A faded Fera poacher gilet in an east London beer garden; a Schöffel fleece writhing at a sweaty Hyde Park gig; or a pair of tasselled Fairfax & Favor Reginas settling in for brunch on the King’s Road. The sport of spying countrymen (and women) in the urban wilds has always been akin to seeing a stride in the hunting field — it was just a case of getting your eye in. But the line between country and city gear has never been more blurred, and so what was once about dialling in to the tattersall shirts, is now the sartorial wild west.

Anyone hankering after a Burberry trench would be forgiven for not knowing that when Thomas Burberry established the supersonic brand in Basingstoke in 1856, the idea was to create practical outerwear for the unpredictable British weather, with the precursor to its trench worn by army officers and polar explorers.

Then there’s Barbour, so entwined with A-listers and London Fashion Week that it’s hard to remedy it with the straight-talking Beaufort wax jacket designed by Dame Margaret Barbour in 1983.

And for more than two decades a pair of Hunters has been a red herring for anyone hoping to pigeon-hole the green welly brigade — Kate Moss was the disrupter when she debuted them at Glastonbury in 2005. But even Holland Cooper, with its comparatively short-lived heritage, has long since spread its provincial wings: Claudia Winkleman cloaked in its full-length Regency Coat on The Traitors is a long way from knee-deep mud at Badminton Horse Trials, where founder Jade Holland Cooper started selling tweed miniskirts in 2008.

The latest in Britain’s long line of clothes that masterfully straddle the city-country divide is Fera — tagline ‘made for the street and the stream’ — which since 2021 has been dressing the kind of thirty-something-year-old who could happily be skinning a rabbit in the morning and DJing in Hoxton by the evening. Think flannel shirts, workwear t-shirts and their bestseller poacher gilet. Good luck deciphering if the man in the Fera khaki wading vest has ever stepped foot on a riverbank or not.

‘There is something deeply British about country clothing. It unlocks a deep sense of nostalgia and identity and if done right, it is a timeless style,’ explains Sidney Hiscox, who founded Fera with his childhood friend Declan Morrison. The pair met aged four and grew up together in Wiltshire, Morrison on the sprawling Fonthill Estate outside Tisbury.

‘Think about Burberry and Barbour — country wear and the countryside have always had an influence on contemporary style. Even people born and raised in the city often have some connection to the country, maybe a grandparent or friend or even just an interest. If we can bring the culture that means so much to us to people both urban and rural in an engaging way, then we are achieving a key part of our mission,’ he says.

‘We both had incredibly lucky childhoods, running around being feral, brewing up ideas while we were wading up a river fishing, or racing around on motorbikes. And we wanted to create clothing which represented the lifestyle we loved,’ says Hiscox, who until Fera was born was drawn to Carhartt-type American workwear brands over any hooray red trouser aesthetic. ‘We’re always trying to show a bit of edge to the countryside. Whether that’s a fly fisherman skating around London finding spots to fish. Or our Christmas advert last year, which was an 80-year-old shepherd flinging his quad bike back to get his Fera parcel in time. I’m always scared to use the word cool — you can’t call yourself cool — but that’s what we set out to do.

‘The reality is that city wear and country wear doesn’t have to be that different anymore. There’s obviously the very function specific clothing which might be the exception. But Fera’s whole philosophy is about being able to wade through a bog in the morning and then waltz into The Ritz for breakfast [without getting changed]. We got some custom jackets made for [electronic music duo] Maribou State for their last tour. And they were sending us photos of them on a farm in Hampshire somewhere, and then next thing they’re on stage playing to crowds in the same gear.’

If Fera set out to create something that worked just as well in town as it does in the sticks, then for Schöffel it’s been a happy accident. ‘We have the same core consumer now as we did in the 1990s when the original Ptarmigan shooting coat was launched,’ says Schöffel’s executive director Marcus Janssen. ‘We have been very conscious to carry on developing products for that core country consumer — it’s always been about technical performance and functionality first. Our demographic has got younger, but that’s because shooting has got younger over the years, rather than us targeting a younger consumer. In the 1990s, it was largely middle-aged landowners and farmers shooting. But the commercialisation of shooting has made it more accessible.’

Schöffel has the Oakham fleece gilet to thank for making it a brand as comfortable on certain stretches of the District Line as it is on the peg. ‘The fleece was originally part of a three in one shooting coat that you could zip in and zip out. And very soon we realised people were wanting more of the fleeces than the shooting coats,’ explains Janssen. And so, the Fulham lifejacket was born.

‘But we never targeted a more lifestyle consumer, we’ve just acquired them as the brand has grown and developed its reputation for performance and quality. People are always drawn to the realisation that country clothing lasts. A shooting coat is a lot of money. But if you’re going to wear it to smarter events or to the office as well, and it’s going to last — we still see 15 or 20-year-old Ptarmigan shooting coats out in the field all the time — then that’s good value for money.’

When Marcus Fairfax Fountaine thinks of his Fairfax & Favor customer, it’s similarly someone who ‘moves effortlessly between town and country. She values quality over quantity, invests in timeless pieces rather than trends, and wants a wardrobe that works across every part of her life,’ he says. ‘It’s not unusual for someone to spend the morning in the countryside and end the day meeting friends in London, still wearing the same Fairfax & Favor Tetbury handbag or pair of Fairford boots. If they feel completely at home in both settings, then we’ve done our job.’

Back in those London beer gardens, a Barbour remains the 'OG' of bringing country clothing into the urban zeitgeist. The ultimate country-to-town chameleon. Since its 1894 beginnings in South Shields supplying oilskins to sailors and fishermen and then riding its 1980s Sloane Ranger era, its modern reputation has been helped along the way by collaborations with the biggest fashion houses, from Ganni to Paul Smith.

But as with other outerwear, it is its practicality and versatility that has let it hold its ground in town — plus, perhaps, a hefty dose of nostalgia. As Sienna Miller, who fronts its Autumn/Winter 2026 campaign told BritishVogue: ‘When you go to someone’s country house, you don’t ask, ‘Have you got a wax jacket I could borrow?’ You say, ‘Have you got any Barbours?’ It’s part of our DNA. Baked beans and Barbours – and it’s never not been cool.”’

Porsche's development engineer had no intention of riding shotgun. He explained the extra controls, asked if there were any questions, then slammed the door. Clunk.

Thankfully, I was to drive solo in the world's most complex and expensive road car. The fastest, too. Porsche claims a top speed of 198mph for the twin-turbo, four-wheel-drive 959, yours for £155,000 if you were sufficiently rich and influential to get on the shortlist in the first place. Only 250 959s are to be made, and all were sold long before the first was delivered. To get one now means waiting for the first used samples to hit the market, at about £250,000.

I was at the Nürburgring in Germany, where Porsche had mustered four late-prototype 959s, soon reduced to three by a £20,000 engine-blowing missed-gear error at the hands of a fellow scribe, poor fellow. With good reason, I was wary of the short, crossways travel of the six-speed gear change, though the double-H shift pattern is logical enough, with first in the left-forward position, top in the right-back one.

One twist of the key and the engine exploded into life instantly, with a deep, resonant rumble. The clutch dipped easily, bit fluidly, and the gear lever slotted with less synchro baulking than that of a normal 911, especially when palmed decisively. Steering needed no more than wristy inputs. It was immediately apparent that the 959 called for neither great strength nor unusual skill to drive smoothly. Pushing it to the limit was something else.

Cruising the first few exploratory laps of the tumbling Ring circuit provided an opportunity to gauge the engine's low-rev bite. It did not feel very strong. Porsche make much of its two-stage turbocharging, designed to overcome off-boost lethargy, but here the engine felt comparatively languid below 4,500rpm. It pulled from 1,000rpm in sixth all right, but not with real vigour; not by supercar standards, anyway.

When turbo thrust did cut in, though, acceleration was phenomenal, startling in its ferocity. One blast to the 7,500rpm cut-out was sufficient to make Porsche's claimed performance figures (would you believe 0–60mph in 3.8 seconds?) seem entirely credible. There was no wheelspin, not even the faintest of chirps from the big Dunlop tyres. The first four intermediate maxima were easily confirmed: 37, 64, 93 and 127mph. Over 160mph is attainable in fourth, though not at the Ring, where the fastest straight was good for only 150mph.

It is an awesome combination, 450bhp and four-wheel drive. The 959's 2.85-litre Bosch-injected engine is a horizontally opposed flat-six with air-cooled alloy blocks, water-cooled twin-cam heads and titanium internals to take the strain. Its Herculean power is fed to all four wheels in varying proportions according to black-box instructions through a normal dry-plate clutch, a new six-speed, close-ratio gearbox and two multi-plate torque-splitting units.

There are four switch-selected transmission programmes to choose from, according to road and weather conditions. One, with fixed 50/50 drive, is for grinding through sand and mud. In the other three modes, there is no fixed torque split, but a variable one determined by each wheel's individual needs, according to sensor information fed to the central computer. In theory, it is not as complicated as it sounds.

A static 40/60 weight distribution might momentarily become 20/80 during a hard, dry-road standing start. Torque is distributed in a similar proportion. In the wet, when traction is poorer and weight transfer correspondingly less, the front wheels can handle more torque. They get it. Less traction means more forward drive, though speed influences the split as well. When parking, there is minimal front-wheel drive, to avoid heavy steering. At speed, the front wheels get a bigger share of the drive to give more understeer stability. Clever stuff.

Apart from its amazing transmission, the 959 also has unique anti-lock brakes, directed by the same sensors that control wheelspin. Then there is adjustable damping that automatically lowers and stiffens the car at speed, to improve stability, not to mention constant pressure monitoring of the huge Dunlop Denloc safety tyres through hollow spokes in special alloy wheels.

As a technical tour de force, the 959 is bewilderingly impressive, a harbinger of things to come. As a competition winner, though, this enigmatic blockbuster, surely the final development of the 25-year-old 911, looks like a beaten finalist. Despite victory in the gruelling Paris-Dakar raid, the car is not really suitable for world-championship rallying. Nor is it competitive against purpose-built Group C racing cars, though its recent seventh-place finish at Le Mans was a fine effort. It is as a street-legal supercar, then, as Porsche's flagship and high-tech testbed, that the 959 must finally be judged.

The cabin is much like that of a normal 911, with extra instruments and switchgear. The chunky rotaries for the adjustable Bilstein dampers, controlling both ride height and stiffness, are centrally mounted. Transmission selection is by a column stalk. There is also a torque-split gauge.

I do not doubt that the car would feel sensationally safe and secure at road-going cornering speeds. On the track it seemed tail-heavy (which it is), even a little pendulous. However, it was only when I braked too late for a second-gear corner on the overrun that the tail snapped into oversteer, and then quite controllably. The power steering is sharp but not especially communicative on smooth tarmac. It is through the seat of your pants, firmly clamped by a hip-hugging Recaro seat, that you get the best feel of the car.

There is nothing unusual about the 959's cornering behaviour. It tends to run wide under power and tuck in on the overrun. Not that you would normally ever know, as such traits are only evident at cornering speeds way beyond the limit of ordinary cars. At the Ring, tantalisingly close to some marvellous motoring country, the best cornering technique seemed to be the classical one: slow in, steady through on a constant throttle, then fast out.

It was on the quick, fourth-gear sweeps that the car felt at its stable best. The higher the speed, the stronger the front-drive understeering influence, remember. Aerodynamics play their part, too. Porsche could have lowered the drag coefficient below 0.31, but only by sacrificing impeccable stability.

With more front-drive bias, in the 'wet' or 'snow' transmission programmes, the car felt twitchier, more sensitive to the throttle on the Ring's dry track. Quite how all this staggering complexity would show up on public roads, particularly on wet ones, I am not sure.

I was left with the impression that the 959 was a staggeringly effective and efficient machine, in the best Teutonic tradition, but somehow lacking in character and soul. For stirring indolent red corpuscles, the rival Ferrari 288 GTO excited me a lot more.

The Country Life Archive contains more than a century of British architecture, rural life, photography, and property records dating back to the magazine's launch in 1897. You can search and explore historical content using the Country Life Archive tag on our site, or access the complete backfile (1897–2005) via the ProQuest Country Life Archive

‘Of the terriers of Ireland we know even less than we do of the early terriers of England,’ Country Life lamented in 1964. Indeed, the origins of the soft-coated wheaten terrier and the Kerry blue are often debated, but the wheaten is generally regarded as Ireland’s oldest breed. It is commonly acknowledged that a ‘tough, wheaten terrier tyke has been found around Waterford, Cork, Tipperary, Limerick and Kerry for the past 200 years’.

Historically used to herd cattle and kill vermin, the wheaten is much like the Kerry blue in colour and shape — and both are sporting and game — but the wheaten is ‘less independent-minded than their blue-coated relatives’.

Until the early 1930s the soft-coated wheaten terriers had aroused little interest and were in some danger of dying out. However, the breed was saved by the efforts of Gerard Pierse, who was so taken with a wheaten he spotted at a field outing for terriers that he badgered the Irish Kennel Club to give recognition to the breed, which the group did in 1937.

However, The Kennel Club in England would not acknowledge the breed until 1943. In 1946 a wheaten called Glenguard Mourneside Firecrest won Best in Show at Romford, Essex, and went on to prove himself as the foundation sire of most UK wheatens.

This is an extract from 'The Country Life Book of Dogs' (Rizzoli, £50) by Agnes Stamp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your aesthetic hero

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

A book you’ve found inspiring

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

A possession you would never sell

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

Your favourite painting

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

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

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

An exhibition that has really impressed you

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

The music that you work to

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

The last podcast you listened to

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

Who would play you in a film of your life

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

What you’d take with you to a desert island

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

What gets you up the morning

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

The items you collect

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

A hotel you could go back and back to

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

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

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

The best present you’ve ever received

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

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

Sunday lunch: accept no substitute. ‘It really is the captain’s table at the end of a long week,’ declares chef Richard Corrigan of a weekly tradition he still vigorously upholds. ‘Beef is the king. The mere mention of a roast in the oven sends the kids scurrying up the hill for a late lunch. I will always cherish it — I think it is the most beautiful expression of living and eating and it’ll never change at my table.’

Corrigan is not alone in his wistful, romantic adoration; the Sunday roast remains sacrosanct on these shores. Still, rarely do two plates look the same. Disagreements abound over precisely what should make the cut. Everyone seemingly agrees on roast potatoes, even if — in Sunday-lunch terms, at least — they’re a modern addition, not becoming a staple of the British diet until the early 19th century. Regardless, they need to be right.

‘Soggy potatoes are a definite no-no; they need to be crisp roasties, every time,’ maintains Sally Abé of Teal in east London. ‘Good gravy is absolutely non-negotiable,’ adds Saturday Kitchen chef Elliott Grover. ‘Proper roasting juices, with plenty of depth and enough of it — there’s nothing worse than being precious with the gravy.’ What about the famous Yorkshire puddings? ‘Absolutely essential with every roast in my opinion,’ offers Abé. Chef and restaurateur Jason Atherton isn’t so convinced. ‘Yorkies should only ever be with beef,’ he counters firmly. The jury’s out.

Of the meat itself? Anything goes. The crucial thing is to get the condiments right. ‘Homemade horseradish is the only thing to go with beef,’ believes Corrigan. ‘Mustard goes well, too,’ notes Abé. Grover suggests ‘mint sauce with lamb, apple sauce with pork,’ before advising, ‘Nobody needs a deconstructed roast with 12 little components and a smear of gravy. Keep it generous, keep it recognisable and make every element really bloody good.’

Thus: meat, potatoes, veg and gravy. The same as it’s been for decades — or is it centuries? In a country founded on the bedrock of myth and legend, it feels apt that one of our most beloved meals should emerge from a shroud of folklore. The story of the Sunday roast is not the pub tale landlords winkingly deliver to tourists of a meal originating with medieval peasants on their way to church laden with a joint. In this yarn, before settling down for the priest’s sermon, the peasants would give the meat to the local baker to cook with potatoes and vegetables in still-hot bread ovens, collecting it on the way home to share at the family table. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that it’s true.

Neither did the roast emerge from the greed of the ceremonial guards at the Tower of London. Established as the Yeoman Warders by Henry VII in 1485, their Beefeater nickname is often flimsily cited as proof of the nation’s ancient devotion to beef on the weekends. Some insist the roast goes back far further, to Sundays in the fields, where workers would roast an ox and feast on cuts chiselled right off the carcass.

What is known is that, although the meal took time to find its shape, Sundays have long been kept as a day of rest. This observance wasn’t left entirely to the Church: in 1444, a law emerged in London prohibiting professional cooks from boiling, baking and roasting on Sunday mornings. Still, it’s unlikely that medieval peasants were getting much in the way of roasted meat, given the process then was extravagant and time-consuming, requiring cuts to be cast on a spit and turned constantly beside a fire to ensure the skin didn’t blister as the inside stayed raw (the instant-barbecue conundrum of its day). For most, meat was boiled and stewed, but, even for the wealthy, a roast was an occasion long before it was attached to a Sunday.

However, those earliest spit roasts produced something now considered indispensable — the juices and fat running from the meat. These would collect into a literally named dripping pan beneath the spit, forming the foundations of gravy. Centuries later, Sam and Georgie Pearman, who run the Country Creatures pub group in the Cotswolds, describe essentially the same principle: ‘We make our gravy from scratch, boiling the bones from the carcass, adding all the delicious meat juices and then straining it to create a really rich, flavoursome gravy.’

Slowly, roasting and Sundays began to entwine, perhaps because the time required for the former was only available on the latter. By the 17th century, the diarist Samuel Pepys was coming home after church for ‘a good dinner of roast beef’. The wealthy Pepys’s tastes cannot be taken as an indicator of the broader English diet, but his accounts from the 1660s foreshadow what would be commonplace less than a century later.

By the early 1700s, roast beef had become not only a staple of the British diet, but a totem of national identity. In 1731, English satirist Henry Fielding wrote The Roast Beef of Old England song into The Grub-Street Opera; shortly afterwards, Richard Leveridge took the patriotic lyrics (‘When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman’s food/ It ennobled our veins and enriched our blood’) and put them to a tune that became such a hit that it inspired William Hogarth to paint a picture of the same name. To this day, it is still sung by the Royal Navy before formal mess dinners.

The 18th century not only popularised roast beef, but one of the defining extras: the Yorkshire pudding. Six years after Fielding’s song, ‘dripping pudding’ appeared in the Georgian handbook The Whole Duty of a Woman. A decade later, it was renamed after God’s own country in one of the most successful and influential cookbooks ever printed, Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.

The recipe was much then as it is now, with instructions suggesting a pancake-like batter set beneath the meat, so the drippings mixed in. The meat, then, physically created the pudding’s flavour: it was not a side. In fact, sometimes, the Yorkshire was served first and the meat was left to finish. ‘Traditionally, a Yorkshire should be served with the sediment from the beef roasting tray and honey as a starter, while the beef is resting,’ agrees Atherton. ‘My great-grandmother would always do this when we were growing up in the North.’

The pudding seemed to tie the meal together and, during this time, the idea of Sunday lunch firmly took shape as a ritual. Economically, it made sense: one substantial meal could feed a hungry working family, with leftovers stretching into the week. In 1834, Parliament debated Sunday observance, with MPs arguing that the weekly Sunday dinner was crucial to working families, many of whom relied on local bakers to cook it — which is probably where that particular rumour comes from (and makes sense, given that all households having ovens was still a long way off).

In his 1867 collection of essays Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes, social commentator Thomas Wright describes Sunday dinner as ‘by a long way the most important culinary affair of the week’. A couple of years before, Mrs Beeton’s Dictionary of Every-Day Cookery showed the Sunday dinner settling into a recognisable form: roast meat, potatoes, vegetables and the appropriate trimmings. Beef came with Yorkshire pudding; elsewhere, her Sunday tables featured roast mutton, lamb, veal and even sucking pig.

By now, the roast was no longer synonymous with beef so much as a way of organising the Sunday meal. Beeton’s roast fowl came with its own established ritual: brown gravy and ‘a tureen of well-made bread sauce’. Here, she was reaching back centuries to the medieval habit of thickening sauces with bread — its pairing with roast poultry would outlast almost all the other sauces made in the same way.

With the dish now firmly a national staple, it is little surprise that products emerged to cut down on labour: soon, there was Paxo stuffing (1901) and Bisto gravy (1908). The public was spared ready-made Yorkshires until Aunt Bessie came along with them in 1995. Roast-dinner devotees are lucky that the Victorians were so keen on them. Two World Wars swept away much of the elaborate domestic machinery of Victorian Britain, but the roast persevered.

Rations during the Second World War certainly threatened its existence, but, in a curious way, reinforced it, too; some house-holds chose to stack up the meat allowance for Sundays only and cherish the roast more than before. Potatoes and other vegetables increasingly filled out the plate to compensate. Meat was the final major food to come off ration, in July 1954, at which point the Sunday roast could finally begin to flourish again. Intensive farming forced the price of chicken down: in 1950, poultry accounted for 1% of the meat eaten in Britain; by 1980, it made up a quarter. Suddenly, beef wasn’t always the headline act.

There were other changes, too. Families shrank, Sundays loosened their mooring lines to the church and overworked parents became less willing or able to surrender an entire morning to getting lunch on the table. Pubs increasingly took on the work instead. Corrigan suspects it may be more common to eat out now on a Sunday than tackle the whole thing at home. Perhaps — but what is clear is that the essential idea has proved remarkably difficult to kill.

‘The roast is alive and well,’ asserts Abé. ‘There’s something very timeless about it. As soon as the colder weather arrives, people start craving that comforting Sunday roast again.’ Yorkshires may or may not be permitted and cauliflower cheese will always be a point of contention, but the reason for gathering around it has altered remarkably little.

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

Ralph Lauren the man has always been good at uniting the most unlikely groups of people. Who else, when you think about it, could create not just clothes, but really good clothes for an English country-house owner, an East Coast WASP and a Texan billionaire — at the same time?

He did it again, in 2008, when he made a serious move into watchmaking, partnering with luxury goods conglomerate Richemont who own IWC Schaffhausen, Piaget and Vacheron Constantin — the world's oldest continuously operating watch manufacturer — among others.

On the surface of it, the American West, which has long been a part of Lauren’s design vocabulary, isn’t the natural companion to Switzerland’s centuries-old, strictly governed horological processes. However, come together they did with the launch of the original American Western Cushion collection, in 2018, to mark Ralph Lauren the brand’s 50th anniversary. The 42-millimetre case was available in antiqued sterling silver or 18-carat rose gold, inspired by the vintage concho and rodeo belts that Lauren collects, wears, makes and sells.

Now, the Western Cushion’s been rereleased with some important updates, including to the case, which has shrunk by four millimetres — enough to feel more refined without compromising the wearer’s ability to appreciate the delicate engraving. The most notable change is that the watch is available in three iterations: off-white lacquer, the closest to the original one’s vintage sensibility, a more-modern black lacquer and natural turquoise, a material which some Native American tribes regard as sacred, or a piece of the sky fallen to Earth.

But for all its cowboy credentials, this is an accessory with a decidedly international outlook. Its leather strap is hand-tooled in Texas, then burnished in Italy, while the silver case and buckle are hand-engraved and aged in New York City. The face is stamped with Roman and Arabic numerals, complemented by Breguet-style hands (Abraham-Louis Breguet was French). The movement, meanwhile, is made in Switzerland, by Piaget, exclusively for Ralph Lauren.

For Lauren, it has always been about bringing together the best of all worlds.

The Ralph Lauren American Western Cushion collection is available from $26,000. Visit the Ralph Lauren website for more information

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again — you see a lot of odd things working here. Today’s entry is a replica of the car from Ghostbusters, which you can buy if you want to make a real statement this Halloween, for £150,000 through Autotrader.

Where to begin. For £150,000 you can buy a very nice new car with features like parking assist, reversing cameras, massage seats, cruise control and serious performance.

Or you could buy the Ghostbusters car, which is a 1959 Cadillac with none of those things, but instead comes with a 5.7-litre Corvette V8 engine that I imagine will make a lot of noise, a conversation pit in the rear, as well as working wailer sirens, roof-mounted spectral detection equipment and a removable model of Slimer, just in case people somehow can’t tell what film the car is from.

To be fair, I have complained plenty about how modern cars are expensive and boring. This is expensive and anything but dull. Also included is the custom plate ‘Ecto 1’.

‘We showcase hundreds of thousands of incredible vehicles on our platform, but this Cadillac Ecto-1 is truly supernatural,’ notes Erin Baker, editorial director at Autotrader. ‘Finished with ghost hunting props, dramatic light bars and a recognisable siren, it’s a spectacular tribute to one of cinema's greatest ever cars.’

The Ghostbusting car is one of the many oddities you’ll find on Autotraders OMG filter, which I would happily recommend using if you are ever bored at work, waiting for a train, or whatever it might be. Ever wondered where you can find a Mercedes 600 or a Jensen FF? Now you know. That said, Ecto-1 will take some beating.

'Lovat green, a dash of red and a hint of blue in the background’ is fashion designer Jeremy Hackett’s tempting description of the new tweed he has created for Country Life. It’s an appealing combination rich in historical resonance. Lovat is the green-blue shade found in many working tweeds. Almost 200 years ago, it was developed in response to early-Victorian Lord Lovat’s view that Highland hills in springtime combined the dun shades of birch and bracken with brighter flashes of bluebell and primrose flowers, with white shores in the distance.

Translated into woollen yarn, the lovat mix of blue, yellow, ochre and white creates a soft, misty, but fresh effect; in the new Country Life cloth, woven from Cheviot wool by Lovat Mill in Hawick, forest green, red and watery flecks add liveliness without brashness. The small check suggests pale skies and heather — a dense, fruitful, rich landscape. It’s a pattern called a ‘gun-club’ check, a three-colour combination of dark, medium and light so called after an American gun club adopted a Scottish estate tweed of similar configuration.

Now available in a selection of Hackett shops and the company’s bespoke headquarters at No 14 Savile Row, London W1, the fabric has a timeless quality that is also engagingly modern. ‘It’s something Edward VIII would feel very comfortable in,’ suggests Country Life’s Editor-in-Chief, Mark Hedges, of the man who, as Prince of Wales a century ago, brought a distinct jauntiness to his tweed-wearing.

That a new tweed pattern should feature among commemorations of Country Life’s approaching 130th anniversary in January 2027 is entirely appropriate. ‘No other fabric is more strongly associated with Britain than tweed,’ Hedges says, and no other magazine is as uniquely British as Country Life. Perennially, the magazine celebrates everything that’s best in our island story, from landscapes and the built environment to our cultural, sporting and social history, the quirks and peccadillos of this infinitely various nation and its peoples, the gorgeous kaleidoscope of British life, stamped by the past and boldly looking forward. For 130 years, Country Life has offered topics of conversation for drawing room, grouse butt, board- room and garden tea, celebrating tradition and shaping innovation: its new tweed is every bit as timeless and versatile.

‘We wanted to make something that could be worn comfortably wherever you are,’ notes Hedges — a cloth that would be of use far beyond the Cairngorms. The 14oz weave has all the toughness necessary for an English winter, Hackett explains, with none of the bullet-proof weightiness of thicker tweeds.

This year’s is not the first Country Life tweed, nor is it the first time the magazine has partnered with Hackett to create its own equivalent of an estate cloth. In 1995, Hackett oversaw special tweeds for both Country Life and Horse & Hound. Although the earlier Country Life design in green and purple — a colour long associated with the magazine — featured a bold overcheck, the absence of any overcheck in the new gun-club pattern creates a softer, less assertive design that nevertheless remains striking and buoyant.

Hackett’s choice of Lovat Mill ensures the tweed is both British made and of the highest quality. The mill is the last surviving weaver of its sort in the Border town of Hawick where commercial tweed-making originated. At the head of its roster of distinguished clients is The King. Luxury brands such as Bentley, Chanel, Gucci, Schöffel and Dolce & Gabbana have all used Lovat Mill tweeds: Hackett’s decision to work with Lovat’s design director Alan Cumming ensured the scheme’s success. ‘One has to realise one’s limitations,’ Hedges observes, who entrusted design decisions to Hackett, confident that his experience and the expertise of all at Lovat Mill would result in a tweed of which the magazine can be proud.

Indeed, it has. The new design, declares Hedges, ‘makes a gentleman look very elegant and to some extent an individual’, as well as responding to changing attitudes to formal dress following covid, with its imposition of working from home. Lockdowns led to more informal work dressing: the Country Life and Hackett collaboration takes into account the return to suit-wearing, albeit with a twist of unpredictability. ‘There are certain things you can buy and wear that make you feel better about yourself. A well-cut tweed suit is one of those things,’ affirms Hedges whose own newest suit, appropriately, is made by Hackett from the Country Life tweed. Its label will feature the ladybird that hides on the magazine’s cover.

Others, of course, will be able to share the Editor's good fortune. Hackett has chosen to use the new tweed for ready-to-wear and bespoke pieces, including tweed caps. A picnic blanket is also among the offerings and Hackett staff anticipate orders for dog coats, especially from the house’s American bespoke clients.

The best tweed clothing is built to last, with heavier-weight garments often surviving through generations. The new design, devised by Hackett in association with Lovat Mill before being selected by the magazine’s Editor, offers the same longevity. Available in a limited edition, it may not match Country Life’s record of 130 years. Echoing the magazine that inspired it, it will remain fresh, engaging and an enduring source of comfort, style, rightness and pleasure, a nod to beguiling traditions that remain serviceable and reliable.

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

There is a marvellous clip in the BBC archives, filmed in 1962 in black and white, in which a bewhiskered presenter stands in the ‘lonely hill country of Co Cork’ to explain poitín to the nation. It is, he says, the ‘do it yourself hooch’, the ‘Mountain Dew’, the ‘illicitly distilled whiskey’ of Ireland, pronounced pu cheen or poteen for the more Anglicised ear.

The camera follows a pair of uniformed officers striding the hills, looking, somewhat half-heartedly, for a still. ‘It’s a gentleman’s business,’ the presenter explains. The police will only act if the distiller is caught and, if he is, he will go quietly. The still itself, glimpsed briefly in the footage and supposedly illegal, looks like something from a child’s science experiment: old tin cans, lengths of hose forming a ramshackle contraption that somehow produces a spirit strong enough to strip paint.

Poitín is part of Irish folklore and runs through the veins of every Irishman — if not in body, in spirit. It was created by monks in the 6th century, long before the Scots laid claim to inventing whisky, and its name derives from the Irish pota, or small pot, after the vessels it was distilled in.

All sorts of mystical properties were attributed to it, from giving greater speed to a greyhound, if its legs were anointed by it, to reviving weak newborn calves. However, on Christmas Day in 1661, it was outlawed by the English Crown, frustrated by its inability to collect taxes on poitín’s production and, for almost 300 years afterwards, it was made in secret in the hills and boglands of the west, more a matter of custom and quiet defiance than crime.

Ironically, once it was outlawed, it was the Church, not the Crown, that held the real power over distillers. The men in black robes, as the presenter puts it, carried more authority than the men in blue uniforms, with the Church by then regarding the drink as the root of all evil.

These days, it is less about stills hidden on fertile slopes and more about a spirit reclaiming its place in Irish culture, as part of the Slow Food movement that has swept the country over the past two decades. In 2008, it was granted Geographical Indication status by the EU and, today, it’s highly regarded as a sophisticated ingredient for a cocktail. Bars such as the multi award-winning Bar 1661 in Dublin, which specialises in poitín mixes, have helped the spirit travel beyond the Emerald Isle into cocktail menus in New York and fashionable areas of East London.

Typically 40% in strength, poitín can be made from grain, sugar beet and potatoes. One of its leading distillers is the award-winning Shortcross distillery on the 500-acre Rademon estate in Co Down, owned by David Boyd-Armstrong and his wife, Fiona, who inherited the estate from her parents.

Her father thought she was ‘crazy,’ explains David, when Fiona first suggested creating a distillery. Undeterred, the pair launched their gin in April 2014 after they married, started making whiskey in 2015 and produced poitín in 2021. ‘It has all the flavour punch of a whiskey, but the mixability of a white spirit,’ he explains, describing their own version as ‘soft, fruity, with a lovely hint of spice, which makes it very approachable. It works in everything from espresso martinis to mules—any cocktail that calls for gin, vodka or white rum, you can replace it with poitín’.

Today, poitín has become part of the tourist culture of Ireland under the banner of distillery tours. Reflecting Ireland’s history, there is a mild north and south divide to it. As David reveals: ‘In the south, you have to register as a brewery first before you can distil whiskey or poitín. In the north, brewing is covered under the distiller’s licence.’

Yet there has always been one Irish drinks tradition across the two jurisdictions, with poitín now emerging from being outlawed and learning how to behave in public — and being celebrated for it. No more men in blue chasing it down through the mountains. These days, the only thing being pursued is the perfect espresso martini.

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

If you haven’t yet visited the Schiaparelli exhibition at the V&A Museum, I urge you do so before it closes next month, for it displays that rarest of qualities in fashion: wit. This feature is far more unusual than you might expect, given that a certain lightness of touch is, at least in theory, intrinsic to the business of style. Yet, watching endless catwalk shows during my career at Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, I was struck by how often the designers were deadly serious in their intentions.

Such solemnity is understandable, given the fact that the industry has grown to become a vast, global trade, owned by billionaires and driven by the rapacious demands of commerce. Even so, one wishes for just a hint of Elsa Schiaparelli’s sense of humour, which she brought with such deftness to her creations.

One of my favourites is worth seeking out at the V&A: an ensemble worn by Jane Clark (wife of the National Gallery director at the time, Kenneth Clark) to the coronation of George VI in May 1937. It looks irreproachably discreet at first sight: an elegant, cream-coloured, floor-length gown, adorned only with a pattern of woven silver fronds and worn with an ivory silk velvet coat. Examine it more closely, however, and you will see a single button on the coat, featuring a buoyant, bare-breasted mermaid (who was thereby smuggled into Westminster Abbey).

Schiaparelli’s mischievous streak was also evident only a few days before the coronation, in the form of Wallis Simpson’s wedding trousseau. The twice-divorced woman who might have become queen, were it not for the abdication of her lover, Edward VIII, only five months previously, had ordered 18 outfits from Schiaparelli’s Paris couture house, in which she was photographed by Cecil Beaton to mark her impending marriage.

The shoot was staged at the Château de Candé in France (where the nuptials would take place on June 3), and Simpson chose to wear one of the most iconoclastic dresses of the epoch. Embellished with a larger-than-life scarlet lobster painted by Salvador Dalí, Schiaparelli’s friend and collaborator, which dangled between her legs beneath a crimson waistband, the provocative gown is arguably more brazen than blithe.

Certainly, Dalí’s insistence on the erotic symbolism of the crustacean reflected his well-known artwork Lobster Telephone, where the supposedly phallic tail is placed over the mouthpiece.

Even so, the startling effect of seeing the soon-to-be Duchess of Windsor dressed with such surreal irreverence makes for a remarkably memorable form of visual iconography, which still retains its subversive power almost 90 years later.

If Schiaparelli remains, at least in my view, unrivalled in her talent for wit, how might we incorporate a playful element in our own wardrobes, without looking facetious? The late Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire, was able to carry off that trickiest of sartorial looks, the slogan-embellished sweater, with one of his design: a navy jumper emblazoned with the phrase ‘Never Marry a Mitford’.

This worked for him because his wife was, of course, the youngest of the fabled Mitford sisters (Debo, whose equally eclectic flair for fashion included her cherished Elvis slippers), but when the Duke’s in-joke was reproduced in a high-profile Gucci collection in 2017, it didn’t achieve quite the same result.

My own favourite jumper is a contemporary copy of the garment that brought Schiaparelli to fame in 1927, featuring a white trompe-l’oeil bow around the neck of a simple black knit top. It’s certainly not laugh-out-loud funny, but I like its quiet allusion to the past, which seems to me preferable to trying too hard with heavy-handed visual puns.

Needless to say, I am not a great fan of ‘amusing’ ties or novelty Christmas jumpers, but, if they have a place in your family traditions, then I’m all for continuing the good cheer. Just don’t do as Dalí did, who nearly ruined the lobster dress when he tried to smear mayonnaise over it; fortunately, Schiaparelli stepped in to prevent him, by pointing out that it was already festooned with prettily painted parsley.

This feature originally appeared in the October 21, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

The most popular topic of conversation is rarely the most fashionable, a fact that became apparent earlier this month as I moved into a new flat and hit the shops. It was my first time in a while buying such essentials as salt, pepper and olive oil, having moved home temporarily this winter and relied on the kindness of parents. The bill hurt.

Call it frequency illusion if you wish, but the primary chatter at the Frieze art fairs seemed to be about groceries. Art is a glamorous field, poorly paid. A friend at Christie’s lamented the cost of seafood as another mourned a client who recently moved his business to Europe. Poorly paid, and dwindling.

Most revealing was the absence of queues for Frieze’s usually thriving pop-up restaurants. I witnessed many punters commit the ultimate art-fair sin — eating a Pret sandwich — and realised that even high-earners now consider £18.50 for silken tofu to be a bit much. The strain felt by diners and the establishments that feed them has seeped into their relationship. How, I asked chefs, do you negotiate between staff asking for better pay, diners demanding better food and suppliers hiking prices as they deal with import and fuel costs?

Margot Henderson, doyenne of Rochelle Canteen in Shoreditch and The Three Horseshoes in Somerset, has a few ideas. Her kitchens, she reveals, will buy a whole cow and butcher it in-house, ‘so a fillet costs the same as a shank’, serve smaller cocktails ‘so the ice doesn’t melt by the time it’s finished’ and ‘use less butter than before’. Seasonal ingredients, she adds, are equally important, reducing reliance on imports and preservatives and lending rural growers a hand.

Yet where such cost-saving measures are usually boosted by mark-ups, certain restaurateurs will opt instead for menu discounts. Gabriel Waterhouse’s new venture, a restaurant inside a potters’ shop in Hackney, offers a seven-course tasting menu for £70 on Sunday afternoon, down from £125. ‘How else do you make your business attractive when people are spending less money?’ the chef asks. Being full on Sundays, he adds, boosts staff morale and sends the right message to passers-by on the day with the most footfall.

By contrast, those who keep prices high in fear of adding to losses may struggle. It pays to be counterintuitive, says Flora McTeare, co-owner of Soho’s Khao Bird, which serves a cocktail inspired by its own bartenders called the ‘I am broke’. ‘It must be the only cocktail in London to admit to using Lidl vodka,’ she says. Honesty may yet be the best policy.

On the plane to Stockholm, where Rolls-Royce launched the new Series II Spectre, two questions kept cropping up among the assembled motoring writers. 'Didn’t they only launch the original about five minutes ago?' and 'What do you think they could have changed?'.

The answer to the first question is easy. It may not feel like it but it’s actually three years since the Spectre — Rolls-Royce’s first ever electric model — first hit the road.

And the second answer? Most of the conjecture was pretty jokey: 'They’ll have re-designed the wing mirrors’, and, ‘different colour options for the go-faster stripes’ were favourites. Both guesses proved wrong because at first glance the you'd think that nothing has changed at all.

That's not a bad thing and actually shows admirable restraint since the original was, and is, absolutely wonderful. So little has changed, in fact, that I did toy with the idea of simply re-running my review of OG Spectre from October 2023 to see if anybody would notice.

I came to the conclusion that they probably wouldn’t, but that nor could I short-change anyone by not actually, you know, doing my job. So here we are: Spectre II: what has changed?

So, the wing mirrors are unchanged, as is the go-faster stripe — or ‘Coachline’, as Rolls-Royce call it. The latter is still, rather magnificently, painted on by hand by the man with the steadiest hands in the automotive industry. The answer to the upmarket game of 'spot the difference' is in the wheels: new 23-inch, forged steel rims and very smart they look too, though slightly scary.

There are cosmetic changes in the cabin too, where, a snazzy new clock is now available — and the revamped dashboard dazzles even so than it did before.

There are new fabrics, the most exotic of which is called ‘Duality Twill’, a rayon fabric made from bamboo that was apparently inspired by Le Jardin des Méditerranées on the Côte d’Azur, next door to Sir Henry Royce’s former winter home, Villa Mimosa. Naturally, you can order this in green to make sure your friends ask you about it.

It's easy for non-Rolls-Royce customers to wonder what difference such things make; but that's a mistake no actual Rolls owner would make. Customisation is absolutely ingrained in the Rolls-Royce identity right now: there’s no such thing as a ‘standard model’, and there hasn’t been for years. If you just want a car, parent group BMW have plenty of other things they’ll sell you. If you want an exquisite expression of your personality, then you’ll want to head to Goodwood — or New York, or Shanghai, or one of the other global design hubs — and deck your Roller out exactly as you want it, whether it's all in black, covered in diamonds, or in two-tone purple and yellow, like a bowl of rhubarb and custard.

The choice really is the point, the difference that shows off Rolls's craftsmanship, and which also happens to push the average price of a Rolls-Royce out to the half-a-million-pounds mark. For a company used to measuring its profit in the billions, that is an important consideration.

You don’t make money like that without giving your customers what they want — and it turns out that in the case of the Spectre, what they want is to actually drive the car. That might sound silly, but the superyacht-like Phantom is one you buy to be chauffeur-driven in, and the huge-selling Cullinan (more than 3,000 were delivered in 2025) is the family Rolls. Spectres are being driven 4,000 miles a year, and usually with the owner alone — and thus the speed and the practicalities have been improved.

The range is 18% better (you'll get almost 400 miles from a full charge now), while charging is 14% quicker, there's 10% more torque from the electric motors in standard spec, and if you go for the sportier Black Badge spec, the car is substantially quicker still. There’s 500kW of power through ‘Infinity Mode’ and up to 1100Nm torque in ‘Spirited Mode’. If those numbers mean nothing to you, then ‘double what you’d get in a Porsche Macan’ will cover it.

The bottom line then? Rolls-Royce have made some nice upgrades to what was already a way-beyond-nice car. Think of it as a beautiful house that you loved before, but which has now been rewired and given a new roof. These are not things you'd immediately notice, but when living with them, they can make a difference. As Royce himself once said, ‘Small things make perfection, but perfection is no small thing’.

Is it a bit cheeky of them to call it ‘Spectre Series II’, rather than just quietly delivering the new bits? Probably, but then again, it gave them a chance to make a thing of it, put on an event in a swish Swedish hotel, and get everyone talking about their sole electric model once more. Job done.

‘The cult of the toy Pomeranian is a most fascinating hobby, as well as a fashionable craze, that charming breed having made rapid strides within the last few years,’ Country Life reported in 1903.

First seen in Britain in 1807, this ‘elegant featherweight’ of breeds was a pet of George III and just ‘as the House of Orange brought us the pug, so may the House of Hanover have given us the Pomeranian’.

The breed — also historically known as a loup-loup or spitzdog — is a native of Pomerania, a district in northeastern Germany, on the shores of the Baltic Sea. The spitz breeds (of which the Pomeranian is the smallest) are of ancient origin and were originally widely scattered throughout Europe and parts of Asia and China. These dogs have pulled sledges, and guarded the homestead and the livestock, as well as being killed both for food and their pelts.

In England, white spitz or Pomeranian dogs were kept as ‘dogs of the drawing-room’, appearing frequently in Gainsborough’s paintings such as Perdita (1781) and The Morning Walk (1785). These dogs were larger than the ones that would eventually be bred for the show ring.

Stonehenge described the breed in The Dog (1872): ‘This cheerful little dog is extremely common on the continent of Europe where it goes by the name of loup-loup. Until lately it was very rare in England, but within the last 20 years it has become very common as a house dog. It is not embraced, however, by the fanciers and is not prized highly by anyone, being of no use but as a companion.’

Stonehenge, however, had underestimated the trend of the times. In 1891 Queen Victoria became the first reigning monarch to exhibit at an established dog show by sending collies and Pomeranians to Crufts, and in 1897 Country Life reported that: ‘Mrs C. Houlker, of Accrington, a well-known lady exhibitor, has every reason to be pleased with her visit to the Ladies’ Dog Show in the Botanic Gardens, Regent’s Park, for during the show the big sum of £200 for her winning Toy Pomeranian, Black Prince, was offered and accepted. No such sum has ever before been paid for a Pomeranian weighing a little under 6lb, but as he is considered the most typical one ever bred, his purchaser, a Manchester newspaper proprietor, has not paid dearly for his ambition to own a dog quite at the top of the tree... His show career has been a phenomenal one, and, although but a little over two years old, he can boast of having beaten every Pomeranian of note. Since he was first shown, when a little over 12 months old, he has won over 100 prizes, including cups for the best non-sporting dog in the show, and championships.’

By 1909 Pomeranian breeding was such a ‘profitable hobby’ that Country Life reported on a lady ‘who was said to have purchased a motor-car from one year’s proceedings of her kennels’.

Country Life suggested that as ‘a pet and companion no other toy dog can equal ... the charming, dainty, loving, and lovable little Pomeranian’ — a compact, short-coupled little dog, with a fox-like head and small, erect ears.

‘To see the Spitzes let out is one of the prettiest sights at Windsor, as they go, helter-skelter, into their paddock, a flurry of bright fluff where the sun catches their gold and silver coats scattered about on the green turn,’ the magazine reported on visiting Queen Victoria’s kennels at Windsor in 1897. ‘How prettily they answer to their names when Hill, the kennel-man, calls them, each in turn all alertness, in perfect attitude for inspection.’

This is an extract from 'The Country Life Book of Dogs' (Rizzoli, £50) by Agnes Stamp.

Something is happening with dahlias. This week, my Instagram feed has been shades of peach, sunshine yellow and café au lait. I spotted a bunch of cream-coloured dahlias in the lobby of the newly opened St. Clement hotel. And Flowerbx, the chic, floral delivery company who specialise in single-variety arrangements, currently has dahlias in 10 colours for sale on the website, including cotton white, mother of pearl, bruised plum and sex on the beach. The latter is a fleshy colour and named after the cocktail.

‘I love how intricate and flamboyant dahlias can be,’ says Lydia Redcliffe. ‘Some truly don’t look real, and with thousands of varieties to discover and grow, there is always something new to fall in love with.’ Redcliffe is the founder of Forty One Flowers and gardens on a sliver of land in South Devon (above). In June, Lily Allen was presented with one of her big and bouncy bouquets while performing at London’s O2 Arena. Redcliffe‘s tips for growing dahlias include planting seeds in rich, well-drained soil, ensuring the tubers don’t get too wet, and ignoring them for a period of time until they really get going, and then pinching out the growing tip. ‘There’s something exciting about growing dahlias from seed because every dahlia grown from seed is genetically unique, so there’s always the possibility of discovering, or breeding, a completely new variety,’ Redcliffe says. ‘I think their enduring popularity comes down to the fact that they exist outside of trends. There are so many varieties in such an extraordinary range of forms, colours and textures, that there really is a dahlia for everyone.’

Tiffany & Co. has caught the bug. Their most recent Blue Book high jewellery collection is called Hidden Garden, the brainchild of artistic officer Nathalie Verdeille, in close partnership with the Tiffany Design Studio. It was shaped by the legacy of one of history’s most important jewellery designers, Jean Schlumberger, and by references to nature and horticulture: vines, a pineapple, fantastical birds and, of course, dahlias.

The Dahlia parure is composed of three unique pieces featuring overlapping petals, cast in yellow gold and platinum and set with tsavorites. A green-hued, grossular garnet, tsavorites were discovered by British geologist Campbell Bridges, in 1967, near the Tsavo National Park on the border of Kenya and Tanzania. Tiffany & Co., then under the exacting eye of Henry Platt, introduced tsavorites into their designs in 1974.

Rare and vibrant tsavorites are about 1,000 times rarer than emeralds. ‘This year’s collection stands out for the large number of exceptional gems it contains,’ says Victoria Reynolds, chief gemmologist at Tiffany & Co. ‘While we are showing extraordinary diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires we are also pushing beyond traditional selections by adding very unexpected gem types and unusual combinations that achieve particularly striking silhouettes.’ The use of special stones is, I think, a fitting tribute to the dramatic dahlia, the flower of the season.

Alfie Nickerson (above), founder of Burnt Fen Flowers, grows dahlias in Norfolk. Pompom dahlias are his floral fixation, selected for their extended vase life. ‘They come in every colour and shape, and they are the most prolific flower we grow,’ he says. ‘A plant that flowers for three months is an amazing thing, and without them, I probably wouldn’t be able to be a flower grower.’

His process of framing dahlias has evolved. ‘Dahlias are tubers, so I now grow them as perennials. I used to lift them and store them over winter, but I now leave them in the ground all year round. This is because our winters aren’t too cold, and we cover them with muck and straw, so as long as it isn’t -7°C for a week, they are usually much stronger and better plants than when you lift them,’ he says. ‘The most important stage is when they have just sprouted; you need to protect them from slugs and make sure they get off to a strong start.’

It is no surprise that, with their remarkable geometric patterns, Tiffany & Co. isn’t the only one to fall under the dahlia’s dazzling spell, and they have a rich cultural history, particularly in Victorian flower painting, botanical illustration and the decorative arts. The Aztecs valued dahlias for their practical, medicinal, and nutritional uses rather than just their appearance. The Danish flower painter Johan Laurentz Jensen depicted dahlias alongside pineapple and grapes in 1835, when the dahlia was still relatively rare in Europe, and they appear in Virginia Woolf’s diaries and letters about the garden at Monk’s House in East Sussex. Her husband, Leonard, bought them frequently, and Woolf's descriptions often emphasise their bright, blazing colour and associations with high summer. René Lalique first introduced the dahlia motif to his eponymous brand in 1931 and his hard-to-come-by Art Deco glass and crystal jewellery, featuring the same motifs, sometimes come up for auction at Christie’s.

Dahlias might be less ubiquitous than roses, lilies and irises, but their rise coincided with the 19th-century passion for collecting, breeding and displaying exotic flowers. The dahlia was not just a pretty bloom; it was a horticultural novelty and a status symbol. Long, thanks to Tiffany, may our fascination with it continue.

'In my carefree days in Vienna,’ recalls Joseph Wechsberg in The Cooking of Vienna’s Empire, ‘it was said that the test of a perfect wiener schnitzel was to be able to sit down on it, for at least one full second, without leaving a fat stain on the seat of your pants.’ The art, of course, being in that greaseless crust. Quite who’d want to consume the aftermath of such an experiment, I don’t know, but it just goes to show that the Austrians take their breadcrumbed veal very seriously indeed.

One can see why. For this is a dish worthy of worship, fit for kings, archdukes and child prodigies alike, traditionally a veal escalope, cut from the leg and pounded until less than half an inch thick. Purists will insist upon using the ‘kaiserteil’, or the ‘Emperor’s cut’ — lean, fine grained and wonderfully tender — sliced from the inner thigh. But, unless you happen to be friendly with a fleischhauer (Austrian butcher), it can be pretty hard to find.

In Austria, anything other than white veal would be verboten — so much more milky, delicate and pale. Yet the traditional European practice of rearing calves in crates to stop them moving about, without the barest glimmer of sunlight, on an exclusively milk (or milk-formula) diet is anything but humane. Crates have been illegal in the UK since 1992 (and in the EU since 2006) and 95% of our veal is rosé (or pink), meaning the calves are reared in open-sided, straw-bedded barns with a normal diet and plenty of social interaction. The meat may be a shade or two darker, the texture more firm, with a markedly pronounced ‘beefy’ taste — but at least you can eat it with conscience clear.

Don’t skimp on the size. A proper schnitzel should hang over the sides of a large plate, blotting out any sight of the rim. First, you dip the meat in flour, then beaten eggs, then breadcrumbs before sizzling in hot fat. Colour is everything. ‘Certain Bruegel paintings and Stradivari violins have the perfect hue,’ sighs Herr Wechsberg — although some prefer theirs a little less burnished, a little more Klimtian in its golden allure.

You do not, of course, have to use veal. Chicken is the most usual substitute, together with pork and even beef. The variations are as many and varied as there are peaks in the Austrian Alps. The Holsteiner schnitzel, or veal Holstein, is perhaps the most famous, named after Baron Friedrich von Holstein, a diplomat of the imperial period. At its most baroque, it involves all manner of caviar, truffles, crayfish tails and smoked salmon. Yuck. Keep it simple — just a fried egg, criss-crossed by a pair of anchovy fillets. There used to be a very good version at Fischer’s in Marylebone and at The Wolseley in Piccadilly, but ever since the great Jeremy King was so rudely evicted a few years back, I’ve never returned.

For those who like keeping things simple, there’s the naturschnitzel, dipped in flour, without breadcrumbs; the Cordon Bleu schnitzel, said to be a Swiss invention, sees a slice of ham and Emmental cheese folded within the meat; paprika schnitzel is drenched in a sour cream and paprika sauce; the parma schnitzel covered with grated Parmesan; whereas the sardellen schnitzel is stuffed with an anchovy and butter paste. Veal Milanese, that great northern Italian dish, is a close relative, although the meat is cut from the rib rather than leg and fried in butter instead of lard.

Whatever you choose, it must be served fresh from the pan. ‘Many people leave it in the oven,’ warns Herr Wechsberg, the wise man of the wiener schnitzel, ‘which is a sin.’ I agree. Attack with a sharp knife and serve with a quarter of lemon. Oh, and if you do want to remove any excess fat from the crust, avoid the seat of your pants. Kitchen roll will do just fine.

Wiener schnitzel

This recipe comes from Shaun Hill’s Salt is Essential, one of my favourite cookbooks from one of our finest chefs. Hill is a deeply modest man, but still ‘shakes the pans’, as he puts it, at The Walnut Tree in Abergavenny, South Wales. ‘There are a few basics,’ he explains. ‘Don’t flatten the meat too thinly or it will taste of fried breadcrumbs and little else. I like the meat to be upwards of 1cm thick. Fried stuff needs the contrast of something acidic, so either lemon juice or a sharp salad as an accompaniment.’

Ingredients

Serves 4

4 100g veal escalopes

3 eggs, beaten

100g white breadcrumbs (panko is fine)

Lard for frying, or vegetable oil plus a knob of butter

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

• Tap out the escalopes to 1cm thick. The flattening is partly to tenderise the meat and is easily accomplished by putting the escalopes between two sheets of clingfilm, then, if you have no cutlet bat to hand, using the flat side of a heavy knife or the base of a small saucepan to produce an even result.

• Season the escalopes with salt and black pepper, then egg and breadcrumb each one.

• Spoon enough lard or oil and butter into a frying pan to give half a centimetre depth and heat this. You need the fat to be hot enough to seal and crisp the schnitzels without burning them and you can test for this by dropping a piece of bread into the pan — it should sizzle and then turn golden.

• Fry the escalopes, one at a time, unless you have an enormous pan. You may need to strain the fat, wipe the pan free of burning crumbs and then return the lard or oil, so that each subsequent schnitzel is as good as the first.

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

Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of human needs starts with a broad base of essentials — food, warmth and the like — and builds up to an apex of art, literature and fashion. They may not be necessary, but these are the facets of life that define a culture.

In a hierarchy of dietary needs, staples such as potatoes and rice would be at the bottom, cakes right at the top. You don’t eat gateaux to survive, any more than you recite poetry to ward off marauding wolves, and, if pastries are nutritional civilisation, then macarons are its haute couture.

In Paris, they take fashion seriously and they take macarons seriously, too, debating where to go for what is best as they might the latest trends in coats or handbags. This was first brought to my attention when I began taking my daughter to Paris 30 years ago. We stayed in a two-room, third-floor apartment in the 1st arrondissement. The owner lived in the flat above.

Madame Mouret was a retired art teacher. A native Parisian, she loved her great city and, in particular, its cake shops and cafés. During every stay, we trooped up to her apartment and settled among the potted ferns and books on Degas and Matisse, sipping Chamberyzette and nibbling financiers bought at Hédiard rather than its more illustrious neighbour Fauchon because, our host informed us: ‘Hédiard is for food, Fauchon for theatre.’

During these visits, Madame Mouret would quiz us on what we had been up to, reacting always with great enthusiasm to our wanderings. She took much interest in what we ate, particularly sweet things. She had an encyclopaedic knowledge of her city’s salon de thé and uncompromising opinions on what you should order when you went to them. ‘At Angelina, you must have the Mont-Blanc, never the baba au rhum,’ she admonished. ‘You go to Maison Stohrer for that.’

When it came to macarons, however, even the redoubtable Madame Mouret sat on the fence. Would she pick Ladurée ahead of Gérard Mulot, who trained at Dalloyau (‘One goes there for the opera cake, of course’)? That fellow Jean-Paul Hévin at Le Petit Boulé, a farmer’s son from the Loire, was not to be discounted either. ‘Hmm, it is hard to judge,’ she would conclude eventually, ‘but you have time. Best you go to them all and decide for yourselves.’ We have been trying ever since.

Originally, the macaron was a simple biscuit, believed to have been brought to France in 1533 by the chefs of Catherine de’ Medici, bride of the future Henry II. The name comes from the same source as macaroni, meaning ‘fine dough’, and the first macarons were as plain as pasta — small and made from roughly ground almonds, icing sugar and egg whites. For several centuries, such macarons were a standard item on trays of petits fours, popular yet anonymous. All that would be changed at Ladurée.

Louis Ernest Ladurée had opened his first cake shop on the rue Royale in 1862. It was his second cousin, Pierre Desfontaines, who would transform the macaron in much the same way Prof Henry Higgins refashioned Eliza Doolittle. Searching for a means to revive his firm’s selection of petit fours, Desfontaines hit upon the splendid notion of sticking two macarons together with a toothsome layer of ganache. The result was a sensation, the appeal of the new double-decker macaron instantaneous. As the great French food writer Pierre Rival noted, the macaron is ‘small, discreet, and yet so appetising—without a moment’s hesitation in one mouthful it is gone — it is an innocent pleasure par excellence’.

There is something comforting about the macaron, too. It evokes nostalgia. Today, you can sit in the stylish verdigris and gilt upstairs parlour of Ladurée on the corner of rue Jacob and rue Bonaparte — the third branch of the shops to open — eating Desfontaines’s great culinary innovation and soon you’ll find yourself agreeing with those elegant Parisians who comment during turbulent times: ‘The world seems such a mess… but when you’re in Ladurée, you feel everything will be alright.’

Modestly, Desfontaines chose not to name his new creation after himself, nor, of course, could he patent his invention. Soon, his style of macaron was being copied all across Paris. Today, there are more than 1,600 patisseries in the French capital selling them.

Competition bred invention. A macaron that tasted of almonds and chocolates was not enough and the colour was, well, a little boring. Soon, the pastry chefs of Paris were refining the chewy little biscuit, making it pink with raspberry, green with pistachio and purple with blackcurrant. French gastronomy had been built on seasonal ingredients and the macaron adapted to the changing seasons — Alpine strawberries in the summer, blackberries in autumn, sweet chestnuts in the winter.

As the 20th century came to an end, the Parisian macaron experienced its own nouvelle vague. It was sparked by the arrival, at Ladurée in 1997, of renowned pastry chef Philippe Andrieu. Monsieur Andrieu introduced more exotic flavours: basil and lime, salted-butter caramel and Yunnan tea. He also followed the fashion houses and, each year, released special spring and autumn ‘collections’ of flavours. It was a necessary evolution because by now Ladurée had serious competition, not only from older rivals such a Gérard Mulot, who had opened his first shop in 1976, and Jean-Paul Hévin, who had burst onto the scene a dozen or so years later, but from a new breed of wildly inventive pastry chefs. Pierre Hermé, a man at the forefront of the revolution in French patisserie that was begun by his mentor Gaston Lenôtre in the 1970s, opened his shop in rue Bonaparte in 2001, creating a sensation with a crêpe-suzette macaron that fused caramel, orange and Grand Marnier.

Japan’s influence on French food began back in the 1970s when the godfathers of nouvelle cuisine, such as Paul Bocuse, rejected the elaborations of classical French food in favour of simpler, cleaner arrangements and flavours. Fusing the luxury of French pastry with the sobriety of Japanese aesthetics is not the easiest trick to pull off, but Sadaharu Aoki, who trained in Tokyo and opened his shop near the Jardin du Luxembourg in the first year of the new millennium, manages it in specialities that use Far Eastern ingredients, such as black sesame, yuzu and matcha.

Later, others would arrive on the scene. Hugues Pouget, formerly pastry chef with Guy Savoy, opened Hugo & Victor to great fanfare in 2010. He offers regular three ‘star flavours’ of chocolate, vanilla and caramel supplemented by five seasonally changing varieties that might include kaffir lime or citronella (from his own garden in southern France).

Former world-champion pastry chef Emmanuel Ryon, who made his name at the über-glitzy Franco-Muscovite Café Pouchkine, set up Une glace à Paris and, focusing on natural ingredients, Monsieur Ryon concocts the kind of flavours that might draw a nod of approval from Heston Blumenthal, including smoked vanilla with pine, strawberry and hibiscus and buckwheat, almond and nougat.

For those who don’t want anything avant-garde, the traditional macaron flavours remain, of course. In Paris, there is room for the classic vanilla macaron as well as those flavoured with jasmine, just as there is space for the Hermès scarf as well as the Miu Miu cone bra.

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

If you went up to my attic today, you would find, well, not that much because I live in a block of flats and don’t actually have one. However, if I did, you would likely come across a suitcase with a missing wheel and Christmas decorations arranged by colour. What you would not find is an exceptional collection of antique and vintage jewellery — but that’s exactly what one Worcestershire family had stashed away in theirs for decades.

The treasure trove was rediscovered during a routine clear out and spans more than two centuries of jewellery design. The majority, though, is Art Deco in design, and highlights include a Cartier diamond bow and Egyptian Revival diamond brooches. The former, crafted in yellow gold and silver and set throughout with old-cut and rose-cut stones, dates to 1905.

The collection in its entirety is going under the hammer on Wednesday October 21 with Elmwood's.

'It is rare to encounter such a fine and cohesive selection of jewels from this period that has remained together,’ Joe Kendrick, head of sales at Elmwood’s auctioneers, says, ‘allowing us to appreciate the collection as a whole, rather than as individual pieces.’

An elaborate Edwardian diamond devant-de-corsage (also known as a stomacher) and a menagerie of Victorian-era animal brooches (below) are among the other intriguing items. Think a charging bull in silver and yellow gold with a ruby eye, a donkey, partridge, fox, greyhound and, somewhat more bizarrely, a sea gull. Animal motif jewellery was hugely popular in the 19th century, reflecting the Victorian people’s passion for nature, symbolism and the decorative arts. As in floriography — the Victorian tradition of using flowers to communicate secret messages, emotions, and declarations that were too intimate or improper to say aloud — animals were used to convey qualities such as strength, courage and loyalty.

The whimsical collection was started by the grandmother of the present owners. Subsequent members of the family are believed to have added to it, charting 200 years of changing jewellery tastes and design as they went. The total pre-sale estimate is £150,000.

Visit the Elmwood's website for more information and to bid.

The last few weeks have been about as exciting as it gets for people who like sheets being pulled off of things, as Bentley, Jaguar, Tesla, Citroën, Alfa Romeo, and many more have all revealed new cars and concepts to the huddled masses of journalists, influencers and everyone else at home.

What is very clear is that we, the consumer of the car, are at a crossroads. Do we want futuristic things that can shoot compressed air and do backflips? According to Musk, we would be foolish to inhabit a world without them. But perhaps more intriguing than a glorified Hot Wheels created by the world’s richest man is how many makers have decided that to go forward we must go back. It’s a confusing world, the car one, when the conservative path is trodden not by Musk, but by the French, Germans and Italians. Go figure.

Tongues were wagging when the new Citroën 2CV rolled across the red carpet at the Paris Motor Show, a clear homage to the ubiquitous original, but they fell to the floor when Alfa Romeo unveiled the Cuorerosso concept, a four-door saloon powered by a hybrid V6 engine. And can you blame said tongues? Just look at it.

But if I had to pick a highlight from recent weeks, it is surely the Porsche Mission S, which has taken the idea of an analogue resurgence to the extreme. Here is a car that will sit above the 911 in the German maker’s range, it will come with a manual transmission, it has no screens and it needs an actual, physical, key to start it and stop it. Porsche has yet to reveal what will be powering this thing, but safe to say it will be fuelled by petrol. Again, just look at it.

What’s particularly intriguing about all these launches (bar the Tesla one, which we shall never speak of again) is how beautiful everything looks. The past few years have seen an influx of new EVs and hybrids from China that have been bought by punters in their droves, which is unsurprising considering that they work and that they are very cheap. Cheap things that work is usually a pretty successful strategy in getting people to buy things, and the message appears to have cut through in various boardrooms across the Continent that to compete, they must make things that people truly desire.

Necessity breeds invention. For the past decade, BMW, Peugeot, Alfa Romeo and all the rest have been resting on their laurels, at least when it comes to design, focusing too much on function and not enough on form. When everything looks the same, what else are people to do other than choose with their wallets?

So it’s nice to see a return to some proper car design. Shapes and angles and lines that you want to look at and be around, either because they are ‘retro’ and iconic, or because they just look so sexy you can’t imagine driving anything else. Go on, let’s look at the Alfa Romeo again.

And the Mission S, as a treat.

Obviously, many of these cars won’t make it to full production, and those that do will be very expensive. But they are the starting point for new designs, theories and directions, and one which allows the rest of us to differentiate what we drive and what we see around us, which is good because I spend a lot of time on the motorway, and it’s about time I had something nice to look at again.

What makes a car memorable is not what apps it has, or whether it can park itself or not. Those things are helpful, but they are not features that make you fall in love. What elevates the experience of driving is combining its utility with art; making the everyday exciting is the one thing that cannot be copied nor derived. You either have it or you don't. It's why heritage is so important, because it is a key foundation on form and feeling, and you cannot just draw it and build it in a factory in some province somewhere.

It's felt a bit hopeless recently, with new car after new car seeming bland and uninspiring, at least to drive, as firms rush to put more technology at one's fingertips, as if that is all that matters. It was time for a correction, and it feels like we've got one. As the nights close in and the temperature drops, the timing couldn't be better.

Bugatti, now in book form

If you are reading this, chances are you enjoy reading about cars, and potentially also like looking at pictures of cars. The good news is that there is are some new books that can help you indulge those desires.

First up is the Story of Bugatti, by Country Life’s very own road-going rake Adam Hay-Nicholls. He explores the story of the timeless EB Bugatti badge, from the Type 35 racer all the way to the Bolide of the 21st century.

'Bugatti built the most elegant cars of the pre-war period. Its works drivers were a courageous bunch, many of whom flew fighter planes in the First World War and several of whom were absolutely vital to the French Resistance in the Second World War,' says Hay-Nicholls. 'After the war the brand was as good as buried, but then resurrected itself with the help of VW to once again become the most decadent car builder in the world. Only thing is, instead of artists and aristocrats, spies and war heroes, they’re now bought by footballers and crypto bros. As Le Patron, Ettore Bugatti, stipulated: “Nothing is too beautiful, nothing is too expensive."'

It is the latest release in the bestselling Story of Cars series, and is out now.

Slightly less crypto bro-y, and certainly far more refined and English, is Aston Martin, which is the focus of the latest of teNeues ‘Milestones’ series. From humble beginnings in 1914, the British carmaker has built icons such as the DB4, DB5, V8 and Valhalla, and this latest book is surely a must-have for anyone partial to James Bond’s carriage of choice. Penned by Roland Löwisch, it’s on shelves from November 12.

'A pocket square offers one of the simplest opportunities for individual expression,’ says Tom Williams, London retail manager of British tailor Turnbull & Asser. ‘A jacket has a breast pocket for a reason and leaving it empty can feel rather like leaving a corner of a beautiful work of art unpainted.’

The company, founded in 1885 and located on Jermyn Street, since 1903, has been providing the wherewithal for nearly a century.

Lengths of exclusively English silk are hand-printed in Cheshire using a mix of traditional screen-printing techniques and digital methods (for ‘largest colour impact’), before being cut into individual squares. The four edges are rolled and stitched by hand in an intricate process that gives a strong and refined finish.

Described as ‘a canvas on which our designers have unleashed their creativity’, the styles range from bold with bright patterns to simple and subdued. Some are inspired by archival prints and others are collaborations with artists and illustrators. Bespoke monogramming is also available.

The finest arrangement of the pocket square is The Turnbull Rose, created by pushing the centre into a semi-closed fist, before the remaining silk is gathered and ‘picked’, much as one might pick a flower. The silk is lifted from the hand and the remaining fabric gently twisted to create the stem.

Once placed into the pocket, the gathered centre remains visible above it, forming the distinctive rose shape — an English emblem, as Williams puts it, ‘rendered not in petals, but in silk’.

Silk pocket squares from £85. Visit the Turnbull & Asser website for more information and to purchase.

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

‘Our vines span 230 acres,’ beams Sarah Perrin, a tour and tasting guide at Rathfinny wine estate in East Sussex. It’s a grey autumn afternoon and a gusty sea wind hailing from the nearby Seven Sisters smacks us across the face. A hawk cries overhead. ‘The Romans always said the ideal spot for a vineyard was three miles from the sea,’ Perrin explains. ‘It diminishes the risk of frost, which can be fatal for vines not only in winter, but in spring.’ What about the hawk? ‘He scares away smaller birds,’ she laughs, ‘more cheaply and efficiently than would our plastic coverings.’ Inside a warehouse is a wine factory with towering basket presses in fashionable stainless steel.

As the wine harvest draws to a close, England’s vintners have cause to celebrate. ‘2026 has been a landmark vintage for Rathfinny,’ says the estate's co-founder, Mark Driver. ‘We’ve brought in top-quality fruit from across the estate that will be vinified and aged in our cellars, then sold in 2030/2031.’ The company is hoping to make roughly 30,000 cases of Sussex Sparkling this year, released through restaurants, hotels and independent merchants. ‘Our yields are up 30% from 2025 and akin to 2023,’ Driver explains: a year that produced what's known as a bumper crop.

He and his wife, also called Sarah, bought the farm where Rathfinny now sits in 2010 after both had made a fortune in the City. They converted the barns into accommodation and decided to become winemakers. A business such as theirs can take 15 years to become profitable — assuming there are no snags. Years like 2026 are few, far between and play an outsize role in ensuring that things break even.

Forty miles away at Nyetimber, the atmosphere is equally ebullient. ‘The year is tracking very closely to 2025,’ says Cherie Spriggs, the estate’s head winemaker (last year’s crop, though not as bountiful as 2023’s, was sweeter and of higher quality due to an exceptionally sunny summer). ‘We should produce about 1.5 million bottles this year,’ she continues, of which many will go to overseas markets such as China, Japan and Scandinavia. ‘It pairs well with the stalwarts of their cuisine,’ Cherie notes of these jurisdictions, ‘primarily fresh fish.’

Although Nyetimber does not yet allow purveyors to buy bottles en primeur, such an allocation could easily become more desirable for English wines in the future, Cherie warns. As vintners like herself celebrate outlier status in a landscape that has borne, overall, less than it usually would, this is a space well worth watching.

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

Somewhere along the line, cars lost their way.

It’s 2026, and they are bigger, heavier, more powerful and more technologically advanced than ever. This isn’t a good thing. Today you can buy a 1,000bhp family SUV, with a series of giant screens that can play YouTube and FaceTime your aunt in Australia. It will park for you and ‘ding’ every time you trickle over the speed limit. It will likely be electric, weigh nearly three tonnes and cost upwards of £100,000.

It’s not just SUVs that have gotten out of hand. Most sports cars are simply too big and heavy for proper, enjoyable driving. There’s that famous Colin Chapman quote, ‘simplify, then add lightness’. Today, it seems the opposite is true. Companies endeavor to ‘complicate, then add weight’.

Morgan didn't get the memo. This British company has been quietly hand-building its sports cars in Malvern since 1909. They are small, lightweight, analogue machines, without distracting touch screens and plastic body panels. Designed for driving first and foremost, they are built the old fashioned way; its current workshop has been in operation since 1918, with its workers still hand-beating body panels and carving wooden frames as they have for decades. It might now be majority owned by an Italian investment group, but Morgan is distinctly old school and proudly British.

‘Every car is coach-built in Malvern, with a significant amount of the work carried out by hand’, says a spokesperson for Morgan. ‘More than 90% of the parts used across our cars are sourced from within the UK, with more than half coming from the Midlands. Just as importantly, there is a continuity of skills and knowledge here. Craftsmen and women work alongside designers and engineers, passing specialist techniques between generations while continuing to develop them. Morgan is a global company, but that concentration of design, engineering, craft and manufacturing in Britain remains central to who we are.’ Walk through the orange brick walls of its Edwardian workshops and you’ll notice there is no hint of AI or autonomous robots. As a result, its lineup of cars looks like it hasn’t changed since the 1950s.

This is certainly the case outside the Bergen Børs hotel, a grand 19th century former stock exchange building in Norway’s second largest city. There are brand new Plus Fours, as well as the Supersports, Morgan’s latest and most advanced model. The unmistakable burble of a V8 idles gently under the bonnet of an early 2000s Plus Eight, a time when its engines were bought in from Rover. A retro futurist Aero 8 comes to life with its own V8 growl, while a British Racing Green 4/4 looks elegant with its longer silhouette designed to house two small adults, or more realistically, extra luggage, in the back.

I am here for Morgan Explores Norway, a four day drive through west Norway, which will take in the finest roads, landscapes and hospitality this part of the country has to offer. It’s one of a series of trips Morgan organises, with previous destinations including the Dolomites, the Pyrenees and Scotland, allowing enthusiasts to enjoy the view from behind their own Morgan or one rented from the company. For Norway, I am joining owners from across the world who have arrived in their pride-and-joys, spoked wheels and chrome bumpers gleaming in the early sub-Arctic sun.

My car for the week is a 2026 Plus Four. Finished in a dashing shade of Alpine Bleu Paon, it too looks right at home on the cobblestone streets of Bergen. Its wheels aren’t spoked; rather they are silver painted alloys inspired by the steel wheels found on the Jaguar D-Type, giving it a purposeful, sporty stance. Its familiar long louvred bonnet and extended side wings look straight out of the 1950s, while the round front LED lights cleverly integrate the indicators and side lights, giving a subtle minimal update on the classic Morgan front end.

Like all Morgans, it’s the kind of car that stops people in its tracks. I am reliably told by more than one owner that the first question people ask them is ‘what is it?’, quickly followed by ‘how old is it?’. I later find this out myself, with my interrogator stunned when I tell them it is brand new.

The Plus Four isn’t made to be just looked at. It’s been designed as a driver’s car, without any of the technological inconveniences that plague more mass-produced machinery. Because it’s built to low numbers, it doesn’t have lane assist or speed limit warnings like many of its competitors. Meanwhile its low slung driving position and outstanding visibility immediately inspire confidence, so anticipation builds as we leave the city.

Getting onto bigger open roads, the Morgan comes into its own. Its precise steering allows you to place the car accurately through a long sweeping bend, with the car’s small body meaning you can play around with different lines. ‘We deliberately prioritise lightweight construction, feedback and connection rather than simply pursuing headline performance figures’, says the Morgan spokesperson. ‘The Plus Four’s strength is the purity and familiarity of the traditional Morgan sports-car proposition. It retains a particular lightness, simplicity and immediacy that are enormously important to us.’ While electronically assisted, the handling has plenty of feel, bolstering the Plus Four’s analogue approach. Furthering this is the beautifully designed cabin, complete with old school dials, smooth wooden detailing and not a touchscreen in sight. The only downside is the gear selector and plastic paddles behind the wheel.

While you can spec a Plus Four in manual for the full analogue experience, mine is automatic, featuring the well regarded eight-speed ZF gearbox. This is paired with a BMW 2.0-litre turbocharged inline-four engine, which produces 255bhp, helping the car hit 60mph from standstill in 4.8 seconds.

This doesn’t seem especially quick when you compare it to the pace of some aforementioned SUVs, but as it weighs only 1,040kg, it is seriously agile and fun. It doesn’t try to overwhelm you with straight line pace; rather its lightweight character makes each journey exciting. ‘You're not isolated from the driving [like other new cars]’, says Dennis Glavis, managing director of Morgan West in Santa Monica, who is participating in the drive. ‘Even though it's got power steering, it's so light and nimble that you know exactly what the car is doing. It's got that connection that a lot of new cars don’t.’

This is especially true around the fjords surrounding Sandane and Øye and on one of Norway’s most famous roads, the Trollstigen, or ‘Troll’s Ladder’. A picturesque mountain pass, it took 20 years to carve the road into the jagged landscape, beginning in 1916, when other parts of Europe were at war. The full road, with its 11 hairpins and 9% incline wasn’t finished until 1936, by which point cars were significantly more advanced. While too tight to be a true driver’s road, the Morgan makes light work of the twists and turns, careering around each hairpin like it’s on rails. Accelerate out of each corner and hear the whooshing of the turbo and feel the wind in your hair. Don’t forget to take your eyes off the road for a second to admire the Stigfossen waterfall plunging alongside you.

The Morgan is part driver’s car, part vessel for exploration. It’s not dissimilar to a motorcycle in that sense; drive one and you are exposed to the elements in the same way. It’s this sense of adventure and the resulting camaraderie that clients enjoy, both about these trips and wider Morgan ownership. ‘A car that's fun to drive attracts a certain clientele and personalities’, says Brian Lewis, a Morgan owner from the USA on the trip. ‘If it was a high-performance race car, the people would be different. But this is a very fun, generous group, and after every trip we talk about where we’ll go again.’

‘We did the Dolomites, the Pyrenees, and came straight from Morgan Explores Scotland to Norway for this’, said his partner Marlene. ‘I enjoy the people that you meet and their stories. What I really loved is all the people on the side of the road watching these cars go down in all these different colours, smiling and waving.’

For others, it’s the history and image that appeals. ‘It's the soul and the heritage’, says Christian Hallan, lifelong Morgan enthusiast and former dealer. ’It's handmade, still in the same production facilities as it's been since 1919. It's unique that they have survived, and also that it's socially accepted everywhere. You turn up somewhere in a brand new Morgan and everybody thinks, "Oh, you have restored a nice old car”, when in fact it’s the opposite.'

That’s one of the interesting things about new Morgans. They might look vintage, but they aren’t complete luddites. There’s the engine and gearbox, which are decidedly modern, powerful and efficient. There’s double wishbone suspension, a setup still used in Formula 1, and the aforementioned electric steering. A bonded lightweight aluminium chassis keeps weight down, while interior luxuries include heated seats and a bluetooth stereo.

The latest model, the Supersport 400, even has serious performance, with 400bhp from its BMW 3.0-litre turbo inline-six. These combine with fancy adjustable Nitron dampers for proper track ability and a power-to-weight ratio similar to a Porsche 911 GTS RS. That’s possible because it only weighs 1,170kg. The Supersport is the most advanced car to ever leave Malvern, but at heart it’s still a simple, lightweight British sports car.

In some ways a Morgan is the antithesis to modern car ownership. In buying one you are compromising slightly, whether on all-out comfort, luggage space or tech. But that is precisely the appeal. They offer something that is lost on other new cars — fun. And that’s true whether you’re traversing Norway’s Atlantic Ocean Road or the B roads of Kent.

‘A cynical person, asked to solve the conundrum, “When is a bulldog not a bulldog?” might be disposed to reply, “When he is a Bouledogue Français,”’ quipped Country Life at the turn of the 20th century.

Citing the French bulldog’s ‘bat ears’, less projected jaw, lack of furrow in the skull, and large eyes, the author nonetheless went on to conclude that ‘as all these characteristics were present in the small English bulldogs of fifty or sixty years ago, there is substantial ground for the belief that both are of the same stock’ — thus overturning the conclusion of a different article a year earlier, that ‘the word “bulldog” applied to this breed is a misnomer’ as ‘the Bouledogue Français certainly resembles more closely the Boston terrier’.

Despite its name, the Frenchie does not solely owe its existence to dedicated breeders in France. In the past, perhaps unsurprisingly, French breeders hotly contested the role the British played in the dog’s origin, but it is now generally accepted that the breed is a descendant of the English bulldog and its lineage traces back to the British toy bulldogs of the 1850s that had long been popular in the Midlands.

When Nottingham lace-makers emigrated to France during the Industrial Revolution, they took their little bulldogs with them. There, they are thought to have been crossbred with other short-faced types, eventually resulting in the ‘Frenchie’ as we know it. ‘It is quite understandable that the Parisiennes, with their love of the bizarre and the petite, may have welcomed these little dogs,’ Country Life reported in 1957.

It was not long before the vivacious little dog ‘full of courage, yet with clown-like qualities’, captured the hearts of locals, being first prized by street traders and courtesans. The breed would appear in paintings by Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec — the latter would depict a French bulldog, Bouboule, at the Moulin Rouge in several works — and soon they became a status symbol of the upper classes and wealthy Americans travelling to Paris in the late 1800s.

According to the ship records of RMS Titanic, a French bulldog named Gamin de Pycombe, belonging to US banker Robert Daniel, went down with the ship in 1912 (his owner survived). In the early scenes of the 1997 film, a Frenchie is shown boarding the boat.

In Britain, King Edward VII was a great admirer of the breed and owned several, notably his beloved brindle dog called Peter. This royal patronage may have had some influence with The Kennel Club, who unbent slightly in 1905 and allowed bouledogues français to be registered as a ‘sub-variety of Foreign Dogs’, and in 1912 the club capitulated and acknowledged French bulldogs as a separate breed.

Country Life would celebrate the ‘neat little Frenchman whose contour seldom brings to mind a roly-poly pudding, or is disfigured by blubber that effectually destroys any shapeliness’ and advised that ‘the ideal French bulldog is smart and cobby, strongly built without being coarse, and displaying an activity that is superior to that of the English bulldog’.

By 1939 Country Life accepted that French bulldogs presented a very distinct type, a fact that caused the late Colonel F. Romilly to write: ‘The essential characteristics of French bulldogs are as redolent of France as the bouquet of her wines, combining the exquisite quality of Bordeaux, the glorious vitality of Burgundy, the exhilarating sparkle of Champagne with the culminating satisfaction of an eau de vie of purest Cognac.’

Clownish is also a description long associated with the Frenchie — Will Judy wrote of the breed in the 1936 Dog Encyclopaedia: ‘He may look serious but he is a laughing philosopher ... He is always a clown.’

Enthusiasm for this cheerful, wrinkly-nosed dog may stem largely from its endearingly comical appearance — with its big bat or ‘tulip-shaped’ ears, sturdy body, and exaggerated features — but also from its role within celebrity culture.

The breed has always had a certain je ne sais quoi that appeals to the rich and famous. Yves Saint Laurent owned four; D. H. Lawrence wrote poetry about his ‘bat eared dog’, Bibbles; and Nancy Mitford had three, presumably inspiring Plon-plon, the little French dog in The Pursuit of Love. The breed even appealed to Russian royalty — Ortipo, the mischievous Frenchie belonging to Grand Duchess Tatiana Romanov, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, is mentioned frequently and fondly in the family diaries.

In recent years, the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Bloombergs, Lady Gaga, Reese Witherspoon, Martha Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Leonardo DiCaprio, the Beckhams, and Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps have all been confirmed Frenchie fans.

The late Carrie Fisher’s therapy dog, Gary, was a popular fixture on the red carpet, and renowned dog lover and actor Tom Hardy even took his French bulldog Blue to a film screening in 2021, posing for photographs in Leicester Square, London.

This is an extract from 'The Country Life Book of Dogs' (Rizzoli, £50) by Agnes Stamp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your aesthetic hero

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

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

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

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

The possession you’d never sell

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

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

An exhibition that has really impressed you

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

A book you’ve found inspiring

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

The music that you work to

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

The last podcast you listened to

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

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

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

What you’d take with you to a desert island

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

Your favourite painting

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

What gets you up in the morning

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

The items you collect

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

The hotel you could go back and back to

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

The most memorable meal you’ve ever had

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

The best present you’ve ever received

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

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

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After Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death in Florence in 1492, the best specimens from his collection of cameos were valued at a considerably higher sum than his best Botticelli paintings.

Mademoiselle Avrillion recalled that the Empress Josephine’s greatest pleasure when in residence at Château de Malmaison was to sit by the fire showing off hers. For George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough, who had nearly 800 superlative examples, they were, according to Sir John Boardman, ‘a solace from his busy sister, wife and many children’.

Tragically, Marlborough’s collection was broken up at auction in 1899. To date, less than one-third of them has been accounted for and, ever since I became ‘cameo conscious’, it has been my dream to re-discover one of those fabulous missing jewels.

I came to appreciate cameos late in life, having always associated them (foolishly) with my grandmother’s Wedgwood imitation cameo brooches and dull, dusty exhibits in provincial museums. What changed my mind was a 2,000-year-old Roman agate cameo of an elegant hound still set in its original gold ring displayed in the window of Bernardo Antichità, the only proper jeweller on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy.

For the two years we lived in that city, I visited that ring more or less daily. How I longed to possess it. Eventually, I plucked up the courage to enter the shop and try it on. Our twins don’t know how close they came to being moved from the international school (costly) to the local state school (free).

I may not have acquired the ring from Signor Antichità, but, thanks to the hour or so he spent showing and telling me about his stock (for he had many other exquisite pieces), I did acquire a passion for cameos.

There are two types of glyptics: intaglio, which are cut into stone, and cameos, which are carved in relief. The oldest intaglios — Mesopotamian cylinder seals — date to about 3500BC, whereas it wasn’t until about 500BC in Greece that we see the earliest examples of miniature sculptures being carved out of gemstones, such as jasper, carnelian, rock crystal and amethyst.

When the first multicoloured, multilayered sardonyx was imported from India, it allowed, to quote expert James David Draper, ‘artists to manipulate the strata of the stone in relation to the design, exploring the stone’s depths to enhance its visual impact’.

Figures or objects could be picked out in one or more colours against a solid or translucent ground. Interestingly, the cutting method has barely changed in two and a half millennia. Instead of using a chisel or riffler as you might expect, the carving is achieved with the point of a drill, which is used to rub abrasive powders into the stone.

Cameos feature in every period of Western history. Initially, they spread from Greece to the rest of the ancient world. From the fifth century onwards, cameos went primarily into church treasuries and were used to decorate reliquaries, crosses and book covers. After about 1400, wealthy patrons of the Arts began to build impressive private collections.

The popularity of cameos grew and grew throughout the Renaissance and into the 17th and 18th centuries (no Grand Tour shopping list could be said to be complete without a cabinet of cameos). Elizabeth I gave Sir Francis Drake an enamelled gold locket set on the front with a sardonyx cameo of two heads. Catherine the Great owned a staggering 10,000 examples. Queen Victoria commissioned a cameo with the jugate heads of herself and Albert for the Royal Order of Victoria and Albert.

What makes these tiny gems so desirable? The skill required to create a well-executed cameo is clearly sufficient reason in and of itself — in other words, their allure could be explained solely on the grounds of the workmanship involved. Yet there are other, complicated reasons.

In the same way that a cook can make a sauce stronger by reducing it, an artist can make their subject more powerful by shrinking it. A cameo is not only a miniature work of art, it is a concentrated work of art. A minute cameo portrait or scene can engender as great an emotional response as the most magnificent, large-scale drawing, painting or sculpture. Interestingly, many of the world’s most famous artists, from Botticelli to Sir Joshua Reynolds, feature cameos in their pictures.

However, where cameos have the advantage over, say, Michelangelo’s David or Picasso’s Guernica, is that you can wear them. You can set them into rings, pendants, brooches, earrings, bracelets, tiaras and even, as Napoleon’s Crown of Charlemagne (which incorporates cameos taken from the treasuries of Bourges, Arpajon and Saint-Denis) proves, a crown.

Small is, indeed, beautiful.

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

When Nigella Lawson published Nigella Bites in 2001, a minor media storm ensued in the lifestyle supplements, based on one chapter she had titled ‘Trashy’. Featuring recipes based on her love of what, at the time at least, were considered ‘lowbrow’ foods, one of her most surprising creations was a deep-fried Bounty bar with pineapple. Had Lawson gone too far this time?

Perhaps, but it’s hard to imagine her publishing a similar recipe starring a deep-fried Mars bar or KitKat. Since its debut on the confectionery shelves of British grocery stores 75 years ago, the Bounty bar has always had a slight aspirational edge over its competitors, thanks to its chief ingredient. Coconut may be a divisive taste, but Mars’s advertising campaigns have always associated the Bounty with a brand of sun-smothered tropical luxury with which, frankly, the likes of the Double Decker and Toffee Crisp can’t compete.

Forrest Mars, son and heir of Mars founder Frank Mars, drew inspiration from the American Mounds bar, also a coconut-and-chocolate combination, to create a version tailored for the British market. Introduced here in 1951, Bounty arrived in a country still under the carapace of rationing and Britons were immediately appreciative of a treat that promised a life beyond bomb sites and Workers’ Playtime.

You certainly can’t accuse Bounty of losing its identity over the decades. Competitors have flirted with modernity, minimalism and celebrity endorsements, but Bounty has persisted with its palms, sea and sunshine. In the 1970s, the slogan ‘The Bounty Hunters: They Came in Search of Paradise’ turned its fans into adventurers, albeit ones whose greatest hardship was deciding where to tie the hammock.

The blue-wrapped, milk-chocolate version is the most commonly seen, although there was once an alternative, something of a cult item. The dark-chocolate Bounty, long favoured by purists, came in a red wrapper and, to its fans, was a superior product due to the more bitter casing balancing the sweetness of the coconut. However, these admirers were a committed few: in 2023, Mars paused production of the red bars, claiming they had been temporarily delisted ‘for operational reasons’. Three years on and with no sign of its return to the newsagents of Britain, it has to be concluded that the dark-chocolate Bounty has gone the way of winklepickers and the SDP.

Yet there are few chocolate bars that inspire quite such tribal loyalties. One either joins the coconut camp or one does not, with no discernible middle ground. Today, 75 years after its launch, Bounty remains British in spirit. Not because it resembles Britain, but because it embodies our instinctive native desire, usually realised on a drizzly Sunday afternoon in November, to be as far away from home as possible.

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

There are plenty of reasons to watch the new film adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. The beautiful country houses, the costumes, the romance — and, perhaps most importantly, the dogs.

Director Georgia Oakley was determined to fill Austen's world with animals. 'It was always really important to me to have loads and loads of animals in the film,' she says. Rather than giving them elaborate storylines, she wanted to follow in the footsteps of Austen and make them a part of everyday life — much as our own pets are a part of our everyday lives. It's a nice touch, and one that makes the world of Norland Park and Barton Park feel more lived in.

First up is Phyllis the pug, who appears alongside Fiona Shaw's Mrs Jennings. 'I've had a lovely time with my pug, Phyllis, who behaves well or badly depending on the day,' says Shaw. Apparently, Phyllis even inspired the actress's laugh as Mrs Jennings — quite an achievement for a dog who isn't actually mentioned in Austen's novel.

There's Danny the whippet, a breed with a long history of keeping company with the aristocracy. Dogs of whippet type appear in 18th-century portraits, although they were equally popular in northern mining towns, where whippet racing was once a favourite pastime. Elegant, affectionate and capable of reaching speeds of up to 35mph, they're just as happy tearing across a field as they are occupying the best seat in the drawing room.

Enter Olivia the old English sheepdog. Long before becoming famous as the Dulux dog, the breed was developed in the 18th century to drive livestock across the British countryside. Their shaggy coats, affectionate natures and capacity for chaos have made them firm favourites ever since. Paul McCartney even wrote Martha My Dear about his beloved sheepdog, although, rather sadly, the breed is now on the Royal Kennel Club's Vulnerable Native Breeds list.

The rest of the canine cast includes great Danes, originally bred in Germany to hunt wild boar; greyhounds, whose speed and elegance have endeared them to the aristocracy for centuries; and beagles, those cheerful little hounds with an extraordinary sense of smell and a selective approach to obedience. Elizabeth I hunted with small beagle-type dogs, and Prince Albert later kept a pack.

Mastiffs also make an appearance. These enormous, gentle dogs have guarded British houses and estates for centuries. Shakespeare praised their courage in Henry V, and one is even said to have protected her wounded master at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. Despite their formidable reputation, they're famously affectionate family companions.

In the original novel, Sir John Middleton has a favourite hound named Folly, whose puppies he is rather generous with. He even offers one to John Willoughby, before discovering the young man's appalling treatment of Marianne and declaring him 'such a deceitful dog!'

Unfair on the dogs, if you ask me.

A collection of highly sought-after watches will head to auction after being seized by HMRC during a major investigation into multi-million-pound payroll fraud. Their previous owner clearly had an eye for horology, but not for their tax obligations.

The five watches — a Philippe Dufour Simplicity, a Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar Split-Seconds Chronograph, two Audemars Piguet Royal Oaks and an Omega Speedmaster Racing — are thought to be worth around £1 million, although the final tally could be considerably higher.

Leading the collection is the Philippe Dufour Simplicity, widely regarded as one of the finest achievements in independent watchmaking and among the most coveted watches on the collector market. First unveiled in 2000, it was a deliberate departure from the horological wizardry for which Dufour was known. His aim was to prove that simplicity, far from being the enemy of sophistication, could be its ultimate expression. Each iteration, like all of Dufour’s other creations, was hand-finished and assembled by him. In 2021, a 2004 model CHF756,000 (about £685,000) against a CHF250,000–500,000 estimate. Not bad for a watch whose greatest trick is making the complicated look deceptively simple.

The rest of the line-up is hardly small change. The Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar Split-Seconds Chronograph combines two of traditional watchmaking’s most demanding complications, while the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak helped turn the humble steel sports watch into a luxury icon. One of the two available to bid on is a Flying Tourbillon ‘Premier’ model, from a limited edition of just 10 pieces. The Omega Speedmaster Racing, meanwhile, brings a little motorsport pedigree to proceedings.

As with all Unreserved Government Auctions, every lot will sell, whatever the final hammer price. For once, time really is money — and the countdown is on.

The Unreserved Government Auction is with Wilsons Auctions. A range of Rolex watches and jewellery completes the sale. Click here for more information and to register to bid.

There's nothing quite like the feeling of trying a piece of clothing on in a shop — preferably one with good-size changing rooms and flattering lighting — and it fitting like a tailor-made glove. Covid did its best to rid us of such sensory joys, but I'm delighted to report that in-person shopping is making a major comeback.

‘The decision to open our first flagship store in Belgravia was a direct result of customer demand,' says Wiggy Hindmarch, founder of womenswear brand Wiggy Kit, whose pop-ups proved so successful that ‘a permanent space was an inevitable decision'.

I've always believed that in-store shopping gives us a better understanding of fabric, quality details and finishing touches, and what suits our bodies. Plus, it's impossible to tell how something will make you feel from a digital description. The opportunity to judge with our own eyes and hands will always be more fun, fruitful and efficient than doom-scrolling online.

When menswear label Thom Sweeney launched its Autumn/Winter collection, they decided to step away from e-commerce altogether. ‘We wanted to go back to our roots to focus on what we have always done best,' said founders Thom Whiddett and Luke Sweeney, ‘getting to know the client and dressing them in person.' Collections are still visible on the website, but treat it less like a catalogue and more like an invitation to visit the Old Burlington Street, Mayfair, store.

This month, American brands Loeffler Randall, famed for its pleated bow shoes and citing 'British appetite', and Ulla Johnson threw open the doors to their London flagship stores on Chiltern Street and Sloane Street, respectively. DeMellier will follow in their fashionable footsteps this autumn, in Chelsea, and Dunhill is busy putting the finishing touches to its new flagship shop in Mayfair.

Somewhat residential in feel, these retail spaces often comprise gallery walls and spaces to relax in among the rails, and sometimes cafés and gardens. Occasionally, they open inside actual former townhouses — like Audemars Piguet.

I, for one, am delighted and ready to move in. It's goodbye clicks and hello bricks.

A little over a year ago, a beautiful invitation dropped into my inbox (how millennial) that informed me my dear cousin and his gorgeous fiancée were tying the knot. The setting? A 15th-century barn on Symondsbury Estate, less than five miles from the Jurassic Coast. Naturally, my first concern was not where to stay or what to wear, but what would be the perfect wedding guest car.

All the best wedding cars have been well documented — they’re typically something you wouldn’t get to drive in daily life, be that down to their prohibitive price tag or rarity. Think of your Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, E-Types, DB5s, and so on. Although some to-be-weds opt for old bangers that have a sentimental significance, you can normally, and should, bet on the wedding car being the most impressive chariot on the big day.

However, when it comes to choosing the best wedding guest car, little has been written and perhaps even less understood. You don’t want to upstage the bride and groom's carriage of choice, but equally you don’t want to get lost in a car park of Range Rover Evoques and Sports. It’s a fine line to tread. Ideally, it wants to be something no one else is going to turn up in, but also practical enough to help with any disaster-averting errands.

To determine what makes the best wedding guest car, we must consider the circumstances and the role of the wedding guest. Is it urban or rural? July or November? Maid of honour or ring bearer? In my case it will be Dorset, the August bank holiday and general family member #14. We are hoping for sun, but it will probably be muddy and I could be asked to do anything from ferrying granny back to the Airbnb after one too many Chablis, to picking up the DJ and all their gear after his 1976 VW campervan breaks down.

Having done some reconnaissance a few months before when visiting family (yes, I am fun at parties), I knew the main and overflow car parks were effectively graded dirt and gravel, on an incline, uphill from the venue. With this in mind, and that regardless of the time of year you can always half expect rain as a wedding crasher, we’re going to want something with a two-speed transfer box and diff-lock just in case.

Since it’s the end of August precipitation is likely, but it’s also the last of the summer wine, we'll undoubtedly hit congested roads with holdout holidaymakers and caravans in tow. So, nothing sporty or low slung, as we won’t be going anywhere fast. The aim of the game is riding in comfort, high up to see over hatchbacks and around winding lanes.

Dorset is Land Rover country. Every model year and conceivable configuration retires here after hard yards in the fields, now resigned to doing over-priced faux farm shop runs and chauffeuring cockapoos to brunch. Anything too flash will elicit hypocritical accusations of Chelsea tractors. We want salt-of-the-earth credentials and nouveau-country-folk approval.

Family obligations are the make or break for a wedding guest car, but with a little experience and foresight you can anticipate almost any eventuality, no matter how eccentric or patience testing. If you’re a younger guest like me, driving rather than drinking, you’re going to get asked to ferry the infirm, tiddly or both. That means a minimum of five seats, plenty of room for gifts and headroom for all manner of headdress. But once you’re amenable to transport someone, you are inevitably going to be asked to haul some thing, so boot space for all and sundry is a must.

With these all important criteria in mind, I opted for the Ineos Grenadier Quartermaster Black Edition. Sensible.

As expected, I got caught behind every flavour of tentbox, caravan, campervan and motorhome headed down South for the bank holiday weekend. Crisp air conditioning and an outstanding sound system made the paint-drying traffic tolerable and the start-stop engine meant my wallet wasn’t completely empty after the five-hour drive.

On the morning of the wedding, that auntie (you know the one) pre-gamed the breakfast mimosas a little too hard and needed a shuttle to the venue. Apparently, there was ‘no longer space’ for her in any of the wedding procession cars… And, despite being told multiple times that we weren’t doing fascinators, she still insisted on wearing one because, ‘Princess Beatrice still does'. Fortunately, for both of us, there were no issues accommodating the obnoxious ornamentation.

My weather prediction soon became a reality. The heavens opened and the car park turned to sludge. Elevated on 18-inch alloys and chunky Bridgestones, we had no problem negotiating the rivers and ponds forming in the claggy conditions; and thankfully, the JBL subwoofer in the rear, right under that auntie, drowned out the back seat driving.

The rain was truly torrential. Auspiciously, but quite unplanned, this particular Quartermaster came with a 270 degree batwing awning. Aside from evoking images of Bruce and Alfred sitting on folding chairs in a Caravan and Motorhome Club campsite, sipping tea from the Bat-Thermos, it was a life saver. The wing spanned the entirety of the passenger side so we all popped out dry (save my better half, who extended the awning) and deployed our Bat-Umbrellas for a quick dash to the church.

After the ceremony, the clouds parted, giving everyone enough time to make it back to their cars and onto the reception. A small but growing group of gentleman guests were crowded round the Quartermaster in its tuxedo, which in turn was surrounded by a sea of navy Range Rovers and Land Rovers. The attention was short-lived though. As the bridal car came to collect the newlyweds, the crowd dispersed to fawn over the English White Rolls-Royce Phantom, adorned with matching ribbon and stringed tin cans.

While trying to negotiate the fleet of Rovers Land and Range all trying to leave at once, one of the bridal cars picked up a puncture, which meant I now needed to ferry four new passengers — three bridesmaids and the ring bearer (Pippa the cockapoo), along with a boot load of booze to the reception venue. Which sadly meant that auntie would need to find alternative transportation to the reception. What rotten luck.

I almost made it to Cinderella time without further incident, but there was one final 'Trinity, would you mind…?'. I was introduced to three groomsmen holding each other up like a tipsy-teepee, covered head-to-toe in muck from trying, and failing, to traverse the sodden field standing between them and their accommodation. My other half herded them into the truck bed, shut the tonneau cover and we took a very gentle drive across the field to reunite them with their long suffering girlfriends.

Most will deride the Quartermaster as overkill for the seemingly simple task(s) of a wedding guest car, but much like the people that scoff at the humble doomsday prepper, they’ll all be running to you when the zombies come, begging for shelter and your tins of SPAM.

In 1935, Country Life reported that just two years earlier, an article by Lady Kitty Ritson had appeared in a London newspaper titled ‘What Is a Schnauzer?’ The staunch, sturdy little dogs had arrived in Britain only a decade earlier, and in a short space of time had ‘gained in popularity, that such a question is now scarcely ever heard at a show, and even in the country, as a yokel points to one of these dogs, you may overhear the remark: “Them’s Snorzers, them is.”’

The Duchess of Montrose was one of the first to bring Schnauzers to Britain, keeping them at her extensive kennel at Brodick Castle on the Isle of Arran. A standard bitch called Busserl von der Grünenbaum, imported as a puppy from Vienna in 1924, would deliver her first litter on British soil in January 1926. Arthur Croxton Smith would later credit the Duchess with ‘being the pioneer of a breed that is likely to become popular’. In 1926, she wrote to the magazine about the ‘rare breed’ to inquire if anyone else knew of this dog ‘in England, as [she had not] seen more than [her] own and one belonging to a celebrated soldier, who had his dog all through the war’.

When the breed arrived in England, Country Life reported that it seemed as if they would ‘boom’ in much the same way as Alsatians had done a few years earlier, but the approach of the Second World War prevented the breed’s advancement. Like Poodles, Schnauzers come in three sizes: the standard (or medium-sized) variety; the Miniature or Zwergschnauzer (introduced to the United Kingdom by Mr W. H. Hancock in 1930); and the Giant, Munich, or Riesenschnauzer, a variety that would not appear on British shores until the 1960s.

A common misconception is that Schnauzers are associated with the terrier family; they are, in fact, herding dogs. Von Stephanitz, in The German Shepherd Dog, declares that Schnauzers belong to the rough-haired intermediate form of driving dogs, and expressed emphatically that they have nothing to do with the short and stocky Pinschers or snappers. Schnauzer enthusiast Captain Williams revealed to Country Life in 1937 that he believed the breed originated from cattle drovers from the Württemberg pastures, who had driven cattle up into Germany. Those who had achieved good sales at the carousel sought other means of transport home and left some of their dogs behind. These were crossed with the wolf-grey Spitz, and later with the French Poodle. In the case of the Giant Schnauzer, it would be crossed with the black Great Dane, ‘to make his hair shorter and his body larger and black’.

The Schnauzer was once known in its native Germany as the rauche or wire-haired Pinscher, while ‘Schnauzer’ was more or less a nickname, meaning snout, and refers to the dog’s outstanding feature — the strong whiskered muzzle. The hirsute furnishings of the face are certainly the breed’s distinguishing feature, ‘plentifully equipped with hair about the head, which is strong and long. They have a moustache and chin whiskers, and their eyebrows are beetling’, Country Life expressed in 1937.

Although the breed’s original vocation was that of a general-purpose farm dog and an excellent vermin exterminator, the Schnauzer’s ‘amazing faculty for discriminating between friend and foe have made him the most popular of all dogs in Germany and Austria for the protection of warehouses’. The Giant Schnauzer has been used as a police and army dog and the little Miniature, ‘with a growl which might well belong to a dog three times his size, still guards the bakers’ carts as their masters deliver the bread from door to door’, Country Life revealed in 1935.

Champions of the breed would also note that they ‘adore children as much as they hate rats, and their temperament does not lead them into mischief in the country’ and, as the faithful little dog with a Teutonic yap ages, ‘his beard may go white, his youthful sense of fun never diminishes, and if he has a fault, it is that, when at last you put him to rest, you can only heal the hurt by buying another Schnauzer’.

This is an extract from 'The Country Life Book of Dogs' (Rizzoli, £50) by Agnes Stamp.

I saw a coat and I liked it. This, in itself, is not unusual. Some people’s eyes are too big for their stomachs; my coat collection is too big for my wardrobe. And I’m particularly partial to a coat that looks great and can do battle with the British weather. The coat I saw is a Burberry parka with a map of London picked out in raised embroidery so tactile that the city appears to almost lift itself from the fabric.

I found myself wondering why I liked it. Was it the parka? The map? The slightly improbable combination of the two? And, more importantly, when did maps become cool enough for one of Britain’s biggest brands to start decorating entire collections with them?

London has been mapped for more than 2,000 years — though cartographers have not always been very interested in helping us get to where we want to go. Instead, they’ve revealed not only how the city has expanded outwards, but how Londoners understand their own city.

One of the earliest surviving depictions is the Cottonian map, dating from around the 12th or 13th century, when places were mapped according to their religious and political importance. It was followed by: the Tudor-era Agas map, made right before rapid Elizabethan expansion; William’s Morgan’s 1676 London map, produced after the Great Fire and a testament to Sir Christopher Wren’s rebuilding ambitions as well as the reality that emerged; and John Rocque’s monumental 1746 map which covered an area of squares, gardens, villages and newly developing suburbs that would soon be swallowed whole by London.

Then there are the maps that are not really maps at all, including Harry Beck’s 1931 Underground effort, Paula Scher’s riotous, 21-colour silkscreen treasure (above), and Ursula Hitz’s typographic offering. They were made in different centuries using different technologies, but they’re all big and bold and an attempt to make sense of London.

For all their beauty, maps have never quite had the headline-making cachet of other collectibles (think Lalanne sheep, Jean Royère furniture or Lucie Rie ceramics). Until now. Wealthy boomers collected blue-chip paintings. Gen Z — who view paper maps as aesthetic wall art or tools for experiential travel — is opting for collectibles, a $320 billion market. In 2022, Roque’s Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster (c. 1749) sold for more than £58,000 at auction; last year, one of Beck’s annotated proofs fetched £88,900 at auction. Young collectors are striving to create a personal narrative, says Emanuela Tarizzo, director of Frieze Masters. ‘Collectors, whatever their age, are searching for stories that resonate with them, and for a sense of discovery.’ In other words, everyone is tired of homogenous, mass-produced slop.

Burberry's London landmark map design — which appears on fleeces, T-shirts, umbrellas and silk scarves, as well as the parka — turns the familiar business of mapping London into wearable art. The pieces, a part of the Winter 2026 collection, designed by Daniel Lee to celebrate Burberry’s 170th anniversary, are available to purchase at a month-long Harrods pop-up.

The brand opened its first store in the capital at 30, Haymarket in 1891; its trench coats — the garment with which the brand is still most readily associated — are synonymous with our wet, urban landscapes and have London names. Kensington, Chelsea, Waterloo and Camden. The midwinter show, held at Old Billingsgate Market, channeled a London that I, for one, definitely recognise: moody, damp and in a constant state of flux. The space was dimly lit, and decorated with resin puddles and check-patterned scaffolding.

In other words, Burberry has co-opted London as its own. Several of the pieces are embellished with their knight motif, but it is the map of famous landmarks, from Buckingham Palace to Burberry’s headline-making headquarters, that really stands out. Perhaps this is why I keep coming back to the parka. I, too, want to tame London, to understand it — and what better way to try and do that by wearing it. The best bit: it’s made to order, so you won’t find yourself playing spot-the-parka all over London.

Burberry's London map-embroidered cotton sateen parka in navy is POA. The Harrods pop-up is open until October 28.

The Hanhart 417 and 417 ES chronograph had two important customers. The German army — specifically its pilots — and Steve McQueen. Quite how a 417 ES ended up on the wrist of one of America's most famous actors in the early 1960s is anyone's guess.

Despite being one of his favourite timepieces, it didn’t, however, come with huge fanfare like his TAG Heuer Monaco moment in the 1971 film Le Mans. Instead, its use was documented in family photographs.

'It was always assumed that my grandfather acquired the watch somewhere around The Great Escape time,' says his grandson, Chase McQueen. 'As we were going through the archives and talking to my grandmother [Neile Adams], we actually figured out that he probably acquired it somewhere in late 1960 or early 1961, because he's wearing the watch in a little known movie called The War Lover, where he plays a bomber pilot named Buzz Rickson. If you look, you can see the Hanhart watch in that film, so we know he discovered that watch at least two years before The Great Escape.'

Nearly 70 years on, Hanhart has released its first official Steve McQueen edition, developed in collaboration with Chase and his sister Madison McQueen. 'Projects like this are important to us,' Chase says. 'Not only is it a way for us to discover our family history and who my grandfather was, but it’s a way for younger generations to understand why he was so cool and to be able to touch and feel and see some of the things that made him who he was.'

The 417 ES Steve McQueen Limited Edition No.1 (about £2,185) is limited to just 300 examples worldwide. The McQueen family was keen for the replica to look as original as possible — with subtle nods to their grandfather, including his signature. Throughout the process the team referred to various photographs and films. The goal was to balance authenticity and modernity, in order to bring the right mixture of 1960s and 2020s together. The final watch features a historic Hanhart logo and aged radium lume — so the hands and numerals illuminate in a warm hue reminiscent of the time period.

'The most difficult part was that we don’t have high resolution photos from the 1960s,' says Felix Wallner, joint CEO of Hanhart. 'When zooming in, we saw some images where we think the lower line says "shockproof", so we put the signature there. In addition, we looked closely at the strap because we wanted to rebuild it as good as we could. In the colour photos, you can see that the strap he wore was a very dark brown cuff strap.'

The contemporary strap is made from a material called Shell Cordovan, by Italian tannery Comipel. The horse leather is said to be four times more robust than cow leather. An exhibition case back means that the wearer can see the flyback mechanism dancing away in the hand-wound piece.

One of Hanhart's chronograph's best-known identifiers is the red pusher — and this special-edition timepiece is no different. According to company legend, a pilot's wife painted his pusher red so that he would think of her when he used it — and come home safe. (The boring reality is that pressing the pusher resets the time, so it was painted red to warn off pilots from pushing it unnecessarily.)

In a nod to the romantic tale, each Steve McQueen edition comes with a bottle of red nail polish, concealed in the box underneath a plaque bearing the example’s number. It’s also accompanied by an ‘official timekeeping licence’, inspired by McQueen’s 1964 international racing license. The original document sold at auction in 2009 for $42,700. Hanhart’s version is signed by the individual watchmaker, and Chase and Madison McQueen.

The company crafts its watches in Germany's Black Forest, surrounded by steep hills studded with sheep, goats and cows. In McQueen’s honour, I cut through this perfectly peaceful environment in a 1969 Corvette Stingray while wearing a Limited Edition No.1 — in the name of journalism and to get a taste of what he would have felt, all those years ago. Despite its 39-millimetre case concealing my entire wrist, I felt like Stevia McQueen — a zero-calorie version of the King of Cool.

The watch and the car are icons today, but neither was that popular in their own time. The 417 ES was not available to purchase in the USA; the Stingray was overshadowed by the likes of the Mustang and Camaro, with less than 40,000 ever made in the 1960s. It’s a nostalgia for that era and the lore of legends who spotted their potential in the first place that has since changed things.

In, The Great Escape, McQueen’s character, Hilts, spend most of his time trying to reach the Swiss border — less than two hours from Hanhart's headquarters. This inspired some intrusive thoughts of disappearing into Switzerland with a classic Corvette and a one-of-300 timepiece, but the reality of Chevrolet’s 1960's engineering soon put an end to that scheme.

The Stingray, though gorgeous, is definitely more a case of form over function. Its brakes feel more like a suggestion than a certainty. Very little happens when you turn the steering wheel, and the automatic gearbox frantically scrambles around for the next gear. It is the utter antithesis of Hanhart’s precision horology.

The 417 ES is German engineering, top-to-bottom. It will take some time to break in, like a new recruit’s first pair of marching boots, but it keeps the cold watch back from your wrist.

'While we were simultaneously working with Felix, I would run to my grandmother [Neile] and ask her because she was the one who was around and was there when he had the original, and she gave me a great quote,' says Chase. 'She said, "You know, I'm sorry, honey, I'm 94, I don't know where that watch ended up, but I can tell you, he f***ing loved that watch."'

Luxury tinned tuna may sound like an oxymoron, although not if you pay a visit to the Tinned Fish Market in Borough, London SE1, or Spitalfields, E1.

‘People mistake high-quality tinned fish for a European invention,’ says founder Patrick Martinez, ‘when in fact it was nurtured on these shores and later became popular on the mainland.’ The best tinned fish, he claims, has been caught in Britain and marinated in Europe.

A native of Madrid, Spain, he first came to Britain 25 years ago and launched the Tinned Fish Market as a market stall in Liverpool in 2018. Tinned tuna, especially, is enjoying a moment due to a glut of bluefin in English waters. ‘There are 30 boats fishing for tuna around the UK,’ says Chris Ranger, founder of The Cornish Canning Co and allegedly the first Brit to ever tin the beast. ‘There are thousands of fish off Cornwall alone.’

A tuna, once gutted, can weigh 80kg, nearly half of which is pure meat. ‘A single fish yields about 400 cans,’ Ranger explains. He now makes about 80 a day, sold via his website, at market or at Falmouth Brewery in Cornwall, which has a pop-up shop at Upton Slip.

Another distinction of the age is encasing fish not in oil, but butter. ‘That’s how I really took off,’ Ranger admits. Don’t shy away from bolder flavours: Martinez’s shop, for one, sells everything from £4.50 mussel spreads to £45.95 tinned sea urchins. Does he have a favourite brand? ‘Rockfish is the best,’ he replies.

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

The Love Language of Flowers jewellery collection by Cece Jewellery transforms the forgotten tradition of floriography into wearable art.

For the uninitiated (and the unromantic among you), floriography is the language of flowers — the act of assigning particular meanings, emotions or messages to different flowers. The word itself comes from 'flori', meaning 'flower', and '-ography', meaning 'writing'.

It became especially fashionable in Victorian Britain, when flowers were used to communicate sentiments that might have been considered too intimate or improper to say out loud. A bouquet could therefore function like a coded letter.

However, the Victorians did not invent the tradition; instead they inherited and enthusiastically expanded it from the French. The pivotal publication was Le langage des fleurs, published in Paris in 1819, under the pseudonym Charlotte de La Tour. The RHS describes it as the first popular book on the subject.

Spanning charms, pendants, necklaces and rings, Cece Jewellery has brought delicate blooms to life with hand-painted champlevé enamel, intricate hand-engraving and diamonds set in 18-carat gold.

Flowers include roses for love, irises representing courage, wild daisies for freedom and wisteria conveying wisdom, each once a declaration of sentiment or celebration of character — although nobody will blame you for gifting or sporting them all.

Jewellery from £2,400. Visit the Cece Jewellery website for more information.

'There are 191 turns in eight miles,’ says the woman, who smiles as she warns of the Oatman Highway just up the road. She is a clerk in Cool Springs Station, the last roadside stop before this treacherous part of Route 66 in north-west Arizona. ‘Just stick to the speed limit and there’s nothing to worry about.’ She knows the face of a concerned traveller when she sees one.

I’m right to be worried. Dangerous Roads, a website dedicated to highlighting the world’s most difficult routes, describes it as having ‘very few guardrails giving you no leeway for error’. It is, indeed, technical, with steep drops that will put the fear in your passenger if they peer out of the window.

And it’s high — the summit of Sitgreaves Pass topping out at 3,595 feet above sea level. Those brave enough to drive it will be rewarded with a visit to the Gold Rush town of Oatman itself located after the summit. They can also brag that they’ve driven one of the oldest stretches of Route 66.

The Oatman Highway is very different from much of Route 66, which once followed a broadly diagonal line of tarmac from Chicago all the way to Los Angeles, California. It was intended to make cross-country travel easier, as well as boosting the income of the small towns it severed. The route was decommissioned nearly 40 years ago in 1985 and celebrates its centenary in November 11, 2026, so what does ‘the Main Street of America’ look like today?

Cyrus Stevens Avery (1871–1963) is widely considered the ‘Father of Route 66’. Settling in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he was an early advocate of the highway and lobbied to bring well-maintained roads to his home state. Following the First World War, the USA quickly modernised and the idea of a national highway system first percolated in the 1920s.

Avery, who was behind the movement, was particularly passionate about a transcontinental route from Chicago to the Pacific Coast. He even coined the catchy ‘66’ moniker and it stuck, despite Highway official’s attempts to push ‘60’ or ‘62’. On November 11, 1926, Route 66 was officially commissioned.

America has of course changed drastically since. Many of the small towns along the route have flourished, others have suffered ever since the Route’s decommissioning in the 1980s.

I joined the road in Flagstaff, Arizona, first flying into Phoenix and then staying at The Fairmont Scottsdale — a 2½ hour drive south of Flagstaff. It’s necessary to stop before you’ve even started — to adjust to both the new time zone and to the intense, dry heat.

It’s impossible to drive north and meet Route 66 without a stop in Sedona. The city is home to two state parks and surrounded by Mars-like red rock formations and vibrant green foliage. If you want to stop (again), try Enchantment Resort, in the heart of Boynton Canyon. The ideal base for exploring what are some of the America's most beautiful landscapes.

After all this overwhelming beauty, you might feel somewhat underwhelmed by Flagstaff itself, but there is plenty to see from the Romanesque Revival architecture in its historic downtown district to the many weathered motel signs that hint at the town’s past. One of the best is the Western Hills Motel sign from 1950, which still lights up defiantly at night.

In 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, Route 66 was described as ‘continuously paved’. It was good timing not only for the war effort, but for the thousands who were forced to flee west from the severe dust storms and periods of drought that became known as the Dust Bowl (1934–40) — one of the worst human-made ecological disasters in history.

The motor hotels, or motels, built along the road’s edge before the war were joined by hundreds of new ones in the late 1940s and 1950s, owners keen to draw in motorists with increasingly elaborate designs and bigger and brighter neon signs.

Streamline Moderne architecture was a popular choice and saw motels and cafés built to look like boats, cars — and even toasters. Mexican restaurants marketed themselves with giant sombrero hats, leaving little doubt of the cuisine served inside, and Native American-appropriated wigwams popped up outside convenience stores and diners. Fiberglass ‘muffler men’ loomed 25-foot-tall, advertising garages.

In 1950, more than 6,500,000 new cars were sold in the USA. Five years later, the number rose to 8,000,000. This boom, together with the excessive wartime use, signalled the end of Route 66. Much of the tarmac laid 20 or so years before was cracked and now undrivable and the road’s narrow widths weren’t designed for modern, larger cars.

It was the introduction of modern, multi-lane highways that put the final nail in the coffin. After returning from Germany, President Eisenhower, impressed by Adolf Hitler’s autobahn, quickly devised a complete overhaul of the country’s highway system and, over the next two decades, the majority of 66 was paved over or completely bypassed.

This makes driving the Route today challenging. It’s not until you get to Seligman — a small town that has one of the best collections of original 66 architecture, dating from the early 1900s — that the clocks feel as if they’ve truly turned back. Seligman is also the place that, in 1987, convinced the state of Arizona to designate the stretch from Seligman to Kingman ‘Historic Route 66’. This inspired the seven other states along the Route to do the same and, seven years later, the National Historic Route 66 Federation was founded — a group that’s busy preserving and restoring what is left.

The 100, unbroken miles Kingman takes in the run-down Historic Trading Post of Peach Springs, Hackberry General Store, the eccentric Antares Point Visitor Centre and Mike’s Outpost Saloon — all the while traversing dusty desert vistas often devoid of all other traffic. In Kingman, enjoy a home-cooked meal of pork chops ‘Florentine’ in a roadside diner before going one of two ways: California or, via Oatman and its tricky roads, Las Vegas.

Sin City was never on Route 66, but those travelling west today rarely miss it. The city is an acquired taste, but its bright lights and kitsch needs to be experienced at least once. It’s all laid out in front of me from the comfort of my air-conditioned room on the 36th floor of Fontainebleau, the Strip’s newest hotel. Better still is the hotel’s spa — every driver needs a massage to relax the shoulders — and its restaurants. Don’s Prime is a must for steak; La Fontaine’s breakfast will set you up for the day’s adventures.

It dawns on me that, although fractured, Route 66 still serves part of its original purpose. It will get you, broadly, from one side of the country to the other, but its beauty stems from the fact that you should, and often have to, leave it, to take in a landmark or a town and then rejoin it. Today’s Route 66 isn’t a strict path, it’s a guide that passes by some of the US’s greatest sights.

The final descent into the clutches of the Pacific takes me through Roy’s Motel & Café, Amboy — which is slowly being restored to former glory — to Barstow and to the Wigwam Motel in San Bernardino. From there it’s a straight line to Santa Monica, where the route officially finishes. I celebrate in the Pendry West Hollywood with palm tree-skimming, hazy views of Downtown LA.

The vast, urban sprawl is a world away from the twisty trials of Oatman and it must have been as overwhelming back then as it is right now.

Elegant Resorts can organised a 12-night itinerary from £3,949 per person with nights at the hotels above, plus The View Hotel in Monument Valley, Arizona, and Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica.

The price also includes return flights with American Airlines, UK lounge access and car hire.

Although Domenico Scarlatti’s cat Pulcinella evidently played its part in the creation of the Italian composer’s Sonata in G Minor, and Michael Jackson’s cloying 1972 hit Ben is about a boy’s friendship with a rat, nothing quite inspires songwriters and composers like a loving hound.

‘There’s something about dogs’ energy, their soul and their sheer joy in life that is inspiring to us all,’ enthuses Charlotte Hawkins, presenter of Classic FM’s Pet Classics and Dogs Trust ambassador. ‘I have a vision of artists and composers sitting at their keyboards waiting for inspiration to strike, looking fondly at their hounds and the magic happening. There are so many pieces of music that might not exist if it weren’t for our four-legged friends.’

One of Hawkins’s favourite dog-inspired compositions is Frédéric Chopin’s Minute Waltz, she continues: ‘It reminds me of my dog Moose, my seven-month-old Dogs Trust rescue. He’s still in his playful phase and spends a lot of his time zooming around.’ The canine that inspired the Polish composer’s famous melody was Marquis, who belonged to his girlfriend, French novelist George Sand. Soft, white and fluffy, Marquis was, the pianist noted, ‘as intelligent as can be’.

In 1845, Sand — mindful of the way her boyfriend doted on Marquis — commented: ‘If I had your talent, I’d write a piece to music about that dog.’ Rising to the challenge, the composer did just that. His Waltz No. 6 in D Flat Major (Op. 64 No. 1), is a three-quarter-time canter that mimics the frenzy of Marquis chasing his tail. Sadly, by the time the composition (sometimes called Valse du Petit Chien) was published, the couple had gone through an acrimonious parting. Chopin never saw Marquis again.

Heartbreak also attaches itself to Sir Edward Elgar’s beloved Cairn terrier, the subject of his 1933 piece Mina. Dogs became the focus of the composer’s life after the death of his wife, Alice, and Mina mixes the playful use of glockenspiel and clarinets with a melody that hints at loss and melancholy. Much jollier is Elgar’s Variation XI from the ‘Enigma Variations’. The composition was inspired by a comical misadventure of a bulldog named Dan, owned by George Robertson Sinclair, the organist at Hereford Cathedral.

The two friends were walking along the bank of the River Wye one afternoon when Dan tumbled in and paddled frantically upstream before hauling himself triumphantly up a grassy bank to safety. A sandstone statue of the unintentionally inspirational Dan (above) was unveiled at the scene of the incident in 2025.

Another musical dog with a taste for misadventure was American composer George Gershwin’s wire-haired terrier, Tony. Bought in 1929, the mischievous little chap quickly became a feature of the New York newspapers thanks to his frequent disappearances from the family home on West 103rd Street. Whether escaped, misplaced or — occasionally — dognapped, Tony somehow always made it back eventually.

In 1936, the terrier travelled overland in a car driven by the composer’s butler to join his master in Hollywood, California. Predictably, drama ensued. Tony became so ill he had to spend a week recuperating en route. Shortly after his pooch’s arrival in Beverley Hills, Gershwin composed Walking the Dog as a number for the 1937 film Shall We Dance?. The music accompanies a scene in which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers walk their dogs on the deck of a luxury liner. Had Tony been involved, it seems certain lifeboats would have needed to be launched.

On October 3, 1945, a 10-year-old boy in a cowboy outfit clambered onto stage at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair. Barely tall enough to reach the microphone, he crooned Old Shep, a tear-jerking ballad about the demise of a beloved pet dog. Dabbing at their eyes, the judges of the talent show awarded the lad fifth prize and wondered, perhaps, if they’d ever hear of him again. They did, of course, because the youngster in the Stetson singing of canine devotion was none other than a young Elvis Presley.

Old Shep was his mother’s favourite tune and was the first song that the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll sang in public. Written in 1933 by country-music star Red Foley, the song tells the tale of the friendship between a boy and his dog that ends, as these things all too sadly do, with the faithful companion growing old and sick before going to the place ‘where all the good doggies go’. The story of the dog that inspired the ditty, Foley’s childhood pet, Hoover, was even sadder — a vengeful neighbour poisoned him.

Tears tend to fall as regularly as Lakeland rain when dogs turn up in country-and- western songs. A mongrel stray, which befriended a young Dolly Parton and helped her negotiate a bleak childhood, is the subject of her song Cracker Jack. Parton described Cracker Jack as ‘the best friend I ever had… he was a playmate, a companion/He was love and understanding’. Steadfast to the end, this brave fellow reportedly died after a fight with a rattlesnake.

Although many pop songs include the word ‘dog’, or variations, in the title, most are not actually about dogs at all (Hound Dog, for example, is about a feckless lover, whereas Rufus Thomas’s Walking the Dog —covered in 1964 by the Rolling Stones — is a dance). However, real-life canines do make an occasional appearance.

The love life of Sir Paul McCartney’s labrador retriever inspired the Wings hit Jet and, in 1965, he paid 10 guineas for an Old English sheepdog puppy he described as ‘a huge tangled ball of wool’. She’d eventually become the inspiration for the song Martha My Dear on The Beatles’ White Album. The title of the track could have been rather different — he originally intended to name his dog ‘Knickers’. Although Martha, like poor Hoover, played her part in inspiring pop music, she didn’t actually perform any.

This was not true of the dog that has strong claim to being history’s most rock ‘n’ roll canine, Seamus, a Border collie belonging to Steve Marriott, frontman of The Small Faces. Seamus provided what we might call ‘backing barks’ on the band’s 1969 hit The Universal. He was not destined to stay in the background for long, however. When Seamus’s owner went off to tour the US, his care was entrusted to David Gilmour, lead guitarist of Pink Floyd. To his delight, Gilmour discovered that when he played blues harmonica Seamus would howl along. The result was recorded on the song Seamus — with Seamus himself on lead vocals — which featured on Pink Floyd’s 1971 album Meddle.

Later that year, the group made a concert film and album Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii. Unfortunately, Seamus was unable to tour due to quarantine regulations and his place was taken by Nobs, an elegant Borzoi who was owned by the daughter of an Italian circus director. Critics still argue over which of them nailed the performance more cleanly.

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

Blood, sweat and tears — quite literally —have been poured into my vegetable garden this year, but to no avail. The dry weather has been a disaster and a few furry friends holing up in my raised beds have caused havoc below surface level.

When the hosepipe ban was announced, the prospect of lugging endless watering cans around led to instant surrender. I’ve shrugged off the beetroots, the dwarf beans, the parsnips and countless other failures, but the things that have really upset me are the carrots.

I am normally an expert carrot grower and was hoping during August, when mine tend to be at their best, to emulate a particularly fine carrot dish I had enjoyed a few weeks earlier.

It was one of those hot, balmy July days that is, in the face of our climate crisis, somewhat unfashionable to applaud (although, shamelessly, I have relished every single one) and I found myself, dog in tow, in the tiny, picture-perfect village of Teffont Evias in Wiltshire’s Nadder Valley.

The task in hand was to visit the Teffont House hotel, newly emerged from a major refurbishment and a change of name. Some may remember it as Howard’s House in days gone by.

That clever old Beckford Group, comprised of Dan Brod, Charlie Luxton and Matt Greenlees, is behind Teffont House, bucking the trend of doom and gloom in the hospitality industry by opening not only this property in the past couple of months, but also Corsham House, a wine-led townhouse restaurant with rooms in Corsham in Wiltshire. Its tally of establishments, which includes the much-loved Beckford Arms in Fonthill Gifford, Wiltshire, and The Talbot Inn in Mells, Somerset, is up to nine.

The secret of its success comes down to a few key factors, plus one defining one. In the context of Teffont House, we have the group’s signature lack of pretension, the highly desirable location, the deep understanding of what makes a hotel characterful and comfortable, the appreciation of fresh food, the respect for guests’ wallets in not wanting to rip them off and the total disregard for any Booking.com nonsense or fancy marketing partnerships. The defining factor is the full-throttle Englishness of every pub or hotel or restaurant to which it turns its hands.

The dog likes our dog-friendly room, but, on that hot afternoon, she likes the narrow chalkstream that ripples through the village more. She likes the hotel’s large garden, too. We all do, spread out on parched grass in the shade of a liquidambar tree, cool drinks in hand, wondering how starry the night sky will look when the Cranborne Chase Dark Sky Reserve comes into its own.

Luckily, there are three telescopes and a star chart provided for that, just as there are easels, watercolour sets, pens and paper available for those of an artistic bent. Some guests, quite sensibly, have checked in for a few days.

Now, what of the carrots? I had already spotted them on the menu when I joined some friends on the terrace as they were finishing lunch. One of these friends, who knows a thing or two about restaurants, was full of praise for what he had eaten and was already looking forward to dinner.

Accordingly, we walked awhile along blowsy, heat-baked footpaths — this is marvellous countryside for walking — to work up an appetite for herb-crusted rack of lamb later. On the side of this came Paget’s carrots, whole, tender and delicious, a little bit sweet and a little bit nutty, helped on their way by a dash of elderflower and a sprinkling of roasted hazelnuts.

I have yet to discover who Paget is, but he certainly knows how to grow a good carrot — and the chefs at Teffont House certainly know how to cook them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your aesthetic hero

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

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

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

An exhibition that has really impressed you

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

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

A possession you’d never sell

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

A book you’ve found inspiring

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

Your favourite painting

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

The music that you work to

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

The last podcast you listened to

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

Who would play you in a film of your life

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

What you’d take with you to a desert island

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

The thing that gets you up in the morning

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

The items you collect

Many different bits and pieces, and wine.

A hotel you could go back and back to

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

The most memorable meal you have ever had

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

The best present you’ve ever received

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

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

Mankind has been making jewellery for at least 100,000 years. In all that time, very few fields of fine, gem-quality emerald have been discovered. In fact, emeralds are so rare that, in some respects, it seems a miracle that any have ever been found at all, the more so when one considers that emerald seams are only ever a couple of inches wide and may barely touch the Earth’s surface.

Until the 16th century, when Spain expanded its empire into South America and found the deposits located in present-day Colombia, every mined emerald mentioned in literature or listed in historical records — even referred to in the Bible — originated in Egypt’s Eastern Desert.

Take Pliny the Elder reporting that Caligula’s wife, Lollia Paulina, attended a party dressed in ‘alternating emeralds and pearls which glittered all over her head, hair, ears, neck and fingers’ or when Isidore, Bishop of Seville, said: ‘That it surpasses in all greenness all green stones, and even the leaves of plants, and that it imparts to the air around it a green shimmer.’ Not to mention the time the anonymous author of the Aberdeen Bestiary wrote: ‘It makes those who wear it appear attractive… it signifies virginity, which wholly preserves the freshness of the flesh.’

Every one of the emeralds described all came from what are now known as Cleopatra’s lost emerald mines. Given their diminutive proportions and the fact the Eastern Desert occupies an area about the size of mainland Britain, it isn’t entirely surprising that she mislaid them — but they are, it seems, located on the slopes of Gebel Zabara, the legendary Mons Smaragdus (Emerald Mountain) of the classical texts, some six days march from the Red Sea, where summer temperatures can reach 54˚C.

Many years ago, with the help of a local guide, I made a week-long trip there, sleeping on a bedroll under the stars and worrying about scorpions as I went. It was heaven. The landscape was more varied, more colourful and much more beautiful than I had ever imagined. We camped one night in the ruins of an ancient temple, another by a small oasis. When we reached the mining area itself, I spent a whole day exploring its various tunnels and chambers, coming away with a pocket full of small, rough emeralds.

I first caught emerald fever when I was 22. Walking through a Bangkok shopping mall, I saw a pair of tiny, square-cut gemstones in a jeweller’s window and fell in love with them. What began as an impulse purchase subsequently turned into something of a grand passion: I’ve visited all the world’s main emerald mines and cutting centres, made trips to see the great emeralds held in public and private collections and attended countless salerooms where notable emeralds were being auctioned. I still experience a thrill every time I hold an emerald up to the light and gaze into its mysterious interior. To me, each one is miniature work of art, a highly portable treasure trove.

Fine emeralds are 100 times rarer than diamonds of the same size and quality. They are greener than any other green gemstone —peridot, tourmaline, tsavorite — and make the rest look pale, brassy and washed out by comparison. The best emeralds are more valuable than any other coloured jewel. Intriguingly, they were one of the earliest commodities to be traded over vast distances, from England in the West to China in the East.

To date, they have only been located in four areas: Egypt (fully exploited long ago), Colombia, Brazil and Zambia. Colombian emeralds set the standard by which all others are judged; the best specimens are an intense, vivid, pure green and glow, as well as sparkle. They are bright yet deep, rich yet clear. Moreover, the green is dominant, with a very faint blueish hue and no yellow.

Almost without exception the most spectacular examples of emerald jewellery in the world — Catherine the Great’s emerald brooch, Queen Victoria’s emerald and diamond tiara, the Duchess of Windsor’s Siddhartha brooch (the first Cartier piece to feature an anatomically represented panther) and all of Elizabeth Taylor’s emerald jewellery (there was a lot of it) — incorporate Colombian emeralds.

Emerald values do not conform to the same pattern as other precious gemstones. If you compare 1,000 one-carat emeralds, each will be unique and priced accordingly. You could pay £200 or you could pay £20,000. They are partly judged, like other gems, on cut, clarity, colour and carat weight, but, unlike other gemstones, inclusions can actually add to the value. These are referred to as the ‘jardin’, or inner landscape, and have special names such as ‘wispy veils’ and ‘feathers’.

One of the rarest inclusions ever found in emeralds is referred to by its Spanish name: gota de aceite, which translates as ‘drop of oil’. The same feature is also sometimes called the ‘butterfly-wing effect’. Gota de aceite increases the levels of internal reflection and gives the jewel a smooth, velvety feel.

Ever since they were first discovered, at least 5,500 years ago, emeralds have been credited with magical powers. As Sir John Mandeville wrote in the 14th century: ‘Emeralds give riches and dignities, and make men honest and wise with speech; they also cure fevers, vision problems, skin diseases and spots.’

In 1348–49, during the Black Death, a prescription reputed to prevent infection contained ‘pearls, jargoons, emeralds and coral, one sixth drachm of each of these materials entered into the composition’. The Arabian physician Abu Meruan suggested ‘six grains of tincture of emerald’ to counter the effects of dysentery. Ibn al-Baytar, another Arab writer, proposed that, ‘emeralds should be worn by royal children from birth, since, set in pendants or rings, they prevent epileptic seizures’. Aristotle, meanwhile, advised that ‘emerald powder taken internally prevents hair loss and excoriation of the skin’.

It is easy to laugh at the pseudo-science of gem healing, but even today the government of India has several emerald prescriptions on its traditional medicine website.

Moreover, from the earliest times, emeralds have been credited with having supernatural powers. The idea that human destiny could be influenced by the action of a mineral can be traced to the sacred Hindu texts, the Vedas. The Kurma Purana, probably written between the years AD550 and AD850, stresses the connection between the working of providence, the planets and precious gemstones. In Jyotish astrology, emerald is allied with the planet Mercury and can be worn to enhance intellect, discrimination and the ability to communicate.

In Western astrology, the choice of which birthstone to wear is further complicated by the fact that few authorities can agree on which stone should be attributed to which month or sign of the zodiac. Some favour June, others May. Depending on which zodiacal system is employed, emerald is variously recommended for those born under the star signs of Gemini, Cancer, Sagittarius and Libra. If you simply want an excuse to wear one, then look no further than Marbodus, whose 12th century Liber Lapidum Pretiosum (Book of Precious Stones) includes the following encouragement:

'Wear it with reverence due, ’twill wealth bestow

And words persuasive from thy lips shall flow,

As though the gift of eloquence inspired

The stone itself or living spirit fired.

Hung round the neck it cures the ague’s chill,

Or failing sickness, dire mysterious ill;

Its hues so soft refresh the wearied eye,

And furious tempests banish from the sky:

So with chaste power it tames the furious mood

And cools the wanton thoughts that fire the blood.

If steeped in verdant oil or bathed in wine

Its deepened hues with perfect lustre shine'

This feature originally appeared in the December 10, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Ever since the covid-era sourdough boom, good bread has become hot property: according to a dataset from early 2025, there has been a year-on-year increase in sourdough sales of 56% and the UK saw a 237% rise in new bakeries opening between 2019 and 2022. A superlative loaf, however, depends on quality flour — and that requires great grains from which to mill it.

Unfortunately, over the past 70 years, Britain’s flour supply has become uniform and disconnected from the land on which it is grown. Many commodity flours are processed from monocultures developed around the 1960s Green Revolution, when industrial grain production took off with gusto. Although high yield, they tend to be uniformly short in stature and susceptible to climatic changes and diseases, requiring noxious chemicals to flourish. They’re also heavily processed, roller-milled into little more than starch — hence the pappy stodge that passes for much mainstream bread.

Now, a steady revolution has taken hold across Britain. A newer generation of artisans is bucking the system, looking back to our provenance-driven grain histories and embracing small-scale modern varieties in thrall to their forebears. There are a few different kinds. Ancient grains are erstwhile and hardy crops that have existed, unchanged, for sometimes thousands of years: think einkorn, emmer, spelt and khorasan.

Heritage grains, meanwhile, are historic British crops that were naturally cross-pollinated and re-sown over many years, eventually becoming genetically defined varieties, such as Red Lammas, April Bearded and Rouge d’Ecosse. Many were preserved for posterity in seed banks in the 20th century, later salvaged and regrown.

Both are usually tall (to outgrow weeds), resilient to bad weather, pests and diseases and grown without chemicals, often with biodiversity-boosting regenerative principles in mind, such as employing low-or no-tilling planting to preserve soil health and fungal networks or leaving borders around crop fields to encourage wildlife.

Population crops, meanwhile, are a sort of modern version of heritage crops, developed in the late 20th century by places such as Cambridgeshire’s Plant Breeding Institute and Suffolk’s Wakelyns, which aimed to record, preserve and promote our agricultural heritage through native crops and ecologically sympathetic farming. They have cross-bred myriad heritage varieties together to create evolving, diverse styles: Miller’s Choice, Oak Farm, Wakelyns YQ, Maris Wigeon and so on.

In addition to the nutritional and ecological benefits, these grains taste fantastic compared with their dowdy commercial cousins, especially when gently stoneground to retain their precious wholegrains — as these British bakers and millers are well aware.

Barony Mill, Birsay, Orkney

Windswept Orkney has many historic USPs — not least its ancient stone circles and burial chambers — and two more diminutive, but no less significant ones. Enter Barony Mill, the only place on the globe that grinds bere barley, a botanical cousin of wheat. Located on the western mainland, the mill dates back to 1873. It was going to seed (so to speak), but, in the 1990s, the local Birsay Heritage Trust set to its renovation, returning bere-milling to the cultural landscape.

Bere is a long-standing crop in this part of the world. ‘A close relation was found in one of the Neolithic digs,’ explains trust treasurer Tony Morley. It’s also a staple of the Orcadian diet: ‘Beremeal bannocks are something that everybody here knows.’

Bere is a hardy crop and grows quickly. ‘It’s called 90-day barley, because the period from sowing to harvest is three months, from May to August. You have to get it out as early as you can because the weather will take it — or the geese will.’

As well as fine- and medium-grain bere flour, Barony sells whole bere ‘berries’ and the three-storey stone mill operates exactly as it did in the 1800s, powered by the waters of Boardhouse Loch. ‘The water wheel drives everything from the millstones to the hoists, to the sieves to the fanners,’ Morley explains. ‘Even shovelling the grain off the kiln drying floor is done with water power.’ It’s a heritage exemplar for the ages.

Pinch, Kelsale, Suffolk

Just off the north Suffolk coast near Aldeburgh, Pinch is the tiny fiefdom of Alice Norman, a Ballymaloe-trained chef long in thrall to sensitively sourced ingredients. During the pandemic, she returned to her native Suffolk and started a meal-kit enterprise, setting up in a former jam room at Maple Farm. Here, piqued by the farm’s wooden Austrian mill, used to grind various specialist grains, she began ‘feeling more passionate about flour and where it comes from’.

After crafting cones from spelt (for the ice creams she’d sell her kit customers), she began baking crullers — a fried doughnut — and then the crisp-bottomed Roman-style pizza for which Pinch is famed. Maris Wigeon is a farm staple and well suited to pizza dough, but Norman will use whatever’s thriving, all milled into semolina, a wheatgerm-flecked plain flour and bran, ‘which goes into the chicken food’.

Next in the running is a coarser, ‘proper’ wholemeal. The flavour, Norman explains, is slightly nutty, ‘like the smell of a health-food shop. We tried it in our pizza; it was actually a bit too much flavour. We need to introduce it gradually, so people’s palates can get used to it’.

Soon, she hopes to have a single wheat variety aligned to each product she’s crafting. ‘It sounds cheesy, but it’s bringing people back to the roots of where an ingredient comes from and the idea that this year’s bag of flour will be different to the next,’ she says. ‘It’s a reminder to be mindful about what this ingredient is.’

Shipton Mill, Long Newnton, Gloucestershire

Back in the early 1980s, John Lister and some friends were ambling in the Cotswold wilds when he came across a ruined, Domesday-era watermill. Inspired by the principles of William Morris and the Arts-and-Crafts Movement — which sought to reinstate craft skills in the face of rank mechanisation — they set about returning the site to glory. ‘It was an amazing opportunity to get stuck into the making of something wholesome,’ he recalls.

Shipton, which has been granted a Royal Warrant by The King, is now one of the country’s preeminent mills. At first, it ground plenty of Maris Wigeon (and still does; the 100% Maris flour ‘suits our organic production methods, as well as offering opportunities for thatching straw’).

Soon, it was experimenting with emmer, einkorn and spelt; even working with Italian mountain farmers on saragolla, propagated in the country’s south for centuries. Lister is also fascinated by teff, an East African grain familiar to Ethiopian and Somalian communities, but something of a curiosity to Western bakers.

Given Shipton’s size, it’s inevitable the mill has segued into some more refined flours, but the founding principles remain (not least in the heritage flour supplied to bakery behemoth Gail’s). The ecological appeal of specialist wheats over commodities is simple, Lister says. ‘These softer wheats have bigger root systems and they harvest more nutrients. You get resilience because you’re not planting a single variety in a field that has to be sprayed to keep all the weeds off, so the biodiversity is greater. It’s a completely different approach to producing grain.’

Landrace, Bath, Somerset

It was when working at Neal’s Yard Dairy that Andrew Lowkes developed the foodie ethos that would shape Landrace, the Bath bakery and restaurant he founded in 2019: ‘The better the farming, the greater potential to make something delicious at the other end.’ Back then, he’d been spending time with various growers and millers involved in the UK Grain Lab — a decentralised body championing interesting wheats. The quickfire nature of wheat cultivation and breadmaking appealed to his ‘impatient’ personality, he laughs. When the Bath site came up, he took the plunge.

At first, Lowkes was more concerned with locating stoneground flours than esoteric strains, but a burgeoning relationship with Ceredigion’s 16th-century Felin Ganol watermill inspired him to start grinding his own. After sourcing some fresh stones from a company in deepest Vermont, USA, and installing them at Somerset’s Westcombe Dairy, Landrace began milling: at first, self-grown wheats — Red Lammas and Orange Devon Blue Rough Chaff among them — before the bakery’s ascent necessitated purchasing grain again.

This year, the mill has been processing wheat from various growers, but Corston Fields Farm near Bath (for a red spring wheat called Mariagertoba) and Somerset’s agroecological don Fred Price (for rye and other heritage varieties) are go-tos. Despite being combined in the bakery’s mixing bowls, they’re milled and bagged as single varieties.

‘Our motto,’ he says, ‘is “Identity preserves stone milling”.’ As well as cornetti — an Italian-style croissant that ‘gives us hell! It’s really hard to make laminated croissants with British stoneground wheat’ — Landrace’s country sourdough remains a signature. It’s all in the retained wheatgerm, Lowkes notes. ‘It’s the grain’s little passport — it declares to your gut that it’s worth digesting.’

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

Patek Philippe’s seventh ‘Watch Art’ Grand Exhibition begins in the Italian city on Friday and will showcase hundreds of watches and clocks, but the biggest draws will be the Swiss watchmaker’s Calibre 89, Star Calibre 2000 and Grandmaster Chime, a trio of so-called ‘supercomplications’.

The Calibre 89 pocket watch became the world’s most complicated mechanical watch when it was unveiled in 1989 to mark Patek Philippe’s 150th anniversary. With 33 complications — or functions — including a star chart, a thermometer, an indication showing when Easter falls and various chiming functions, it remains the Genevan company’s most complex watch.

Five years went into its development and a further four bringing its 1,728 components together. Only four examples were ever made, one each in white, yellow and rose gold and a fourth in platinum. Weighing almost a kilogram, the watch was huge, but it was designed for deep pockets. The last Calibre 89 sale was in 2009, when the yellow-gold version hammered at just over $5 million (around $7.5 million today).

As its name suggests, the Star Calibre 2000 was introduced for the Millennium. This was a pocket watch, too, with a comparatively modest 21 complications. Even so, collectors often view it with greater reverence: the Star Calibre 2000 solved a number of complex horological problems and was awarded six patents, one of which was for an indicator that tracks sunrise and sunset times. It was also the first chiming watch to accurately replicate the melody of London’s Big Ben.

Five sets of four were made, four in gold and platinum, and a fifth in only platinum. The first time a set came up for auction was in December last year, when Sotheby’s sold one of the mixed metal sets for a cool $11.9 million.

The Grandmaster Chime Ref. 5175 was created for Patek’s 175th anniversary in 2014 and has 20 complications, making it Patek’s most complex watch for the wrist. Two of the heavily engraved reversible gold wristwatch’s functions were patented; an alarm that strikes the time in full when it goes off, and another chiming function that sounds the date on demand.

It’s said a Grandmaster Chime took more than 100,000 hours to produce, which explains why only seven were made, one of which has crossed the Alps to Milan from Patek’s Geneva museum. None of the original seven has ever come up for auction, although two years ago Sylvester Stallone sold his Grandmaster Chime Ref. 6300, a follow-up variant released in 2016, at Sotheby’s in New York for $5.4 million.

Patek’s exhibition runs until October 18 at Milan’s late-Art Nouveau Palazzo delle Scintille, now known as CityOval. Entry is free with registration and covers access to 15 rooms full of Patek watches, including the current collection and a special range of Italian-themed clocks and watches produced exclusively for the event.

For more information, visit the Patek website.

‘It’s not happening,’ tweeted Liam Gallagher after word of Oasis headlining Glastonbury took over the internet this summer — followed by a series of expletives we are too polite to spell out, even in asterisks. It did little to diminish their lead in the odds market: both he and brother Noel are notorious for denying reprisals until there is so much money on the table that it is impossible to say no. Their odds finally crashed two weeks ago after it was announced that Oasis would perform in Manchester on the same weekend as the Somerset festival. One assumes the financials were better.

Don’t fret if forced to pick the latter: Oasis will be back at Knebworth in Hertfordshire next September to mark 31 years since they set new records for live audience numbers in Britain. It has been a good year for the Mancunian duo: the announcement of a 38-date tour came hot off the heels of a documentary, Don’t Look Back In Anger, which premiered in Venice and returned the Gallaghers to the top of the odds market in a new category: most likely to compose the next Bond theme.

All this is not happening in a vacuum. Next month, Tate Britain will host an exhibition dedicated entirely to the cause: ‘The 90s: Art and Fashion’, curated by Edward Enninful (former editor of British Vogue) and featuring works by Juergen Teller and Corinne Day. Sacha Baron Cohen is returning to cinemas as Ali G on October 23. The most heated debate at this year’s FT Weekend Festival was not the one about whether Gen Z could ever own a home, but one that asked which artist had made the best music of the 1990s. (For my money, I’d say Janet Jackson.)

There is reason to believe, however, that our nostalgia for the era has peaked. ‘I think young people are feeling nineties fatigue,’ says Rebecca Dolan, GQ’s associate features editor. ‘The shift happened this summer after so many brands, including M&S, released 1990s-inspired capsules following the success of Love Story on Disney+.’ Young people, she notes, ‘find these elaborate marketing campaigns quite cloying’. ‘It was fun, but I think I’m done with the 90s,’ wrote Tomo Delaney, a former Vogue staffer as he wound down his popular Instagram account, @90sLondon, earlier this month.

Some of the decade’s more serious incidents — the war in Kuwait, say, which turbocharged the cost of petrol — have resurfaced in the public consciousness as pundits seek to draw modern-day parallels. Short-lived nightclubs such as Lost, which sought to recapture the phone-free hedonism of the 1990s from an abandoned cinema in Soho, have closed. All this is unlikely to affect demand to see Oasis next year; yet the winds of change are hard to ignore. Trends, as per last week’s column, work in 30-year cycles. Let us hope, for their sake, that Liam and Noel are still around for another comeback in the 2050s.

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

A working week in Woking for McLaren

It has been a busy week in Woking, where British speedsters par excellence McLaren announced, among other things, new branding, £500 million of new investment from their Abu Dhabi owners, 1,000 new jobs, a new factory and a performance SUV (the first in the brand’s 63-year history).

As previewed when I wrote about the reveal of the McL 6GT back in August, McLaren is looking to build its future on the bedrock of its past. The firm has long been known for its technical expertise, but there’s only so much carbon fibre and pure performance can set the heart racing. Where it lacked was passion. So, along with the manual V8 car that is slated to arrive in 2028, the new branding for the firm harks back to its founder, New Zealander Bruce McLaren, and heavily references his family’s garage in Remuera, Auckland.

‘McLaren has evolved enormously over the years, but looking back through our shared history across Racing and Automotive, it’s poignant how much of Bruce's original vision and spirit still runs through the business today,’ said Lou McEwen, McLaren Racing’s chief marketing officer. ‘This evolved identity perfectly bridges that proud heritage with our future ambition. It celebrates the symbols and stories our fans, partners and team mates already know and love, while giving us a more connected expression of where we’re heading next.’

The announcement of an upcoming SUV was met with some raised eyebrows, as McLaren were essentially the last supercar manufacturer to not have one in their stable. However, what made them unique also hit the bottom line, as it’s well known that for brands such as Bentley, Lamborghini, Maserati and Aston Martin, SUVs are best sellers. While the £500 million investment from their (relatively) new owners will be a welcome one, it is clear that they would also like to see some of that money back.

Since the days of the F1, McLaren has always been a force for innovation, so while SUVs are not everyone’s favourite, it will be interesting to see what the boffins at the MTC can cook up to cut through in an already crowded sector. McLaren’s success in Formula 1 has also led to a large uptick in interest in the brand, and while two-seater sports car are fun, they are not always practical. As McLaren Automotive CEO Nick Collins said, ‘it’s quite difficult if you have to decide which one of your kids you want to leave behind at home’. Collins also added that McLaren has no plans to build an EV, which will keep plenty happy.

Perhaps most excitingly, however, is that the new money is part of a total of $2 billion promised investment in the brand over five years. Without getting too jingoistic about it, it’s nice to see investment into the UK performance car sector, a world-leading industry of which we should be proud. Indeed, the announcement was attended by Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who said that the company was ‘doubling down on Britain’.

Goodwood Revival revived

If you didn’t make it to Goodwood Revival last weekend, fear not, as our good friends at Rolex (official timepiece for the weekend) have provided plenty of gorgeous photos, which you can view here.

We're Kermit and Nevada and we like your vibe

I’ve written plenty about Lunaz in this column-cum-newsletter, but if they keep making fun cars, what can I do. These two beauties are bespoke Range Rover Classic commissions, the first of which is called Kermit, a Pop-Art inspired effort built on a black-on-black Overfinch, while the second is called Nevada, and is also green, but less green. It is named Nevada due to its impending life on a ranch in, you guessed it, Nevada.

Driven by a growth in demand in the USA, Lunaz is expanding capacity at its Silverstone factory, and Kermit and Nevada are the first of the new batch of Range Rover Classics, limited to 25 builds. Both modern V8 or electric powertrains are offered, and I recommend getting your orders in now.

More than just an airline

For clients of VistaJet, having access to one of the world’s largest ‘on-demand’ private jet fleets is clearly not enough. Members can now reap the benefits on land and in the water, with partnerships with Bentley, the Monaco Yacht Show and the FIA Endurance World Championship (WEC).

Last month, members gained exclusive access to Bentley’s prestigious Speed Society, which took place on Romania’s Transfăgărășan Highway, one of the world’s greatest driving roads, and featured ‘exhilarating performance, exceptional hospitality and privileged access’.

The firm is also the Official Private Aviation Sponsor of the Monaco Yacht Show, which finished yesterday. With a private terrace overlooking Port Hercule, members could enjoy the finest views, while again indulging in a programme of hospitality, networking and exclusive experiences.

Lastly, members have been blessed with VIP hospitality throughout the WEC, including the Vista House which will make its appearance at the season finale in Monza on November 6–8.

'Give or take the odd corgi, pugs have long been the darling of royalty,' Country Life reported in 1995. The snub-nosed little dog, Chinese in origin, has the Dutch royal family to thank for its popularity after the House of Orange first took delivery of a pug in the 16th century, amid the cargo of a Dutch East India Company ship returning from the Far East.

The first celebrated pug in European history is Pompey, the silver dog who thwarted the assassination of William the Silent of Holland by barking and warning him of the Spanish attack at Hermingny in 1572. This incident is attributed to the subsequent popularity of pugs at the Dutch court, who would have orange ribbons attached to their collars, marking them as treasured royal mascots.

William III and Queen Mary brought the dogs to London in 1688, where they were first known as Dutch mastiffs, presumably on account of their fawn coats, Country Life mused in 1931. The breed retained its position of court darling throughout the Hanoverian era, and it was during the reign of George III, whose wife, Charlotte, was 'an enthusiastic lover of the breed' that they reached the pinnacle of popularity.

Indeed, a charming inclusion of William Hogarth’s self-portrait of 1745 is the painter’s pug, Trump, 'an amiable-looking rogue said to echo his master’s personality,' Country Life suggested in 1990. Porcelain models of Trump were also made at the Chelsea Porcelain Factory at about the same time, thought to have been based on a terracotta modeled by sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac.

Queen Victoria bred pugs in the royal kennels at Windsor (she had 36), and in 1897, the Princess of Wales’s decision to take up 'the eccentric variety of black pugs' was reported: 'In consequence, they are likely to become fashionable this year.' The newly trendy black pugs had been introduced to Britain by Lady Brassey in 1886.

Pugs have also been resident at Glyndebourne, East Sussex, since the 1870s, commemorated by the two stone pugs that support the bust of John Christie — the opera festival’s founder — that stands outside the theatre. Country Life reported in 1995 that if the resident pugs were to leave, 'the opera house would close — just as the Royal Family would fall if the ravens left the Tower of London.'

With their deep Churchillian wrinkles, stocky and compact stature, and big personalities (the breed’s motto is multum in parvo — much in little) the breed would also captivate the Duke and Duchess of Windsor who were intensely devoted to their 11 pugs, treating them like royalty. When Country Life visited the villa at 4 route du Champ d’Entraînement in an architectural capacity in 1987, John Cornforth detailed that: 'Pugs, indeed, are almost a leit-motif in the house, and if live ones are no longer snuffling around, there are endless reminders of them in pictures, photographs, china and velvet.'

In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Lady Bertram’s pug can be seen to personify the indolence of the aristocracy, and Marie-Antoinette’s fondness for the breed has not helped their reputation as louche lapdogs.

However, Country Life attested in 1931 that pugs 'are attractive little pets provided they are brought up in a hardy manner and are not spoilt by excessive coddling. They should be kept on plain fare given in moderation, for it is easy to ruin their shape by an excess of fat.' This feeling was echoed in 1953, when the magazine detailed that 'the popular conception of the pug-dog as a fat, snuffling, pampered creature, suitable to be only a ladies’ pet, is most unfair to a little dog, who, if properly treated, is an active, intelligent creature with a great deal of character and individuality. [The breed] makes no claim to being either an athlete or a sportsman, but if his tendency to greed and consequent corpulence is restrained, he enjoys a good walk either in town or country, and, given the opportunity, is not above taking an interest in rats.'

Certainly, the breed’s tenacity can be best seen in Fortuné, the dearly loved companion of Joséphine Beauharnais, who delivered messages (under his collar) between Joséphine and her family when she was imprisoned at Les Carmes. In 1796, upon drawing back the bedcovers on his wedding night, Napoleon Bonaparte’s leg met the bombastic little pug, who promptly took a chunk out of it. It would seem the emperor bore no malice, and he would later write to Joséphine: 'A million kisses even to Fortuné, notwithstanding his naughtiness.'

This is an extract from 'The Country Life Book of Dogs' (Rizzoli, £50) by Agnes Stamp.

Napoleon said many things, but perhaps most famous was his suggestion to never interrupt an enemy when they were making a mistake. The urge to be first, to set a precedent, can be a rewarding one, but not necessarily the right one. Sometimes, it’s better to sit back, wait, and see which way the wind is blowing before making your move.

The wind is blowing electric, of that we can be sure. Such are the demands of democracy in a changing climate. But the question is, how do we want to be electric? Plenty in the luxury car world have tried to provide an answer. Rolls-Royce created the Spectre, arguably the ideal distillation of co-founder Charles Rolls’ vision of silent perfection. Ferrari's effort is the Luce, which, to be polite, was somewhat more polarising. Today, Bentley revealed the Torcal. If you can't be first, you can at least try to be the best.

The Torcal is smaller than the Bentayga, but is still very much an SUV. It is long, it is wide, and it is high; a mashup stylistically of a Porsche Taycan and a Range Rover Velar. It is immediately apparent that this is a grand tourer for the practical age, combining space and performance. Crucially, however, it does not skimp out on style: the wheels are big, the lines are clean and the pseudo-shooting brake body is instantly elegant and recognisable.

Plenty of those who went first have attempted to make an electric car that feels like a petrol car in disguise. What sets the Torcal apart, on first inspection at the very least, is that Bentley is steering into the skid. What purpose is there in making an EV if you do not celebrate what electricity can do? Has anything contributed more to the advancement of society in the past 200 years than stripped electrons? Why hide it?

The Torcal is an electric car, Bentley’s first, and it makes no bones about it. A startup sequence involves the car coming to life like a well-heeled Frankenstein; lights pulsing with life. The grill illuminates with an iconic cut-diamond display and inside, ambient lighting subtly dances, as if the electric power flows through the car like blood.

Many EVs are accused of lacking soul; machines that turn on and off silently at the flick of a switch, to be used and discarded like an iPhone or a toaster. Perhaps that is because we have become numb to the miracle that is electric power. Bentley have decided that the works of Tesla, Edison et al are to be celebrated and, in doing so, have come as close as any to giving their machine a spirit.

But if the Torcal is the car of the future, it is also grounded in the past. Bentley is nothing if not heritage and craft manifest, and the Torcal is no different. The front of the car is a reimagining of the Continental T, while updated interiors feature a raft of traditional materials and styles, all sensitively updated for the 21st century. A collaboration with clothmakers Fox Brothers & Co has produced a 100% merino wool fabric for the cabin, which is a world first for a production car. Bentley says that the new blend is resilient enough for everyday use in a car, which will be huge news for my array of holed jumpers.

New features have not been overthought. The central console screen is now curved, in order for a scrolling driver or passenger to keep consistent pressure on the display. Physical switches have been added at the request of customers. Improved, but not over-designed and certainly Bentley.

Craft and the attention to detail therein are a hallmark of the brand, and the Torcal is packed with delicious Easter eggs that give this machine a decidedly human feel. Professional musicians were enlisted to help synthesise the sound of the old Bentley V8s, so that the artificial noise isn’t merely a soundtrack, but something more organic and responsive. The speedometer and dial is based on a crystal-cut glass with a light shining through. The indicator noise is a small hammer being tapped on leather and the car whispers birdsong when you open it. It is never the easiest thing to innovate while retaining an identity, but the Torcal is a splendid effort so far.

If the inside remains true to form, so too does the performance. Power tops out at about 875bhp, a top-speed of 162mph is claimed and the Torcal will get you to 60mph in 2.9 seconds. All plenty, but not too much. Perhaps most impressive is the advertised 375 miles of range and the ability to charge from 10%–80% in as little as 16 minutes. Bentley said that they have spent a lot of time designing the car to operate as a proper GT, and if those values are proven on the road, then there is very little to separate the Torcal from any other continent crusher.

It’s been a long-held belief at Country Life to not rush into things. Listening rather than talking, observations over actions. Doing it right is always better than doing it first. On first impressions, the Torcal seems very right indeed.

Jeff Koons is looking on the bright side. ‘I think we have an amazing future ahead of us,’ says one of the world’s most successful living artists, eyes twinkling. ‘AI is affecting us in the most positive ways imaginable.’

Jeff’s view is not a popular one. It’s a warm September day in New York City, his home, and the morning’s papers are forecasting AI will usher in the end of humanity only years from now. We’re discussing the launch of his latest collaboration, this time with the Swiss watchmaker Hublot.

‘This collaboration lets me celebrate the challenges and opportunities we have with [AI] and to be open to the future,’ he continues, pawing the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons, a limited-edition version of Hublot’s sports watch, now physically enhanced by the pneumatic design codes made famous by his shiny, rather ubiquitous 'Balloon Dog' sculptures.

Unlike the pessimists and, it seems, even some of the billionaire tech bros, Jeff says he’s free of the anxieties of a world overrun by killer robots. ‘I believe in practising the removal of judgement and being open to acceptance of everything,’ he explains. ‘If you practise acceptance, everything’s perfect in its own being, and that’s total empowerment. Judgement creates anxiety, and anxiety creates fear, so you become disengaged, and that creates disempowerment.’

Acceptance, continues the 71-year-old, is fuel for ‘awe and wonderment’. But isn’t judgement a critical part of what makes us human, of what helps us distinguish right from wrong? ‘There are some places for judgement,’ he says, clarifying. ‘You have to make decisions. But being open to everything is how you walk out of Plato’s Cave. If you remove anxiety and fear, you’re able to have higher consciousness.’

Per the allegory, said cave is one we only walk out of with education, and Jeff is eager to impress what he has learned, and what his 'Balloon Dog' sculptures — and his new watch — might teach us. ‘If you think of a balloon animal, the outside membrane is interacting with the external world,’ he begins. ‘If you had a balloon here, you would feel like the inside was vacuous, empty, and the outside world you would feel has more density.

‘In our own being, we’re like an inflatable, but we’re dense inside,’ he continues. ‘We have blood, organs, and the vacuous part is outside. So when we look at a balloon animal, there’s a reversal, and it gives us a sense of confidence to be engaged in the external world. You feel more safety within your own being.’

The narrative deepens. ‘There’s a profoundness in the dialogue,’ he goes on, still referring to the inside-outside meaning behind his mirror-like stainless steel sculptures of the childhood object. ‘There’s life and death. Take a deep breath and it’s a symbol of optimism and life energy, and then there’s one’s last breath, exhaling, a symbol of death.’

The watch, he says, conveys the same idea, albeit in a slightly more private way than would be true of a towering public sculpture. Every surface of the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons is somehow inflated and cartoonish. Even the dial is undulating, like the inside of a bouncy castle, and the strap is puffy, too. The second-hand counterbalance carries a tiny moulded Balloon Dog, so small it’s barely visible to the naked eye.

‘At death, we deflate,’ Jeff says, without intending to burst his own balloon. ‘But the watch will remain permanently inflated. Time is passing, but optimism is remaining.’

Jeff moved to New York in the late 1970s (initially as a commodities broker) after art school, and has since become one of the world’s most influential artists. His work, which typically elevates the everyday into something more extraordinary, has explored themes such as seduction, banality, consumerism and self-promotion, all of which are as apparent in his first collaboration with Hublot as those that examine our mortality.

The Balloon Dog watch comes in 42 millimetres of stainless steel, finished either in a matte metallic red or blue, or a chrome-like finish buffed to mirror levels of sheen. These sit alongside a fourth and far more technical piece, a spin on an esoteric Hublot design called MP-14 Origin by Jeff Koons. Sitting a full two centimeters off the wrist, its octagonal form is hewn from a single block of sapphire crystal, one of the world’s hardest materials, and houses concentric rings of diamonds and blue sapphires wrapped around a tourbillon mechanism made almost invisible by the translucent blue dome above it.

Even while the MP-14 Origin is large — huge — in wristwatch terms, it’s tiny by comparison to his’ 12-foot-high Balloon Dog (Orange), a piece sold by Christie’s New York for $58.4 million in 2013. Even Rabbit, a 41-inch high stainless steel sculpture that became the world’s most expensive piece sold by a living artist when it went under the hammer for $91.1 million in 2019, would dwarf it.

But scale, Jeff says, is easily surmountable, and collaborations such as this give him room to prove it. ‘Plato would always say that in making a work of art, the first thing you have to deal with is scale,’ he says. ‘If I’m making a traditional piece, I start to make maquettes and cutouts. But it’s all embedded within us, scaled within our mind. And so with pieces like these Hublot watches, I find a major part is internal, profoundly within.’

The detailing in the watches is extreme. Hublot’s production head is in New York, too, and he admits quietly that the dial alone required significant trial and error during the two-year period that spanned the brand’s first meeting with Jeff and the delivery of the new watches.

How does he know when a piece — or a watch — is finished? ‘You take something as far as you can, and then at a certain point you just have to let go, and move on to the next thing,’ he says. In part, this is who he is. ‘Sometimes I would be referred to as a perfectionist, but I never consider myself a perfectionist, because I’m not,’ he offers. And then, with a whisper of irony that makes his eyes light up again, he insists — ‘a perfectionist is like a dog, chasing its tail.’

The Hublot Classic Fusion Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons costs £19,700 (all colours); the Hublot MP-14 Origin by Jeff Koons costs. £383,000. Visit the Hublot website for more information.

The Searchers sang about them in the Swinging Sixties, Jane Austen used them with as much professionalism and sharp observation as she did a quill pen and countless people have searched for them in haystacks — usually fruitlessly.

Needles captured Shakespeare’s attention, with Helena intrinsically linking them to friendship in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As a needle joins stitches and attaches them to material elements, so she says: ‘We Hermia, like two artificial gods,/Have with our needles created both one flower,/Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion.’ Slight, svelte, invariably shiny and pin sharp (note not ‘needle sharp’, for in a linguistic slight the eyeless pin has somehow out-pointed the needle), needles have, throughout history, punched above their weight.

They can pierce through fabric and flesh and are adept at taking on a diverse range of tasks, from creating clothing to tattooing and drawing blood; they deliver medication (or worse); they are used to make sutures in all kinds of creatures; they are a key tool of the acupuncturist; and they give sound to singles spinning on record players. Where would we be without a needle — made up simply of a shaft, an eye and a point — to prise out a deeply embedded thorn from a sore finger?

Our ancestors understood the power of needles and were using them at least 50,000 years ago, no doubt to unite various animal hides in the earliest examples of cave couture. The oldest needle fragment, made of bird bone and discovered in 2016 in Siberian Russia’s remote Denisova Cave, has been dated to the Palaeolithic period. This was aeons before one of the latest developments, the ‘modern’ sewing machine needle — with a plump, rounded shank and front groove that set it apart from the hand-held needle — was even a twinkle in designer Thomas Saint’s eye. (The term ‘modern’ is used loosely, for Saint’s first sewing machine design appeared in 1790.)

Worcestershire’s Redditch, famous in recent times for its designation as a new town (in 1964) and the butt of comedian Jasper Carrott’s jokes about the inescapability of its ring road, was once something more formidable — the needle-making capital of the world.

Documents show William Lee making the slender spikes in Studley, a satellite village, in 1639, with small-scale producers subsequently proliferating, until the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the‘dark satanic mills’ of William Blake’s poem, with brutal work practices and unceasing production.

In Hard Times, Charles Dickens writes of the rattle and tremble of the windows caused by the machines running ‘all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness’.

By 1869, Forge Mill was one of 116 mills in Redditch. The former iron forge turned to needle-making and scouring/polishing in the 1730s and only fell silent in 1958, after which it was transformed into a museum. Today, it’s tranquil. The half-dozen visitors meander, sit at the picnic tables with ice cream or browse the well-stocked gift shop.

As a keen, but time-deprived hand-sewing curtain-maker, I can’t resist a teal-coloured pack of ‘general needles’, assembled and inspected on nearby Washford Industrial Estate by 186-year-old firm John James Needles, a rare survivor.

A couple of sightseers have found their way into the three-storey, red-brick museum and are reading placards that recall how this building once thrummed with ceaseless toil.

Firstly, coils of Sheffield steel wire would be drawn through a series of diminishing holes, until, slim enough, the wire would be cut about 30,000 times, each time into the length of two needles, point to point, these conjoined twins heading through the factory together. Next, a bunch of some 15,000 wires would be heated, rolled and straightened before they made a beeline for the pointing process — a job fraught with danger.

Jo-Ann Gloger, curator, is explaining the many processes of needle-making (there are 30 stages in all) and listening to her is not unlike tuning in to Aggers delivering a cricket masterclass for the BBC. She knows her stuff. ‘To point the wires, the worker would press them hard against the grindstone and roll them,’ she elaborates. ‘Then, he would flip the wire over and point the other side, all in less than 30 seconds. Because he’s dry grinding, the metal dust goes into his lungs and causes silicosis or “pointer’s rot”. Within two or three years, he'll be coughing up blood and, by the age of about 35, he’ll be dead. Sometimes, a metal sliver may fly into his eye, blinding him. Occasionally, the pointing stone will fracture and cause a fatal injury, the fate that befell Edward Matthews in 1816. It was pretty horrific, but they were very well paid because it was so dangerous.’

The next stage saw a fly press stamp out the two eyes, with outworkers trimming away the excess metal left by the weighty drop hammer. The conjoined pair of needles was then split in two and sent to a hardener, who heated them to 800˚C until they glowed cherry red, at which point they were plunged into whale oil for quenching. Reheated to 200˚C and left to cool slowly to temper their brittleness, the needles were then scoured/polished before finally being tucked into folded paper packets.

‘This is the only water-powered needle-scouring mill left in the entire world,’ reveals Gloger proudly, adding that the process she has just detailed remains ‘very similar today. They’ve simply mechanised it more extensively. At its height, this mill was scouring something like three million needles per week. Early needles were really treasured because they were expensive, but, when machines were introduced, they became cheaper. In the 1880s, they cost just 1/d a packet.’

Armed with this fascinating knowledge, I head from the gloom of the former mill into the sunshine of the tranquil museum garden. ‘Any more questions?’ asks Gloger. I do have one, but I think she might baulk at being asked whether it is at all plausible that a camel — a diminutive one, certainly — could pass through the eye of a needle.

Visit the Forge Mill Needle Museum website for more information.

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

No car in history has been flattered by imitation so much as the AC Cobra. At the last count, there were over a dozen different British specialists producing spurious clones of the machine that epitomises the ultimate in muscle cars. In the USA, where the Anglo-American Cobra was created in the 1960s by shoehorning a big V8 engine into the neat, race-bred spaceframe of the AC Ace, there are several more. However, any that use the AC or Cobra names face the threat of litigation by Ford, who own both.

Ford bought AC from Autokraft, the company that acquired the rights to make the Cobra from the original Thames Ditton-based makers, last year. Now they take an aggressive stance against imitators who infringe their copyright, not least because Autokraft (whose owner is also managing director of Ford-controlled AC) still makes the real thing, albeit in very small numbers, mostly for the US market.

The replica makers confuse the issue by giving their cars other names: Brightwell Viper, Dax Tojeiro (in association with John Tojeiro, who designed the chassis of the original AC Ace), Magnum 427 (an evocative number that signifies the capacity in cubic inches of the 7-litre Cobra’s engine), Pilgrim Sumo, Python Roadster, Ram ST, SRV8 Roadster and others besides.

If the proliferation of Cobra lookalikes is rooted in the original’s classic looks and raw performance, it has been bolstered by soaring prices that have put the genuine article beyond the reach of all but wealthy collectors. A damaged AC Cobra sold recently at auction for £90,000.

What price, then, a respectable replica that looks, sounds and goes like the real thing? You see them advertised at anything between £10,000 and £20,000 — even more for outstanding examples — which is a lot of money to pay for a kit car. Oh yes, I forgot to mention: most Cobra clones start as a kit of parts, quite possibly a very incomplete kit that requires a very donor car, usually a Jaguar, from which to scrounge key components like the suspension, steering and brakes.

DIY car construction is not a job for anyone without patience, skill or proper facilities. However, there are now enough ready-made, upper-crust replicas on the market to attract the attention of enthusiasts interested in more than just enjoying the end product than in creating it.

I would not touch a car that had been shoddily built from a poor kit by a corner-cutting amateur. However, a professionally built machine with a decent chassis (like the Ram ST’s, designed by Adrian Raynard, a racing-car constructor of high repute) and refurbished Jaguar suspension (more sophisticated than that of the original leaf-sprung car) should ride and handle better than the real thing. If the glass-fibre body is expertly painted and free from ripples (not all of them are) it is indistinguishable from the original’s aluminium skin.

The best and most authentic Cobra lookalikes have large American V8 engines, preferably from Ford, though Rover’s 3.5 V8 powertrain, complete with five-speed gearbox and a clutch that does not need Herculean strength to work, is an acceptable down-market alternative: it performs with alacrity in the Morgan Plus 8 and TVR 350, so why not in a Cobra replica?

Jaguar’s 5.3-litre V12 has been prized under the bonnet of some cars, sacrificing authenticity (and, probably, handling balance, too) for engineering art. Either way, do not expect the sort of shattering performance (0 to 100mph in under 10sec) that put the original 7-litre Cobra, albeit a tweaked one, into the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s fastest-accelerating road car.

Many famous supercars, past and present, now have spurious lookalikes. Those that were hybrids in the first place — the cross-pollinated Cobra, born out of wedlock, is the classic example — seem to work best. They do not offend me in the least, provided they are well made and finished. Others in this category include Transformer Cars’ HF2000, which apes the Ferrari-powered Lancia Stratos rally car, and GT Developments’ GTD 40, authentically reproducing Ford’s Le Mans-winning GT40 sports racer of the 1960s. Tom Keating would have been proud of both.

There are several other categories. Pseudo-off-roaders like the Escort-based Jago Jeep, Rickman Ranger and Eagle RV account for a surprisingly large slice of the burgeoning kit-car market. Then there are the pared-to-the-bone sports cars, low on creature comforts, high on raw driver appeal. Here, Caterham’s expensive Super Seven, its lineage straight from classic Lotus stock, has the best pedigree, Westfield’s respected SE being its strongest rival.

I rather like the open sportsters that imitate nothing in particular but capture the spirit of another era. The Jaguar-based Kougar — another kit that has become a classic — is probably the fastest if not the prettiest.

I can summon little enthusiasm for those impertinent replicas of current aristocrats such as the Lamborghini Countach or Porsche 911. It is a question of breeding, I suppose. Good Cobra clones get away with it because they faithfully reflect the original in spirit and hardware. A Ford-Granada-powered Countach does not. Nor does a poorly finished 911 with a flat-four engine.

Not all the clones originate from kits. The ultimates, like Lynx’s Jaguar D-type replica (also a road-ready car), are so superbly crafted that they are collectors’ items in their own right. Better to play with a £50,000 fake than a priceless original.

The Country Life Archive contains more than a century of British architecture, rural life, photography, and property records dating back to the magazine's launch in 1897. You can search and explore historical content using the Country Life Archive tag on our site, or access the complete backfile (1897–2005) via the ProQuest Country Life Archive

'Little Billiee the Pekin[g]ese spaniel, hails from China, and is a wonderfully good specimen of his breed. He is very small, well built, and has extraordinary feather on the legs and feet, and quite the longest ears imaginable. He is certainly a most charming little pet, being lively and having the best of tempers,' Country Life reported in 1897 on visiting the Princess of Wales’s kennels at Sandringham.

The Pekingese has long enjoyed royal attention and was once the exclusive companion of China’s emperors, who regarded the breed as sacred, confining the dogs to the Forbidden City. However, it was the sacking of Peking, during the Second Opium War of 1860 that brought the breed to Britain. The emperor of China had fled the Summer Palace — which had been inhabited by his aunt — and a British officer spared a thought for the five little dogs mourning the loss of their mistress, who had committed suicide on the advance of the allied troops.

One of those dogs he presented to Queen Victoria, who named it Looty and consigned it to the kennels at Windsor Castle, where it survived until 1872. Of the remaining dogs, two were given to the Duchess of Richmond and Gordon, who went on to develop the Goodwood bloodline, and two were secured by Admiral Lord John Hay.

However, it would be a wealthy barrister’s wife, Clarice Ashton Cross, who founded Britain’s most distinguished peke kennels at Alderbourne, and took Edwardian dog shows by storm, arriving by carriage with footmen carrying her dogs in hampers.

Ashton Cross proved to the nation that a 'show dog is not necessarily a beautiful imbecile' and that the diminutive little dogs were perfectly capable 'of running and hurdling, the obstacles, of course, being graded to suit their size' and that those ‘'reared sensibly are most pleasing outdoor dogs and are an ornament to any lawn.' Indeed, Arthur Croxton Smith confirmed in 1931 that they 'are not merely lapdogs, suited only for lying about on cushions,' a sentiment that was echoed in 2010 when Country Life reported that the Pekingese’s 'instincts for herding and for chasing quarry were stronger than the pampered indolence of the popular stereotype.'

Brave, imperious, and undeniably fluffy, displaying a 'certain aloof air of disdain, as though the memory of royal ancestry never quite leaves him' the Pekingese has captivated many enthusiasts including the 3rd Duke of Wellington, Idina Sackville, Barbara Cartland, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Banks, the first woman president of the RHS, and Mary Russell, the 'Flying Duchess' and wife of the 11th Duke of Bedford, who built a charming little temple in the pet cemetery of Woburn, Bedfordshire. Beneath a wrought-iron dome supported on Corinthian columns sleeps a cast of Che Foo, otherwise known as Wuzzy, the duchess’s Pekingese.

Famed for resembling a pain au chocolat (or a fig roll?), a Pekingese called Eric stole the nation’s heart when he competed for Crufts Best in Show in 2016.

This is an extract from 'The Country Life Book of Dogs' (Rizzoli, £50) by Agnes Stamp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your aesthetic hero

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

An exhibition that has really impressed you

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

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

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

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

Your favourite painting

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

A possession you’d never sell

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

A book that has inspired you

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

The music that you work to

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

The last podcast you listened to

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

Who would play you in a film of your life

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

What you’d take with you to a desert island

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

The thing that gets you up in the morning

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

The items you collect

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

A hotel you could go back and back to

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

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

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

The best present you’ve ever received

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

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