high definition. It is an earthly paradise, its soaring volcanic peaks iced head to toe in spongy vegetation. On moodier days, clouds snag in the steep crevices and raindrops the size of marbles plip-plop off palm fronds and pool inside hibiscus plants. The air becomes so thick with moisture you swear you can feel and hold it in your mouth. The people I met described how ocean water runs in Polynesians’ veins and that it’s not uncommon for older fishermen to ask for a shark’s permission before taking fish from their feeding grounds. It is, in other words, precisely the sort of place that produces people like Titouan.

There is, tucked away on page 44 of Coral Gardeners' latest report, a single sentence that ought to have made rather more noise than it has. In June, at the United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice, the President of French Polynesia announced that his government would formally recognise ‘coral gardener’ as an official profession. On the face of it, it is a bureaucratic footnote. In practice, it is rather extraordinary: an environmental NGO, founded by someone not yet 30, has effectively willed a new career into existence by government decree.

Buried a few pages later is something else. On the atoll of Ahe, Titouan’s team repurposed the ropes of a defunct pearl farm — his family's trade — to grow coral instead, with growth rates nearly 20 times the original volume in under a year. Meanwhile, in Italy, the same methodology developed for tropical acropora (a genus of small polyp stony coral) is now tentatively being trialled on cold-water Mediterranean gorgonians (colonial soft corals).

You'd assume a coral-restoration project in French Polynesia and the great houses of Italian fashion and Swiss watchmaking would have little to say to each other. You'd be wrong. In nine years, more than 500 companies have come knocking, wanting to attach their name to Coral Gardeners. Titouan turns most of them away.

His filtering process is, to put it politely, unsentimental. He wants evidence of homework done before a single penny changes hands; partners who have ‘properly started even before our discussion to build a CSR (corporate social responsibility strategy) with some tangible goals’ — and, crucially, ‘not just giving us some financial support for us to do the thing.’

There are two big names who cleared the bar. Rolex and Prada Group. The watchmaker — who Titouan speaks of with something close to reverence, calling them ‘our North Star’ — has backed Coral Gardeners, via its Perpetual Planet Initiative, since near its inception. Earlier thsi month, the President of French Polynesia visited Coral Gardeners' headquarters earlier this month and joined the team underwater to inspect the nurseries. The moment was caught on camera by CNN for Call to Earth, the cable news networks's multi-platform editorial series that exposes some of the environmental challenges facing our planet, together with the solutions. It launched in 2021 in partnership with Rolex.

Prada, in partnership with UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, is helping to fund Titouan’s projects in the Mediterranean. He singles out the luxury fashion house's Re-Nylon collection, spun from recycled fishing nets. ‘Introducing nylon into [high] fashion is bold,’ he says, ‘but using recycled fishing net nylon’ — and sustaining it for years, as one of the label's bestsellers — is ‘brilliant.’

It would be easy to mistake all this for greedy ambition. However, Titouan doesn’t even consider himself a custodian of the reef, much less so its keeper. ‘The reef has given me everything in my life,’ he says, ‘so I want to give back… nature is not something we own, but something we live in harmony with.’ The billion-dollar question is whether it’s a philosophy that scales to planetary emergency. Titouan might be our and the ocean’s only hope, and the closest thing gardening has to a creed.

Enid Blyton's prodigious output of hearty stories for young people may have been mocked and satirised over the years — some are no longer in print due to ‘outdated’ themes and attitudes — but her lively stories about naughty schoolgirls, buried treasure and midnight feasts continue to absorb generations of children, as well as adult collectors.

Blyton (1897–1968) was also an avid reader in childhood and knew how to captivate, saying of Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women: ‘Those were real children… That’s the kind of book I like best.’ The wholesome activities of the Famous Five have arguably survived best in popular imagination and, in 2008, inspired a Disney animation; GWR currently uses their adventures to advertise outings by train to the West Country.

The quintet was introduced in Five On A Treasure Island, in which Julian (nearly grown-up and the natural team leader), Dick (boyish, brave) and Anne (domesticated, feminine, cautious) spend the summer holidays at Kirrin Bay with their Uncle Quentin, an irascible scientist, prodigious baker Aunt Fanny and cousin George (uncompromising tomboy), who owns a mongrel dog, Timmy. Blyton wrote 21 in all between 1942 and 1963 and there were numerous spin-offs and annuals.

At school in Kent, where Blyton was head girl, she started a magazine, Dab, and wrote poems and short stories. She gave up her place at the Guildhall School of Music to train as a teacher — her early writings included educational books and contributions to Teachers World magazine.

Her first husband, Maj Hugh Pollock, an editor at George Newnes, encouraged her to buy a typewriter, which revolutionised her output. As for many prominent figures, however, there was no escape from the unflattering posthumous biopic. In Enid (2009), Blyton, played by Helena Bonham Carter, was portrayed as ruthless and unlikeable. There was little mention of her charitable fundraising in which young readers were encouraged to raise money for sick animals and disabled children through clubs, such as the Busy Bees and Sunbeam.

Her publisher, Hachette UK, explains that the process of editing out ‘offensive terms’ began in Blyton’s own lifetime and still continues, but that the intention is to keep her stories ‘at the heart of every childhood’. Indeed, her fan club thrives and the annual Enid Blyton Day (on August 23 this year) attracts more than 100 attendees.

This feature originally appeared in the July 22, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

I'm standing in front of the exuberant, comedic and muscular paintings of nonagenarian Rose Wylie (b. 1934) at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA), thinking about what makes an artist and their work quintessentially English. Is it humour, scale, technique or none of these things?

The RA first opened its doors in 1768 and its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, spent the next 21 years orating what English art could and should be in his annual Discourses.

As at all European academies, history painting was held in the highest regard, with portraiture, landscape and still life fighting for the lower rungs of art’s hierarchical ladder. Reynolds talked at length of a national school, at the same time as urging English artists to emulate their European neighbours. Yet, today, in our global society, should we still attempt to define art by geographical borders?

Many artists now often study, work and live in different countries to where they were born. To consider ‘English’ artists, we must first define them as those who live and work in England for sustained periods (rather than necessarily being born here). That said, how do we begin to corral all the disparate work these artists produce? Is there any coherence at all?

Despite ongoing financial difficulties for England’s museums and galleries, the recent closure of several major commercial galleries and continued cuts to art-school funding, the country has managed to maintain a thriving art community.

Many overseas artists choose England as their base and English-born artists successfully run studios in metropolitan centres and rural locations. Even if their work often sells in international auctions and art fairs and they exhibit all over the world, it is England that all these artists call home.

Here, too, there are a number of areas of particular interest to contemporary painters right now.

If we follow the lead of auction houses, some of the most sought-after paintings by English artists working today are those that verge on abstraction. Many are being produced by women artists born in the 1990s — Rachel Jones (b. 1991), Jadé Fadojutimi (b. 1993) and Flora Yukhnovich (b. 1990).

Jones only graduated from the RA Schools in 2019, but two years later she was included in the landmark contemporary painting exhibition ‘Mixing it Up: Painting Today’ at the Hayward Gallery, London. Her vivid oil-pastel painting, lick your teeth, they so clutch (2021), is some 23-feet (more than seven yards) long. Viewing it is an immersive experience, as the chewy colours sizzle, pop and shimmer, turning the giant teeth into cosmic landscapes and saturated skies.

Yukhnovich has gone one step further. Her canvases have been exhibited at the Wallace Collection, London, but, in 2025, she created a giant wrap-around mural for the newly restored Frick Collection in New York.

Her exuberant, abstracted florals often take inspiration from Rococo artists, such as François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and they now command seven-figure sums at auction.

Her latest work, conceived in dialogue with site-specific wall paintings and exploring how myths and stories change over time, was on show at the Victoria Miro gallery in Venice this summer.

Collectors similarly scrabble to acquire the latest paintings by Fadojutimi. Her sweeping abstracts come from deep within. They are vast meditations on life, exploring the characters, spaces and personas we create for ourselves.

Today’s abstract artists are ambitious and emotive and their work offers viewers glimpses of imagined spaces and psychic states. They all build on a long tradition of abstract painting in England, by the likes of Bridget Riley (b. 1931), Ian McKeever (b. 1946) and Fiona Rae (b. 1963).

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

Carolyn Rose Ramsay can finally enjoy a Jersey Royal potato salad again.

The artistic director of Ballet d’Jèrri has just moved into new premises in St Helier, having hitherto worked out of potato grower Albert Bartlett’s packing shed, where a sprung floor was installed among the pallets. The fledgling company was grateful — large indoor practice spaces are hard to come by in the Channel Islands — but dance had to pirouette around harvest.

Now, there’s no being sidelined by spuds, as Ballet d’Jèrri has taken up permanent residence at the recently refurbished Jersey Opera House. With about 1,000 applicants from around the world competing for nine positions within the organisation, Ramsay had her pick of talented dancers, who are currently working with community groups to create a new production of The Nutcracker (November 26–29).

It has been a long time since Jersey put on its own version of the Tchaikovsky classic. The festive favourite is part of a new year-round programme of theatre, music, talks and other events now possible due to the opera house’s renovation.

Originally opened in 1865, the venue suffered several fires — a common issue in wooden buildings that relied on candlelight — and was rebuilt in various forms. The cream façade with its arched windows and Art Deco style places this latest version firmly at the turn of the 20th century.

The 2020 pandemic closure provided an opportunity for necessary refurbishment, and the opera house ‘went dark’. (Historically, theatres used to leave a candle in the centre of the stage during such fallow periods, probably contributing to those ubiquitous fires.) Now, with the £12.7 million project complete, the opera house has reopened.

‘The theatre is a cultural crown jewel for the Channel Islands,’ says Sebastian Warrack, Jersey Opera House’s CEO. ‘The building work involved essential maintenance, such as structural repairs and installing low-carbon heating systems, but what’s most obvious to visitors is the auditorium, which has new seating, carpets and improved accessibility.’

I last visited the venue in 2011 during the Liberation International Music Festival, an annual event that marks Jersey’s freedom from German occupation. The balding red velvet has since been replaced by a sleek blue pile, the colour tastefully reflecting the lapis-lazuli and gold-leaf ceiling. The original Edwardian and Victorian plasterwork details across the horse-shoe balconies have been carefully reinstated, with the gilt garlands gleaming once more.

At a glance, the theatre is not that far removed from the venue Lillie Langtry opened in 1900. Warrack became the custodian designate of this shiny-as-new building a few months after the lights went back on, taking up the appointment at the start of this year. Many elements are complete (including the island’s only purpose-built dance studio, home to Ballet d’Jèrri), but there’s still work in progress as the government-funded refurbishment did not include technical equipment. ‘I’m glad to say that we have raised more than £1 million, largely thanks to an anonymous independent donor, so we can make further improvements to the lighting and sound equipment,’ Warrack says.

These include additions that Langtry would never have imagined: a state-of-the-art fly tower, razzle-dazzle lighting and all the digital wizardry needed to host touring productions. Hiding behind the opera house’s proscenium arch is a complex history, coloured recently by the same challenges affecting the performing arts everywhere. All of these, and more besides, are known to Warrack, who previously served as joint chief executive of Wiltshire Creative (co-managing the merger of Salisbury Playhouse, Salisbury Arts Centre and Salisbury International Arts Festival), a tenure that overlapped with the Novichok poisonings.

Then, just as Salisbury was getting back on its feet, covid arrived. The appeal of relocating to the Channel Islands is easy to see. Warrack was wooed by the beautiful, often near-empty beaches. ‘Being able to get to the sea in five minutes is a rather lovely perk,’ he says. ‘I encourage our visiting artists to book here at the end of their tour. Coming to Jersey is coming for a jolly.’

Ramsay, originally from Vancouver, Canada, settled in the Channel Islands in rather more unusual circumstances. Having danced with Miami City Ballet, Les Ballets de Monte Carlo and the Norwegian National Ballet among others, an injury led her to move into Arts administration and she took up a role in Jersey. It was 2020 and, with the borders closed: ‘I got stuck here,’ she says. ‘It was fantastic.’

Jersey Opera House is a misnomer: there has never been a full-time Jersey opera company, although opera regularly features. When I speak to Warrack, the venue is about to screen Opéra de Rennes’s production of three-act comic opera Robinson Crusoe by Offenbach, performed by Orchestre National de Bretagne and conductor Guillaume Tourniaire.

However, programming is wide: vocal quartet G4 brings its ‘Phantoms of the Popera’ show (September 12–13) and Jersey Chamber Orchestra plays Mozart by Candlelight on October 10.

Body-builders are also as likely to be encountered as bassoons. Events such as the UKBFF Channel Islands Wellness & Physique Competition take place at the opera house. ‘I want all of Jersey to feel welcome here,’ says Warrack, comparing the venue to Derbyshire’s equally multi-purpose Buxton Opera House, which hosts the International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival together with comedy such as Harry Enfield shows.

Inviting newcomers to a potato shed or Fort Regent, Jersey’s medieval bastion that has been everything from a garrison to a leisure centre and Arts venue, always required ‘a bit of explanation,’ Ramsay says with a smile. Now, whether it’s for panto or Puccini, there’s a more traditional space awaiting audiences. The artistic director is delighted: ‘It gives me so much pride when we bring visitors to the opera house for the first time and say: “This is our National Theatre.”’

This feature originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'

Riley Harper remembers the first time he saw a professional stuntman at work. He was four years old, he was on the set of the 1995 Kevin Costner action film Waterworld in Hawaii and it was his father. ‘I think that was probably where the seed got planted,’ he says.

Riley is the definition of cool — and not bad to look at either, if you care about that sort of thing. The 37-year-old Los Angeles-born stuntman has been performing daring feats since the age of seven, when he appeared in his first film. Soldier (1998) starred Kurt Russell and saw childhood Riley fall down a set of 20 stairs. ‘I was always pretty fearless,’ he says.

He has followed in the motorbike tracks of his father and uncle, appearing in films such as Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). ‘Anything with Christopher Nolan as a director is amazing to work on,’ he says ‘Those Batman movies are so fun. Putting on the suit was very cool.’

The job doesn’t come without its risks. Riley describes how, for the ‘really frankly bad remake’ of Point Break (2015), he had to jump down a 25-feet high cliff on a motorbike in the pouring rain, to land in between a cluster of trees. Oh, and roll a car over again and again next to a cliff's edge. ‘There were a lot of scary things that could have gone wrong.’

It’s safe to say that, as he gets older, Riley is (somewhat) slowing down. ‘All through my twenties I was just going from movie to movie to movie, all around the world, nonstop.’ In his thirties he has branched out into photography, directing, writing and growing a social media following to showcase his work — he has 441,000 followers on Instagram at the time of writing and works with brands such as Porsche and Belmond.

This has allowed him to spend more time at his home in Calabasas, which he shares with his wife, model Paige Harper, and their two-year-old daughter. ‘Nowadays I do strive to have a simpler life, because everything is complicating life, you know? For example, phones are supposed to make our lives easier, which they do in a lot of ways, but I think they complicate life more than they simplify it,’ Riley says.

‘Going out of your way to do less. It’s a really strange thing… I think being aware is important because our attention is being stolen, basically all day long, with these tools that we need to survive and make a living.’

Riley has not, however, totally taken his foot off the gas. ‘I’m still doing stunts, but I do more hand-picked jobs now. Usually more driving work. When I was younger I did a lot of motorcycle stunts, which are more dangerous than cars, for the most part, but yeah, it is still dangerous.’

So, where’s the line? Is there any stunt Riley won’t do — particularly now that he is a father? ‘I’ve never said no to anything. Primarily because anyone who’s hiring me understands what I’m capable of.’

Your aesthetic hero

Probably Anthony Bourdain, not really for his aesthetic in the traditional sense, but more for how he lives life and looks at stuff. Outside of him, I would say I usually admire older men who don’t have social media. Just random people, for example, a guy I see in Paris who opens his same store every day and is just bettering himself over time.

An exhibition that has impressed you

I mean, this is kind of corny, but for me it’s the exhibition of life. I love those mundane moments in life that most people don't see, and I like to look for those now and appreciate them.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

Well, I’m an extreme car person. I've always been into cars and vehicles and motorcycles, and I would say it's close to a sickness. So, I just bought myself a new Porsche 911. I got to actually build it top to bottom. I’ve ordered a baby seat for the back. I'm biased, because she's mine, but I'm doing my part to make my daughter as cool as possible.

Your favourite painting

I can’t remember the name of it, but I took a photo of one in Reid's Palace [a Belmond] hotel, Madeira. It was a sailboat in a storm, hung over the fireplace in their lobby. Everyday that I walked past I would just stare at it.

A possession you would never sell

I would probably say my 1969 Triumph Bonneville. It’s an iconic British brand. They’re as authentic as it gets. I always loved those as a kid, and dreamed of having one one day. And so I found this motorcycle in pieces, I actually traded a vintage car I had to a mechanic for it. I knew it was gonna be a lot of work but I spent probably a year and a half building it with my dad, my uncle and a mechanic that I used for engine stuff. We basically brought it back to showroom level.

I finished that bike when I was 20 or 21, so I've had it for a long time, and I've now raced it at desert races. I've driven my wife on it for date nights. It's just the most beautiful motorcycle in my opinion, so I don't think I could ever part ways with that. It's too sentimental. Nothing could replace it.

A book you’ve found inspiring

Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus, I'm in the middle of that right now, which is fun. James Salter, I'm getting into recently, so I'm bouncing between a few of his. The Anthony Bourdain Reader — I read that when I’m in my sauna.

Another book that comes to mind that I’ve read probably five times is The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. I've always been a fan of Rick Rubin, I've met him many times, and I've always respected what he does — and that book is just so good.

The music that you work to

Mostly jazz. I love jazz.

The last podcast you listened to

I think Rick Rubin’s podcast Tetragrammaton. He always has really interesting guests on, such a wide variety, and he's a great interviewer — a very curious guy.

The person that would play you in a film of your life (and the person that would perform the stunts)

That's an interesting question to have to answer. God, I don't know. That is so hard. I don't know if my life's worth having a movie about. Maybe, if I could go in a time machine, I would say Pierce Brosnan in the 90s. He was my James Bond. And then to do my stunts, maybe my younger brother? We're pretty similar looking and he’s alright at stunts too, I suppose.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

My wife and daughter. Safety in numbers, we would survive.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Also my daughter, for sure. But probably, more broadly, my curiosity. And a morning coffee, it’s just the most exciting thing. I think about it the second I open my eyes.

The items you collect

Cars and motorcycles.

A hotel you could go back and back to

Splendido Mare [a Belmond hotel] in Portofino. My wife and I got married there. We've been going to Portofino at least twice a year since we met. It's just our favourite place, and we have a lot of friends there.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

The dinner at our wedding, but also my wife and I used to go on sailing trips and the dinners we’d have on them — local fish that you’re buying off other boats and cooking on the boat — were always such great meals.

The best present you’ve ever received

My wife got me a Cartier tank watch for my wedding and she engraved the back. That’s sentimental, and something our daughter will wear one day.

'Old old England, lands of golden peace,/Thy fields are spun with gossameres of gold,/And golden garners gather thy increase.’ Thus wrote poet and Nobel prize-winner Sir Ronald Ross in 1914, as war cast a shadow over the British countryside.

The ‘golden peace’ of our cereal fields remains central to our national identity today, spanning three million hectares of land, from the rolling chalk hills of the South Downs to the flat Fenlands of East Anglia, known as the bread basket of Britain. Swathes of sun-coloured crops brighten many of our most beloved artworks, too.

At first glance, Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, of about 1750, appears to focus on the couple taking repose at their Suffolk farm after a shooting expedition. Then, however, the eye journeys across the fields, following rows of stubble to the fruits of their land: plump sheaves of corn — emblems of productivity, property and pride.

In Reapers (1785), George Stubbs, too, shows the landowner taking in the bounty of his estate. Seated on horseback, the master towers over the workers as they slice into the wheat with their sickles. The reassuringly familiar sight of this honey-coloured landscape lingered in the consciousness of John Constable, the son of a corn merchant.

‘I live almost wholly in the fields and see nobody but the harvest men,’ he wrote in August 1815, as he worked on The Wheat Field, a subject that his son, Lionel, resumed in his own work. Framed by poppies and featuring children in bonnets gathering discarded crops as if they were bouquets of flowers, the elder Constable scene offers up an idyllic image of the harvest, where even the accoutrements of a picnic appear to loll in the sun.

Fifty years later, with agriculture radically reshaped by industrialisation, John Linnell’s nostalgic Reapers, Noonday Rest is even more storybook, depicting labourers sleeping beneath a shelter made of hay sheaves as their obedient dog watches over the harvest.

By the time Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles came out in 1891, the cereal field had become the site of a battle between tradition and technology. Although his heroine clings to the past, ‘holding the corn in an embrace like that of a lover’, the sheaves she gathers are now ‘gulped down’ by a ‘buzzing red glutton’ in the form of a steam-powered threshing machine.

Later, artists made technology part of the tableau. The bold geometric forms of modern intrusions such as telegraph poles or a wind engine add drama to Eric Ravilious’s ash-blond fields. A cherry-red tractor contrasted against a backdrop of yellow wheat is a recurrent motif in the naive art of Gary Bunt. We experience these scenes through the eyes of a farmer in cap and braces who populates many of his paintings, gazing out at a sea of corn or napping in a squashy haystack.

Cereal fields, so crucial to our survival, have long been associated with reproduction. Romans worshipped Ceres, the goddess of agriculture and fertility (from whom the word ‘cereal’ is derived), and sprinkled grains on the animals sacrificed to her. In Britain and elsewhere, it was believed that the grain spirit dwelled in the fields and so corn dollies were woven from the last sheaf, to preserve its life force throughout winter.

Writers have drawn on this rich mythology, making the grain field a potent symbol of fecundity and passion. For 18th-century poet James Thomson, author of the extended meditation The Seasons, it is the stage for a burgeoning romance. When ‘Autumn nod- ding o’er the yellow plain/Comes jovial on’ and the harvesting season begins, landowner Palemon is drawn to the unassuming Lavinia, a gleaner who is gathering leftover crops in ‘soft-inclining fields of corn’.

In L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between of 1953, there is intrigue at play as the thickly growing crop fields help conceal an illicit exchange of letters between tenant farmer Ted Burgess and his social superior Marian Maudsley, facilitated by the young Leo Colston, a guest at her Norfolk home, Brandham Hall. The cornfield echoes Burgess’s virility and fluctuating power. At first, he is as ‘ripe for reaping’ as the corn he cultivates, we read; but, when he learns of Maudsley’s engagement to Lord Trimingham, he becomes ‘like corn that had been cut and left in the sun… the husk of the man he had been’.

Far away, in the sun-baked Tuscan hills, it was reportedly the lack of a suitable filming location that led Merchant Ivory to reimagine the famous kiss scene in the 1985 adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908). However, perhaps it was also the fitting symbolism of a ripening cereal field interspersed with flushes of red that saw a bank ‘carpeted with violets’ replaced by a ‘wavering golden sea of barley touched with crimson stains of poppies’.

In 1832, in Lord Tennyson’s lyrical ballad The Lady of Shalott, the humble cereal was already playing cupid, with the ‘long fields of barley and of rye,/That clothe the wold and meet the sky’ suggesting the sensuous natural world that the Lady of Shalott, imprisoned in a tower, is forbidden to look at directly.

Riding ‘between the barley-sheaves’ as he canters into Camelot comes the handsome Sir Lancelot — an image that is enough to make one blush and does not escape the attention of the Lady of Shalott, who, spying him in her mirror, casts her weaving aside and cranes her neck out the window. Curse or no curse, his ‘coal-black curls’ and ‘mighty silver bugle’ are more than she can resist.

Grain fields acquired a new poignancy in the early 20th century as Britain emerged from the First World War, the calm order of their long, neat lines offering something soothing after years of chaos. In peacetime’s early years, painter John Nash returned to the cereal field time and time again, creating preparatory sketches amid the Chiltern Hills of his beloved Buckinghamshire.

The most famous of these would become The Cornfield (1918): a striped landscape foregrounded by corn sheaves cinched at the waist that bend and tilt like a procession of ballerinas. It was painted, he once remarked, ‘in sheer relief at being still alive and back in the English countryside’. The visual spectacle of our golden crops, stretching as far as the eye can see, still speaks to the most creative spirits.

Often overlooked in the oeuvre of David Hockney, who died in June, are his vibrant wheatfield paintings. Most were made en plein air in the mid 2000s when he returned to East Yorkshire, where, as a schoolboy, he worked in the fields stooking corn. In Wheat Field Near Fridaythorpe, a crisp, uncut crop looms like a giant piece of toast and the energetic strokes of Wheat Field off Woldgate convey the ceaseless movement of the wheat in the wind.

‘The camera can’t get the beauty of this,’ he stated at the time. ‘It just can’t get the space, the thrilling space.’

This feature originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

'Experts say…’ The Editor looked up from his newspaper with a sigh. ‘I keep coming across this phrase, but who actually decides whether someone is an expert or not? It’s meaningless — we need to be more precise.’

English allows for precision. It’s often described as the world’s biggest language: the Oxford English Dictionary lists more than 170,000 words currently in use, with at least 1,000 additions every year. Why, then, does it feel as if everyone’s vocabularies are shrinking?

In a very real way, they are. The algorithms that control what we see online reward predictable linguistic choices, rather than inventive ones. Then, of course, there’s AI. The generative models increasingly being used to ‘write’ are not capable of original thought: all they can do is regurgitate the training data they have been fed, with predictably bland and woolly results.

To worsen matters, each AI model also has its own irritating stylistic tics — ChatGPT famously relies on the ‘rule of three’ and ‘it’s not X, it’s Y’ constructions — which are now actually starting to shape human writing. The snake takes another bite of its own tail, becoming ever smaller.

We can’t go back in time, but there is a way of inoculating ourselves against this deadening algorithmic creep. As a nation, we not only used to read more, but more widely and with greater courage. A glance at the 1956 O-level English Literature syllabus is salutary: how many of us now would be willing to give Francis Bacon’s 1626 utopian fever-dream The New Atlantis a go?

This is the National Year of Reading, ‘a UK-wide campaign designed to inspire more people to make reading a regular part of their lives’. Children who have been turned off it by relentless exams are a focus, but most of us could do with reminding ourselves of the magic of getting lost in a world built entirely from words.

Swapping a screen for ink and paper can get around digital distractions, but it isn’t mandatory: listening to an audiobook counts, ditto reading e-books (and, of course, magazines — including digitally).

Cinema, too, can be a springboard: in an otherwise critical review of Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster The Odyssey in the London Review of Books, classicist Emily Wilson reported that the film was causing the ancient text to fly off the shelves. ‘Nolan, who studied English at University College London… is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful,’ she wrote.

Dr Wilson’s own version of The Odyssey provoked heated debate for its rendering of Homer’s famous opening address to the Muse as ‘Tell me about a complicated man’. In fact, casually comparing translations in this way is one of the most powerful reminders of how exhilaratingly kaleidoscopic language can be — regardless of whether or not you’re an expert.

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

‘He was an aquarius, I’m an aquarius.’ Perhaps Cordelia de Castellane’s tenure as the artistic director of Dior Maison and Baby Dior for more than 15 years was written in the stars?

‘When I arrived, I think I made a very clear and strong link with Mr Dior himself. I know how strange it is, but going through his life and what he had left behind…’ she pauses, before adding, in her thick French accent: ‘He was very superstitious, I’m very superstitious. He was loving flowers, I feel very well in my garden…’

Whether you believe in the power of this ‘imaginary conversation’ between Cordelia and Christian, or indeed the significance of the zodiac, there’s no questioning the reality of the artistic director's success.

As well as Dior, Cordelia also runs her own company, Studio Cordelia de Castellane, which provides bespoke interior decoration for hotels, restaurants and private houses. In her own words, she has ‘a lot going on’. She explains: ‘I don’t like to do only one thing, I get bored very easily.’

Dior is the perfect gig for Cordelia. ‘As a little girl, Dior was a fantasy, it was a dream. I have always been obsessed with fashion,’ she says. Style also runs in the family. Cordelia’s great-great-uncle was the neo-romantic architect Emilio Terry. Her uncle, Gilles Dufour, was Karl Lagerfeld's long-time right-hand man at CHANEL and her mother, Countess Atalanta de Castellane, is an interior designer.

‘I grew up really in the middle of fashion and art and everything. It’s something that’s been around me since I was a little girl, so for sure I have a very good excuse to do the work that I do.’

Cordelia was raised in the Swiss mountains. An only child, she spent a lot of time with her grandparents, and a lot more time with no one at all. ‘I’m not really a city girl,’ she says. ‘I was a unique child, I spent a lot of my time quite alone — which is a good thing, don’t get me wrong.’ Perhaps because of this she has always had a strong imagination, ‘because I had my own world within myself’.

She had work experience at CHANEL, courtesy of her uncle, and landed her first job there aged 15. This was followed by a 10- year stint at Emanuel Ungaro that was originally only supposed to last for a month. ‘I arrived a young girl and left a woman with two children, married,’ she says. Then Dior came calling. ‘I knew very young what I wanted to do, and I wanted to work for a big house, so from the beginning I knew my goal.’

Your aesthetic hero

I’m quite obsessed with [Lorenzo] Mongiardino. I think that if I have to name one person with that kind of taste who pulls me away it would be Mongiardino, for sure.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

I would say that Monet is the painter who has my heart, because the way he paints nature is really something that talks to me. It's nothing original, but it's completely the truth.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

Nineteenth-century vases painted with irises that I found in a flea market. They’re really divine.

A possession you would never sell

I don’t know, because I think the most valuable things I have are not of monetary value. I’m not materialistic. I will never sell my soul, that’s for sure. Not for anything.

Your favourite painting

Something by either Monet or Renoir. With the latter’s paintings, like Bal du moulin de la Galette, you look at the people and you can imagine the story of what they’re talking about and who’s in love with who. It’s something that I love to do. That and Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son, by Monet.

The music that you work to

I could say classical, but also I love Coldplay and English pop music. I love music but it depends on my mood, you know?

The last podcast you listened to

I listened to something with Monty Don on. It made me cry, actually. He had a tough few years as a younger man. I’m a huge, huge fan.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

My family and my mum. Oh, and my dogs — Bagheera and Mowgli. Maybe I would swap all of them for just my two dogs. Maybe…

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Life. I love life.

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

Meryl Streep. I love her. She’s so successful, so brave, so talented, but with such simple, good values. And to be able to be that beautiful and stay at the top of your game without touching your face — if we are talking about authenticity, she’s an authentic woman. I don’t know if I could be as brave as her.

A hotel you could go back and back to

I love the hotels in Italy. Like Hotel Il Pellicano, for example.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

I think it was something also in Italy. Probably pasta, because I’m obsessed with pasta. I’m always on a diet because I could eat all day. I love eating.

The items you collect

I am a huge collector of everything. Sylvanian Families — because I’m like a kid and I don’t want to grow up — books of flowers, erasers, frogs, vases, plates. I am quite an excessive collector of lots of things.

A book that you've found inspiring

I love Proust. He’s been next to my bed since I was a little girl. I also love the Paris of that time, which he writes about.

The best present you’ve ever received

My four children, for sure.

Visit Dior's website to shop Maison Dior and Baby Dior. For more information on Studio Cordelia de Castellane, click here.

It's most unusual for a piece of art to be name-checked, never mind be regularly on display in a sitcom, yet Dale Chihuly’s blown-glass sculpture Macchia, worth some $30,000, had pride of place in Frasier, from season six onwards. In one scene, the titular character’s father emptied his pockets into it, causing Frasier to protest: ‘My Chihuly is not a trash can!’

Indeed not: Chihuly was one of the founders of the contemporary studio glass movement in the US and his influence has been profound in the UK. He has helped define the concept that studio glass is the use of the material to make art, rather than vessels produced in factories, and, with teams of blowers creating his designs in his huge hotshop (a series of furnaces), he has shifted the practice from solitary craftsmanship to a collaborative team-based model.

With his pieces featured in more than 200 museums, including the massive installation suspended in the entrance of the V&A Museum, Chihuly transformed traditional craft into a recognised medium of monumental fine art.

Although some artists originally created ‘art vessels’ with a practical function, such as vases or dishes, glass has increasingly been employed to make sculptural objects, the function of which is to be beautiful or thought-provoking, rather than utilitarian.

‘Sometimes, a piece has an opening you could put a handful of flowers or twigs in, but no, studio art glass is not primarily a vase,’ explains Angel Monzon, owner and founder of the Vessel Gallery.

‘It’s the expression. It’s the form, it’s sometimes the storytelling, or the sheer beauty of it, or the skilled craft that goes into it. That can be a challenge for our market here… when it comes to glass, it’s still associated with a vase. Glass art is for an audience that appreciates sculpture.’

Until the 1950s, artists had little hands-on experience of glass. Then, art schools — led by Helen Monro Turner at Edinburgh College of Art and Ronald Stennett-Wilson at the Royal College of Art — began to install their own furnaces and offer their students the opportunity to blow their own glass. Students no longer created designs from a distance, but began to manipulate it to express their ideas.

‘To understand glass fundamentally, you have to engage in it,’ explains Sarah Rothwell, senior curator of Modern and Contemporary Design and glass specialist at the National Museum of Scotland. ‘You have to allow a student to work with it, to understand its possibilities and potential. That’s what was happening during the 1950s and early 1960s. It was the breaking down of those static barriers and allowing students to engage with material.’

Glass-blowing gathered pace with the arrival in the UK of Sam Herman, a Fulbright scholar and formidable self-publicist, who had trained with two pioneers of the art in the US, Harvey Littleton (who, in turn, helped train Chihuly) and Dominick Labino.

Blowing is a very physical activity and involves gathering a blob of molten glass on a blow pipe, shaping it and laying it in frit (coloured crushed glass) to colour it, before gathering more clear glass and heating in the kiln.

Although Herman was not the originator of British studio glass, he promoted it, going on to found The Glassworks, a studio and then gallery in Covent Garden that became extremely influential. A number of ceramicists also began experimenting with glass, the foremost being Peter Layton, whose London Glassblowing studio and gallery is celebrating 50 years this summer.

Layton, 90 next year, is still practising, creating organic works that swirl with colour and pattern. When teaching in the US, he built his own kiln. ‘I burnt myself very badly experimenting, so I was almost out of it as soon as I began,’ he recalls. ‘But glass gets you hooked. It’s addictive.’

Returning to the UK, he set up his own hot-shop in 1976 and, exhilarated by the Working with Hot Glass symposium at the Royal College of Art, commenced his extremely influential career. He worked mostly with colour, including iridescent glass.

‘The lovely thing about iridising was that it gave the glass a wonderfully silky surface. I wanted people to be able to handle glass. It was very tactile and didn’t finger-mark.’

Layton is known for his painterly marks on organic-shaped glass vessels, often inspired by projects with the Royal Academy and National Gallery. His workshop with a ‘nice little gallery attached’ has expanded, providing not only him with a place to develop his own pieces, but also a host of glass-makers, who, in return for working part time for him, use the facilities for their own projects.

Until the 1980s, ‘there was,’ according to Rothwell, ‘a rather macho culture of the glass blower with a very performative hotshop culture, with a focus on process and virtuosity and how bright and vivid the colour.’ At the time, men got all the action, but by the late 1970s and through the next decade, glass artists explored new directions, taking on board the influence of cast glass from the then Czecho-slovakia.

Rather than amorphous, coloured blown vessels, they created sculptural, architectural, often monolithic forms. Some, such as Harry Seager and Danny Lane, worked with cut and glued float glass to create architectural glass, with artists Keith Cummings and Colin Reid developing kiln casting.

Reid takes moulds from books, string instruments and plants to cast in glass to create his sculptures, but today concentrates more on casting from rocks. ‘Glass has qualities that other materials don’t have. You’ve got the outer form of it, but also the inner space, which gives you another whole dimension.

'Casting is an incredibly powerful technique. It gives the possibility to incorporate found objects, found forms and textures into a completely new piece.’ Today, he is also starting to work with a robotic arm to create his sculptures.

By the late 1980s, glass began to be used by artists, especially women, to tell stories and make social commentary, particularly about gender. At the time, collectors and critics were more interested in technique and bravura than ideas, so female makers often lacked galleries, advocates or institutional support. That began to change in the following decade, with artists becoming much more conceptually ambitious, exploring storytelling and issues of identity and ecology, as well as pushing for glass art to be recognised as fine art.

Cast-glass artist Anna Dickinson was a pioneer, as was Emma Woffenden, who creates blown and slumped sculptural works, incorporating other media, to explore the psychological, the human form and social narratives in large-scale body-like sculptures.

‘I was always looking for a language, because I wasn’t very good at expressing myself, so I put it all into the work. It was that thing of finding this language of form,’ she explains.

Glass has also given artist Chris Day his own voice, providing a language to express his personal history. Originally a plumber, he blows the material into copper cages. His work now explores themes of identity, social justice, historical narratives and the impact of colonialism.

‘My new pieces of work are definitely talking about me, finding out about my Jamaican background, my Nigerian heritage. It’s a way of telling people about my identity and being proud for once. For years, I’ve been ashamed of who I am. My work, although about my own identity, ties into historical facts as well.’

Day, as have many others, has been helped by Monzon and his Vessel Gallery, which has cultivated collectors of British glass and has been enormously successful in attracting foreign buyers.

‘We have a great, great movement in cast glass at the moment in this country — for example, Monette Larsen and Nina Casson McGarva are doing some exceptional cast work. Nina uses the approach of blown glass, where you manipulate with your hands and you shape it. She casts glass and then goes in kitted out like an astronaut, with heat-resistant gear and dives into the kiln and manipulates it. She has a minute and a half to form her pieces.’

Other glass artists such as Elliot Walker create sculpture of furniture and objects, not by casting, but by modelling cooling liquid glass. ‘The process of coaxing a complex form out of the liquid glass is unlike working with any other material. Until the very last second, the sculpture is a moving living entity, frozen in time as the glass sets.’

Rather more minimalist is the work of Karlyn Sutherland, who explores place, light and shadow in her architectural glass. Yet glass is expensive to make, especially as the UK has such high energy prices. Today, courses are proving too costly to run and galleries and museums are cautious about showing glass. Britain is such a leader in studio glass: it would be tragic if it was squeezed out of the market.

The International Festival of Glass, including The British Glass Biennale, takes place at The World of Glass, St Helens, Merseyside, from August 27–31.

Until 2003, London mail was disseminated via underground tunnels to bypass traffic. Operating for 22 hours a day at its peak, it took 26 minutes for mail to travel 6½ miles and be delivered to various sorting offices across the capital.

One can still pay a visit to the technological vestige. Across the road from the Postal Museum in Phoenix Place, the Post Office Underground Railway — rebranded ‘Mail Rail’ to mark its 60th anniversary in 1987 — is still popular with those in the know. An accompanying Mail Rail exhibition runs from Tuesday to Sunday.

Construction work on the railway began in 1915, although it didn’t open until 1927 due to labour and material shortages caused by the First World War. During this time, precious artworks from the Tate, National Portrait Gallery and British Museum were stored in the tunnels to protect them from possible German attack. Among these treasures was the Rosetta Stone.

In its heyday, about four million pieces of mail were carried daily between its eight stations as it travelled from Paddington, under Wimpole Street; High Holborn; Mount Pleasant; and Liverpool Street to Whitechapel. The line operated until changing technology led to its closure, before it reopened as a tourist attraction in 2017.

Since then, the Mail Rail exhibition and 20-minute ride have been brought to life by an audio-visual show with interactive exhibits relating to the railway’s history • Riding on the train, passengers listen to narrative voices echoing through the narrow tunnels —which are much smaller than London Underground’s tunnels, at only 7ft to 9ft wide.

Images and videos depicting the attraction’s history are projected onto the walls. En route, the train stops at Mount Pleasant’s platforms, a major hub for mail distribution for more than 130 years.

For more information about the Mail Rail and to purchase a ticket, see here.

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Last month, Athena visited Claydon House, Buckinghamshire, which this year is the setting for a new venture organised by the National Trust with the contemporary art gallery White Cube.

For the remainder of the season — until September 14 — visitors are asked to book an arrival slot to see an exhibition of 47 works by a diverse group of artists, including Cai Guo-Qiang, Sir Antony Gormley and Dame Tracey Emin, that extends through the main rooms of the house and into the garden. It’s well worth a visit and offers a bit of welcome publicity for a property that, but for the overshadowing local presence of the landscape park at Stowe and Waddesdon, would surely enjoy much greater celebrity within the Trust’s portfolio.

Indeed, its fantastical 18th-century Gothic, Chinese and Rococo interiors by the carver Luke Lightfoot and the stuccadore Joseph Rose are outstanding by any measure. The display of contemporary art in historic houses has been enjoying something of a vogue in recent years and this particular collaboration has raised the bar for the Trust.

In the past, too many exhibitions of this kind have fallen far short of the ambition exemplified in both permanent and temporary shows by privately run estates, such as Boughton, Northamptonshire; Goodwood, West Sussex; Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute; Wolterton and Houghton in Norfolk; or Jupiter Artlands, Edinburgh (to name a few).

Despite being so well established, this genre of exhibition is sometimes presented by contemporary art critics in slightly patronising terms. One resilient fiction —contradicted by their popularity — is that visitors will be offended by the juxtaposition of old and new. Casting contemporary art as something shocking serves artificially to exaggerate its novelty, radicalism and capacity to transform its audience. It also denigrates the historic context, which by implication is possessed of none of those qualities.

Another wishful and self-flattering platitude is that the new ‘breathes life’ into the old or even, in extreme cases of self-delusion, makes it ‘relevant’ (although quite how is never clear). What actually strikes Athena as notable about the collaboration at Claydon, and which generally makes exhibitions of this kind interesting, is that it stands accepted norms of contemporary-art display on their head.

The name White Cube evokes the soulless interiors in which contemporary art is usually displayed; featureless rooms with white walls and an even fall of light. This ideal, seen in museum galleries around the world, aims to focus attention exclusively on the object displayed. At Claydon, by contrast, the interiors have a strong character. That, in turn, creates a dialogue between the rooms and the art displayed in them.

This is not, however, an asymmetric conversation. Certainly, the work of Lightfoot and Rose is never eclipsed by this juxtaposition. It remains a matter of personal taste as to which we might prefer to look at, but — regardless — it is the fact that each helps us see the other differently that matters.

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

For more information on the exhibition and how to book, see here.

Dame Jilly Cooper would have loved the summer of 2026. Regime change, record temperatures and a lust for national heartthrobs (I’m talking about Jude Bellingham, not the one with long eyelashes) are enough to make you wonder whether she engineered the whole thing from heaven. After all, she may wish to say thank you: the hot summer has been good to the country romp, the genre which she helped to create, with saucy beach reads migrating to the garden as we enjoy its simulation of the tropics.

Last month saw a spate of rural romances hit the shelves. Among them were Playing The Field, the second novel by fashion designer Tabitha Webb (a favourite of The Princess of Wales), and Tangled Webs, the debut novel by equestrian Callie Coles, famous for allowing her horse into the kitchen of her home in Devon. Both have caused a ruckus, in rural circles and beyond. The names emblazoned on the spine of each novel are identified by their publishers (Harper Collins and Penguin) as Dame Jilly’s rightful successors.

Male authors are typically immune to such comparisons. No one is being slated as the next Martin Amis lest such an accolade set expectations too high. Are female novelists unburdened by the anxiety of influence, or do publishers simply believe they are only marketable if likened to their predecessors? ('The next Donna Tartt' does have a nice ring to it, mind.)

For Tabitha, Dame Jilly was not merely a torchbearer but a mentor. ‘Not until she told me that I had what it takes did I start to believe that I could actually become a novelist,’ she says. ‘Jilly gave me the most important advice I have ever received as a writer: that you have to research and understand the world you are writing about.’ Although Playing The Field will mostly appeal to those who fancy steamy scenes on the riverbank, it also considers the difficulty of building a rural business or inheriting a farm. Callie's novel, meanwhile, goes big on her love of horses.

There are two clear reasons why the rural romp is enjoying a moment. The first is a general trend towards steamy romances (authors Rachel Reid and Sarah J. Mass have dominated this year’s sales). The second is a vogue for the countryside, more specifically — driven, Tabitha believes, ‘by a yearning for lives that are simpler and rooted in the natural world’. The real question remains, however: how raunchy are the romps? ‘No one can out-Jilly Jilly,’ Tabitha laughs. ‘She was Sex Ed for all of us.’

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

He's no longer at Condé Nast, but Sir Nicholas Coleridge can't help but edit me in real time. He gives me a quote about Boris Johnson that he’s not happy with and is so hyperaware of how the interview format works that, at the end, he asks me to omit anything he said that would make his life a little difficult. This seems strange coming from the journalist who, as a young hack at The Standard, once pretended he was a chauffeur to sneak into Prince Andrew's 21st-birthday party to get gossip.

‘What would you do if you were writing this up?’ I ask him. ‘Would you take out things that would make the interviewee’s life more difficult if they were published?’ He replies: ‘I'd probably do what I want anyway.’ It is this characteristic brazenness that led to his 30-year tenure at Condé Nast, which saw him described in 2012 as ‘magazines' most compelling advocate for almost two decades’.

Nicholas was born in London, the son of David Coleridge, and distant relation to the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His career began as a reporter on the Falmouth Packet newspaper in Cornwall. He then got a job at Tatler, working for the iconic Tina Brown, ‘a marvelous person to have as your first boss’ who was ‘completely talented and completely ruthless’.

A mass firing meant he was Brown’s deputy after just a year. He was subsequently poached by The Standard after meeting its then-editor at a dinner party. Later, he became the editor of Harpers & Queen, which has since switched the ‘& Queen’ out for ‘Bazaar’.

After this came his role as group editorial director of the British arm of Condé Nast. He later became the president of their international arm. ‘I spent a huge amount of time on aeroplanes in those last 10 years,’ he recalls, detailing how a typical week could see him in London on Monday, Moscow on Tuesday, Mumbai on Thursday and back in his home in Worcestershire by Friday.

He is a man who wears many hats — and always has. His most recent are chairman of the V&A Museum, provost of Eton College and chair of Historic Royal Palaces.

Aged 69, it is strange to be living at his old school, he says as we sip coffee in the wisteria-covered gardens. ‘Never in one million years would I have thought I would come back.’ Eton is an institution that is at once unchanged and entirely different. It is now more international, with a wider curriculum and, famously, much higher fees. (In 1970, when Nicholas first started, boarding at Eton cost approximately £900 per year. Today it costs approximately £65,000.)

He is married to Georgia Metcalfe, an author and healer, and they have four grown-up children. Nicholas evidently has a passion for all that he does. The boys at Eton are ‘very fun, very unentitled, very helpful, polite, amusing’ and working for Historic Royal Palaces is a dream. ‘You’re not allowed to have favourites, but I will say that the two that begin with “H” I very much like,’ he says.

He doesn’t miss being a journalist, he tells me. However, given that he wakes up every day at 5am to read a variety of newspapers and still has subscriptions to a stack of print magazines (including Country Life) I don’t believe him. There is a glint in his eye as we chat, a small sign of the mischief and charm that made him such a success in the publishing world, and which is still very much alive and well today.

Your aesthetic hero

Charles Moore, Baron Moore of Etchingham; His Majesty The King and Nicky Haslam.

A possession you would never sell

We've got an Indian statue in our house in Worcestershire that I bought literally on a whim in a reclamation yard that I would be really very sorry not to have. I also have a portrait of one of the princes of Bihar in India, which I bought 35 years ago from Spink, in the days when they sold paintings.

Philip Mould, before he was a famous art dealer, found it for me. Back then it was a very large sum of money for me, £6,000. I bought it, but then Spink rang me to say that another gentleman had been interested and would like to buy it from me. He offered me £20,000. They couldn’t tell me who it was but they said he was an American who worked in fashion and I had a sixth sense that it was Ralph Lauren. The sales person didn’t confirm this but said: ‘Goodness, you’re very astute.’

An exhibition that really impressed you

The David Bowie exhibition at the V&A was one of my all-time favourites. There was a very good exhibition at Kensington Palace called From Crown to Couture which was, I thought, great. Also, at the V&A, the Dior exhibition.

A book you’ve found inspiring

Knight Crusader by Ronald Welch. It was a children's book which inspired me to firstly be very interested in history, and secondly to read every other book by Ronald Welch. My party trick used to be that people could ask me any question about anything that happened in a Ronald Welch book, and I would know because I had read them so many times.

A hotel you could go back and back to

Devigarh, about 30 miles outside Udaipur. I would happily die there — but I hope I don’t.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I bought a painting by Josephine Trotter of the late Queen's funeral, and I'll show it to you on the way out.

The music you work to

I work in silence and I like to be quiet. I don't like any music on at all, and I can work anywhere, having worked in a newsroom, but I do prefer to write with pen and paper. I use those American yellow legal pads, and all the books that I have written, I wrote by hand.

The items you collect

I collect Indian miniatures.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

Suncream and a cocktail shaker.

Your favourite painting

I'd most like to be the owner of The Birth of Venus. I would also say that there's a whole series of paintings hanging in the city palace in Udaipur which are aerial depictions of Udaipur with enormous amounts of village life, princely life and Maharajas. One of those enormous Indian bird's-eye pictures I would adore to own.

The last podcast you listened to

I listen to Rory Stewart speaking to Alastair Campbell quite a lot. I think Rory and Alistair's views are increasingly merging into one, they seem to be going that way. I listen to William Dalrymple and Anita Anand’s podcast Empire a lot, too. I think they are extremely good hosts.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

My addiction to reading news online.

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

I would like to be played by the young Michael Caine.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

I went to Korea for The Spectator just before the Olympic Games were held in Seoul [in 1988]. I was sent to see if I could find anywhere which was still selling dog, which was the national dish, but which the country had stopped in the lead up, realising how countries thought about it. I had a very nice small taste.

The best present you’ve ever received

Can I say something so cheesy? My children. I can't think of anything that I've, in the long term, enjoyed more.

For more information and to purchase a membership to Historic Royal Palaces, see here.

When Francis Bacon’s grand retrospective opened at the Grand Palais, in Paris, France, on October 26, 1971, his lover George Dyer had been dead two days, lost to a lethal cocktail of drinks and pills. The artist attended the inauguration anyway, a decision that many viewed as callous and which cemented his reputation, at least among Dyer’s friends, as the blackguard in the couple’s tempestuous relationship.

‘I don’t believe he was a villain,’ counters Alistair Hall, who has written a play on Bacon and Dyer. Buggers will portray the troubled artist on stage when it premieres at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this month. ‘I think he made some bad choices. George was also very temperamental and violent. You know, he is often painted as the victim, which he was in many ways, but George was also a perpetrator a lot of the time... I would never say that either of them was a villain.’

Noting that the artist looked awful in the footage from the Grand Palais opening — ‘his lip is cut; he looks like he had been crying’ — Alistair can’t quite fathom why Bacon decided to attend, but then Buggers isn’t a play that passes judgement: ‘I wanted to present these men and their very essence.’

The project is grounded in his long-standing passion for the artist’s work — ‘I feel seen by it, and I see something in it’ — but the final push came from seeing ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’ at the National Portrait Gallery: ‘I was so struck by the melancholy and the beautiful way in which that exhibition was curated and the power of his portraits [that] I thought, “I really need to make something about Dyer and Bacon.” They were together for almost a decade, so, yes, it was awful, but there was also so much love and I felt like I wanted to get into the nuance of all of that.’

Writing about Bacon, let alone playing him on stage, is a tall order: ‘He's a real contradiction of a man. I mean, we all are, as human beings — we say one thing, we mean another; we feel one thing the next minute, and we feel something else the next day — but Bacon, I feel like he's that, amplified.’

In a brave, inspired move, Alistair — who jokes that the artist, were he alive today, would find him ‘unbearable’ because he leads a quiet, wholesome life — decided to get in touch with the artist’s estate. ‘I thought I'd be in and out within 20 minutes and they'd laugh at me.’ Instead, they opened the archive to him, so he could research all the material from the Dyer years. ‘I had my last visit there two weeks ago. They've been incredible and I'm so so grateful. They've never asked to see the scripts. They've never tried to approve anything and they've been really supportive.’ Yet, the play, he is keen to add, is as much about Dyer as it is about Bacon: ‘One thing that was so important to me was to really give George a voice and some authorship of his life.’

‘In the beginning, we explore the electricity and the excitement. I imagine their first morning together after the night they met. Then, we are transported to years later, when things aren't working. We all know what that feels like to fall in love, to think that this is it, to think that you found everything…To know that it starts as that, then it becomes something very toxic and very violent and very unpredictable, and then it becomes this tragedy — yes, it's been really hard [to write] and weirdly, it's taken me back to some emotional parts. I've been thinking about when I was a teenager and I'd just moved to London, and I had all these hopes and dreams, and I got waylaid with addiction, and I had all this deep sense of belonging all the time for someone to rescue me.’

He believes that something similar contributed to the implosion of the couple. ‘With Bacon and Dyer, there's so much longing in that relationship, they both expect something from each other, but the other person cannot give it and they are muddled up in addiction. Both men are alcoholics; they really enable each other, and both are screaming at each other for help or for something else. But neither is listening.’

Although legend has it that the two men met when Dyer broke into the artist’s apartment, they had, far more mundanely, chanced upon each other at a pub in Soho in 1963. Art historian Michael Peppiatt reports the artist’s recollection of that first encounter in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma: ‘George was down the far end of the bar and he came over and said “You all seem to be having a good time, can I buy you a drink?”’

They could hardly have come from more different worlds. ‘Bacon, when they met, had just had the Tate retrospective. He had paintings on display in New York, his profile was growing and growing,’ explains Alistair. He had also come from an affluent, prominent family in the first place. ‘He left home very young, he knew trouble, but he had safety in a way that George [didn’t]. George was from a working-class background. He was in and out of prison. He struggled with his identity, so privilege separates these two.’

Yet, they fell for each other and were much in love, at least initially, with Dyer becoming a muse to Bacon, as much as a lover — the first portraits of him date from very early in their relationship. Alistair was especially moved by their photos together: ‘Pictures of them on the Orient Express; pictures of them on holiday. That's when you think, “they were happy at times”... You really see domestic moments between these men and what I couldn't get my head round is the relaxation in each other, which is easy to forget when you know what's coming, when you know the ending.’

Rather than chronicling the unravelling of their lives, however, he imagines three moments at the outset, halfway and end of their relationship, a tripartition recalling Bacon’s triptychs (the title of the play — Buggers — is also a nod to the artist’s work: it’s the nickname by which one of his paintings, the 1953 Two Figures, became known).

Yet, Buggers is not — or not only — a play about the artist and his lover (Alistair says you don’t need to be familiar with Bacon and his work to enjoy it).

He, director Alice Wordsworth and Peter Clements, who plays George, worked to strip Bacon and Dyer of their art-historical significance and present them instead as a ‘very human’ couple: ‘They could be my mum, they could be my brother, because the themes are the same in this relationship. It's the human condition of belonging, feeling misunderstood, identity, class, sexuality, desire — it’s things that aren't just exclusive to Bacon and Dyer.’

A story he shares from the earliest days of the play drives his point home: ‘Something that really struck me before I started writing [is that] I went to visit Dyer's grave. It was in the same cemetery where a dear friend of mine died by suicide 10 years ago and I thought, “These are two men, decades apart, but the struggles are the same.” The struggles are the same and I think that was my impetus.’

‘Buggers’ is at Pleasance’s Upstairs at Pleasance Courtyard, in Edinburgh, from August 5–30 (except 17 and 24)

No show compares to the Royal Academy’s (RA) Summer Exhibition. Its uniqueness derives from history and format: select public submissions are displayed together with works by invited artists, Royal and Honorary Academicians, in the world’s largest survey of contemporary art and architecture.

Perhaps because of this, it has been a lightning rod for artistic rows almost continuously since it began and many of its biggest controversies have centred on who gets in and where they are hung.

It all started in 1768, when 34 artists and architects, including Reynolds, Gainsborough and Angelica Kauffman, obtained George III’s permission to establish the RA and hold an annual exhibition. The first show took place a year later, featuring 136 works (today, there are about 1,200).

Artists used to apply the final touches to their paintings on Varnishing Day. In 1832, Constable was busy perfecting The Opening of Waterloo Bridge when Turner came in and realised that his seascape, Helvoetsluys, didn’t stand out compared with his rival’s work — so he added a bright red buoy to it. When he saw it, a dejected Constable said: 'He has been here and fired a gun.'

Today, members of the public can submit up to two works for consideration. The final selection is made in the gallery in an ‘eight-day hang’, during which committee members are fortified by swigs of a legendary ‘beef’ tea, the recipe for which is secret.

For a picture that sent shockwaves through late-18th-century Britain, The Conjuror, by Nathaniel Hone the Elder (1718–84), looks innocuous enough.

Clad in rich red robes, an ancient wizard, luxuriant beard streaming past his neck to skim the top of his chest, summons with his wand a collection of Old Master prints to make new paintings.

The artist’s contemporaries, however, recognised in the figure the president of the RA, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and in the scene a satire of the great artist’s tendency to ‘borrow’ extensively from Renaissance works.

Nonetheless, The Conjuror, now at the National Gallery of Ireland, was accepted for the RA exhibition — until Angelica Kauffman saw herself in the woman dancing naked in the background, since removed, but still visible in a sketch belonging to Tate.

Hone wrote to her to rebut the accusation: ‘To convince you, madam, that your figure in that composition was the farthest from my thoughts, I now declare I never at any time saw your works but with the greatest pleasure, and that respect due to a lady whom I esteem as the first of her sex in painting, and amongst the loveliest of women in person’ — and offered to paint over the figure.

Kauffman remained unappeased and threatened to pull out all her pictures if Hone’s painting was shown, which in turn led the RA Council to turn it down. This, however, incensed the artist, who decided to stage a solo exhibition of his works in another gallery, giving The Conjuror pride of place and complaining in an affidavit that neither RA treasurer Sir William Chambers nor three other grandees had taken into account his ‘most explicit declaration’ that he had ‘never introduced, or intended to introduce, any figure reflecting on Mrs. Angelica Kaufmann’.

Despite all this, a year later the furore had already died down: Hone returned to exhibit at the RA in the summer of 1776 and continued to do so until his death.

What to look out for at this year's Summer Exhibition

1. Sir Grayson Perry was elected a Royal Academician in 2011. This year he's exhibiting Behold Humanity!, a large-scale tapestry that reveals what the artist thinks about AI (spoiler alert: it's not particularly positive)
2. Honorary Royal Academician Marina Abramović's The Kitchen VIII from her photographic series 'The Kitchen, Homage to Saint Therese' is also on display. The photographs — which were staged in an abandoned kitchen space in Spain — pay tribute to Saint Therese of Ávila, a mystic renowned for her intense spiritual experiences and levitation episodes often associated with domestic and kitchen spaces
3. When Country Life put a cat on its front cover for only the second time in its 130-year-long history, we didn't think the RA would follow suit with a dedicated feline display, but here we all are. The standout is Jill Feld’s frantic black cat painting

The RA's Summer Exhibition is open until August 23. Visit their website for more information and to book.

Where is it?

Wiltshire, on the edge of the Marlborough Downs.

A quick description

A late-18th-century Grade II- listed hunting box built from mellow Bath stone with a Georgian bow front, set in 70 acres of fields and ancient woodland.

How did you find it?

We’d been looking for a country bolthole for years and found it in 2013 through a buying agent. The search took us all over the countryside, but I grew up nearby and when we first saw it, it said ‘save me’.

Any challenges?

There were various hurdles put up by the vendor, but I was determined that I was going to get it.

Favourite aspect of the house?

It feels happy, has amazing light and I love the peacefulness. It actually stands not far from the motorway, but it feels very rural.

Best memory of living there?

All the lovely parties we’ve hosted.

Biggest mistake?

I underestimated how much money I would need to fix the house. It was last decorated in the 1980s when someone had the idea of creating a restaurant with rooms, so there were exit signs, strip lighting and an acre of bright-red nylon carpet to remove.

Biggest indulgence?

My bedroom. It’s huge, with enough room for two sofas. I wake up and still can’t quite believe that I live here.

Sophie Conran is a designer, cook and gardener. Her eponymous home and lifestyle brand includes a collection of sofas handmade in the UK. On September 11, 2026, Salthrop Manor will host the Rare Plant Fair.

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

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.

ES Devlin creates temporary societies. A multi-talented artist, she develops environments for theatre, opera, rock concerts and dance, as well as immersive installations, performances and artworks, where the audience, through the combined magic of sound, light, movement and text, briefly becomes a community, sharing attention rather than passively viewing.

She is an ‘Everythingist’, someone who encompasses the vastness of human knowledge, combining diverse skills, passions and possibilities. The term was originally coined for Natalia Goncharova — another multi-talented woman, who painted, wrote, made illustrations and designed sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes — and is also the name of the installation that Devlin devised in response to Goncharova’s Firebird backcloth at V&A East.

Devlin cannot be pigeonholed as merely a set designer, although her creations cover a roll call of events — from operas such as Philip Glass’s Orphée at the Royal Opera House (2005), to plays such as The Lehman Trilogy (2018) and dance Connectome for the Royal Ballet (2014). She’s also worked on immersive structural environments for Kanye West and Jay-Z’s Watch the Throne arena tour (2011), fashion installations for the 100th anniversary of Chanel No. 5 (2021) and the transformation of public and commercial spaces, including the closing and opening ceremonies of the Olympics in London (2012) and Rio (2016), respectively.

The wide-ranging nature of her practice — which is also evident in the variety of accolades she has received, from a Tony and multiple Oliviers to The Critics’ Circle Award for Contribution to the Arts (as well as an OBE and CBE) — is partly rooted in what she calls her ‘feral’ childhood.

She was born in 1971, the second of four children, to educationalist parents. ‘We weren’t allowed to watch much television; our constant refrain was: “We’re bored.” Mum used to say: “Only boring people are bored, here’s a Rice Krispie packet and a pair of scissors, go and make something.”

'We were endlessly cutting up yoghurt pots and cardboard boxes. We would make games and toy theatres, performing plays in them. We had a small space under the stairs, which was dark, where we could control the light, where we would experiment with our little projector.’ It was the precursor to her sophisticated use of light today.

A gifted musician, she played three instruments: each Saturday, from the age of 11, she took the train — unaccompanied — from Rye in East Sussex to the Royal Academy of Music, tacking on visits to galleries and jumble sales.

Intending to do printmaking and photography at Central St Martins, she was introduced to set design at the Motley Theatre Group. ‘I knew nothing about set design, but there was a dark red room full of people making model theatres, listening to opera, reading books, covered with reference images on the wall, in dialogue with each other.’

Enticingly, there was 24-hour access to the studio. ‘I knew that I had so much work to do that I thought: “Well, even if this theatre thing is of no use, I’ll have this studio and I’ll just stay up all night making the stuff I want to make.”’ It was, in fact, of ‘use’. In 1995, she won the Linbury Prize and designed Marlowe’s Edward II for the Octagon Theatre, Bolton, Greater Manchester, and, in 1998, was invited to design the first ballet to be performed by the Rambert dance company at the newly refurbished Sadler’s Wells, followed closely by Pinter’s Betrayal for Trevor Nunn at the National Theatre.

Her career continued with increasingly spectacular projects worldwide. For any of her projects, Devlin watches rehearsals intensively and, during the ones for Wagner’s six-hour long Parsifal (2012), having to read the translations in subtitles, she became aware that she was doing more concentrated, uninterrupted reading in those 10 days than she had done for some time. ‘That was a source of interest to me, and also slight grief; it reminded me that I used to be much more absorbed in reading than I am now — I wondered whether a lot of people felt like me.’

Her response was to develop a collective reading event with Hannah Barry for Bold Tendencies (2018), in which Benedict Cumberbatch with 2,000 participants read The Order of Time by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli.

Her most recent projects are also related to books and libraries, perhaps harking back to the days when she read English at Bristol and fell in love with the etymology of words. Both from last year are The Library of Light at the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy — a 59ft-diameter revolving cylinder of 3,200 books — and The Library of Us, a triangular 20ft-tall, illuminated rotation of 2,500 books with a circular reflective pool in Miami, Florida, US.

Following on from those two, Devlin has just made her first indoor library, The Library of the Four Winds, a sculpture of hundreds of books inside Sir John Vanbrugh’s temple of the same name at Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, in commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the architect’s death.

‘He has many parallels for me. The fascination he had with literature, with architecture, with geometry, with systems — he cared about systems, systems in power, systems in architecture, so there’s so much for me to respond to. I’ve made a revolving (illuminated) library.

'Everything I do is personal to me, as well as responding to situation and report, and it’s a library of all the books that made me who I am.’ She reads out selected passages and the books encircling the Temple, as well as those in the library, are her own, complete with her copious underlinings: ‘2026 is the National Year of Reading so we really hope this is going to encourage people to come to sit, to meet each other through text, and we’ll be doing some drawing classes, too.’

With such an all-encompassing career, her brain never seems inactive. ‘I draw to translate something that’s inside me to the outside. Drawing is me thinking and that’s how I figure stuff out. There are neurons in the end of my fingers, and [with] the friction, the meeting of the pencil to the paper with my hand and my eye, thoughts will happen in that process, which if I just lie in bed thinking about it, imagining, won’t be the same.

'You have to make the mark. The idea will take a different form if I pick up a pen or a piece of charcoal or a pencil.’ Her drawings are often in response to an invitation. However, projects commence with a feeling, based on a hinterland of past sensa-tions, experiences and responses.

‘How do I feel? What’s the experience? The process starts by going to a place. Having recorded experience, bodily apprehension of situation, the next is association: “What do I want to bring to bear here, of my batch of poems, of all the things that I’ve picked up along the way…”

'They’re visual and tactile, but they’re also mental, bringing in, always, a lot of reading and philosophical discussion. I use a lot of my instinct (that) is often to quite simple forms.’

Yet, her projects are always collaborative. She is not a fan of the ‘artist as genius’ approach. She collaborates with many different people, directors, gallerists, technical experts and skilled artisans — not least as the artistic director of Homo Faber 2026’s ‘Island Of Light’ in Venice, Italy, a festival of craftsmanship comprising 15 installations and 500 makers — as well as audiences.

This collaboration is not episodic, it’s a continuous chain of influences and shared thinking. ‘We always say that each project we come to, we come through the lens of the thing we just did and the people we just worked with, so we’re always… one step removed from a conversation we just had with someone else. With the artworks, I’m often building on a line of enquiry.’

She has an ongoing project ‘A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery’, a digital artwork developed in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture Lab, where everyone is invited to ‘co-author an evolving portrait of the nation’.

An individual’s photograph is transformed into an animated digital portrait based aesthetically on Ms Devlin’s previously executed charcoal and chalk drawings. The moving digital sketch marks resemble a portrait constantly redrawing itself, repeatedly resolving one likeness, followed by another and another, in an expanding sequence of the faces of all who participate.

She employs new technologies with skill, conscious of their transitory nature. ‘You have to flow with the moment where technology still feels like magic, because magic allows us to, for a moment, see through the lens of our actual senses rather than through our preconceived expectancy of what we’re going to see. When you destabilise someone’s perceptions about how coins and cards behave in a magic trick, then you destabilise their perceptions about how blue the sky is and they might look with their eyes, instead of simply assuming they know.’ Devlin never fails to supply the magic that changes those perspectives.

Es Devlin’s 'The Library of the Four Winds' is at Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, until September 27. ‘The Everythingist’ is at the V&A East, London, until October 18. ‘Es Devlin: Other Worlds’ will be at the Design Museum, London, from October 2–April 4, 2027

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