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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your aesthetic hero

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

A possession you’d never sell

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

An exhibition that has really impressed you

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

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

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

Your favourite painting

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

A book you’ve found inspiring

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

The music you work to

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

The last podcast you listened to

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

Who would play you in a film of your life

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

What you’d take with you to a desert island

A coffee machine.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

The school run.

The items you collect

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

A hotel you could go back and back to

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

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

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

The best present you’ve ever received

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

Visit the ZdG website for more information and to shop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your aesthetic heroes

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

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

Exhibitions that have impressed you

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

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

The last things of note that you bought for yourselves

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

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

Your favourite paintings

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

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

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

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

The possessions that you’d never sell

Clare: The silver teapot.

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

Clare: I’d never sell that.

The books you’ve found inspiring

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

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

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

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

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

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

The music you work to

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

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

The last podcasts you listened to

Clare: Michael listens to a lot.

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

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

What you’d take with you to a desert island

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

Michael: To defend yourself or cut through things?

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

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

The thing that gets you up in the morning

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

The hotels you could go back and back to

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

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

The most memorable meals you’ve ever eaten

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

Clare: I think probably a risotto or kedgeree.

The best presents you’ve ever received

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

Clare: You quite like surprises.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is it?

A remote spot in the Cotswolds.

A quick description

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

How did you find it?

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

How smooth was the purchase?

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

What made you buy it?

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

Favourite aspect?

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

Best memory of living there?

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

Biggest mistake?

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

Biggest indulgence?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your aesthetic hero

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

A book you’ve found inspiring

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

An exhibition that has really impressed you

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

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

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

Your favourite painting

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

The music you work to

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

A possession you’d never sell

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

The last podcast you listened to

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

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

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

What you’d take with you to a desert island

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

The items you collect

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

The thing that gets you up each morning

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

A hotel you could go back and back to

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

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

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

The best present you’ve ever received

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

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

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

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

Gucci mega cuff coat

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

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

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

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

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

Engraved necklace

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

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

Portrait of a Lady EDP by Frédéric Malle

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

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

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

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

Margaret and Marigold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your aesthetic hero

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

An exhibition that has really impressed you

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

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

The last thing that you bought for yourself

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

Your favourite painting

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

A possession you’d never sell

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

A book you’ve found inspiring

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

The music that you work to

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

The last podcast you listened to

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

Who would play you in a film of your life

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

What you’d take with you to a desert island

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

The thing that gets you up in the morning

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

The items you collect

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

A hotel you could go back and back to

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

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

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

The best present you’ve ever received

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

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

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

Where was it?

Potten End, Hertfordshire

A quick description.

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

When did you live there?

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

How did it come about?

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

Best memory of living there?

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

Biggest indulgence?

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

What happened to it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your aesthetic hero

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

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

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

An exhibition that has really impressed you

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

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

Your favourite painting

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

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

A possession that you’d never sell

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

Who would play you in a film of your life

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

A book that you found really inspiring

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

The music that you work to

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

The last podcast you listened to

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

What you’d take with you to a desert island

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

The thing that gets you up on the morning

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

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

The items you collect

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

A hotel you could go back and back to

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

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

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

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

The best present you’ve ever received

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your aesthetic hero

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

A book you’ve found inspiring

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

The music that you work to

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

An exhibition that has really impressed you

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

What you’d take with you to a desert island

I think I would take a Jilly Cooper book.

The last podcast you listened to

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

The thing that gets you up in the morning

The cry of a toddler.

The items you collect

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

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

A fur coat at a vintage market in Paris.

A hotel you could go back and back to

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

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

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

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

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

The best present you’ve ever received

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

Your favourite painting

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

A possession you’d never sell

Lots of things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your aesthetic hero

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

The possession that you’d never sell

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

An exhibition that has really impressed you

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

A book you found inspiring

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

Your favourite painting

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

The music that you work to

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

The last podcast you listened to

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

The last thing of note you bought for yourself

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

Who would play you in a film of your life

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

What you’d take to a desert island

A pop-up spa and a speed boat.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

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

The items you collect

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

A hotel you could go back and back to

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

The most memorable meal you’ve ever had

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

The best present you’ve ever received

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your aesthetic hero

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

An exhibition that has really impressed you

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

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

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

Your favourite painting

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

A possession you’d never sell

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

A book you found inspiring

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

The music you work to

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

The last podcast you listened to

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

Who would play you in a film of your life

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

What you’d take with you to a desert island

A book about how to build a boat.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

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

The items you collect

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

A hotel you could go back and back to

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

The most memorable meal you’ve ever had

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

The best present you’ve ever received

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

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

'Independent taxation, which took effect on April 6, 1990, offers all married women the opportunity to enjoy independence and privacy in their own tax affairs,’ proffered Margaret Thatcher’s business secretary Peter Lilley in Parliament that July, announcing the long-awaited policy that is now considered a cornerstone of women’s suffrage.

Eighty years before, Sophia Duleep Singh, one of the original movement’s architects, was marching to Westminster as part of the Women’s Tax Resistance League (WTRL, slogan: ‘No vote, no tax’). The march on November 18, 1910, of some 300 Suffragettes, frustrated by news of an imminent General Election that would scupper the bill to allow women the vote, became known as Black Friday for its police violence.

As the third daughter of Sir Duleep Singh, the last maharaja of the Sikh Empire, and Bamba Müller, the illegitimate child of a German merchant banker and his Abyssinian mistress, few historical figures have sat at such a rich and fascinating juncture between power, empire and progress.

The Princess was born in west London in 1876 and spent most of her childhood at Elveden Hall in Suffolk. Her father had called Britain home from the age of 15, five years after he was deposed from the Sikh Empire and the East India Company seized control of Punjab. Queen Victoria took a shine to the young maharaja and, after he abandoned his family in 1886 and Müller died of renal failure a year later, she gave Princess Sophia, her goddaughter, a grace-and-favour residence on the Hampton Court estate.

Thirteen years later, the Princess would join the WTRL and campaign for her right to vote, causing a scandal by selling copies of The Suffragette newspaper outside the former royal residence she called home. Her move into activism was prompted by a trip to India in 1907, where she became disillusioned with the British Raj after witnessing extreme poverty. This pushed her to challenge the establishment and, by 1911, one of her diamond rings had been impounded by bailiffs as recourse for non-payment of tax. It was later bought back at auction and returned by a fellow member of the League.

Princess Sophia died in 1948, 42 years before her dream of women’s financial independence was finally enshrined into law. An exhibition focused on her life, and her sisters Catherine and Bamba, ‘The Last Princesses of Punjab’, runs at Kensington Palace until November 8. It features her spoilt 1911 census record, on which she wrote ‘No Vote, No Census’.

Away from the campaigning, during the Second World War, Princess Sophia joined the Voluntary Auxiliary Detachment Service as a nurse. She was also a keen rider, hockey player, cyclist and dog breeder and trainer, taking her Pomeranian, Jo, on her tour of India in 1906. Borzois were her second favourite dogs.

This feature originally appeared in the May 27, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Dame Prue Leith is talking to me about ‘bitches’. She is talking about female dogs, of course, but it still cracks me up. It is funny, I think, because she is old. This is by her own definition; her new book, Being Old and Learning to Love it, was published in Prue’s 86th year and instantly became a Sunday Times bestseller. ‘I'm so sick of people banging on about how terrible it is to be old. There are lots of old people having a really good time, and I’m certainly one of them,’ she tells me, taking a sip of her coffee, chomping down on a shortbread biscuit and looking entirely at home in the swanky room we are meeting in at The Chesterfield Mayfair.

It is her no-nonsense approach and trademark quick wit that made the South African and British chef a star in 2017 when, aged 77, she joined The Great British Bake Off as a judge alongside Paul Hollywood. Before accepting the job, she rang up her predecessor and friend Mary Berry for advice on working with the most steely-eyed of bakers. ‘She said, “Paul absolutely knows what he’s all about, and his judgment is always spot on… the only problem we’re going to have is that you’re not really necessary. Paul could do the whole thing on his own — so just make sure you get your word in”.’ She certainly did.

Her husband (who introduces himself as Prue’s bag carrier) is her biggest fan. He is also her personal stylist — she is married to the retired clothes designer and businessman John Playfair. When I first meet John he takes a card for their show, Prue Leith’s Cotswold Kitchen, from his breast pocket, beaming. He seems to be absolutely infatuated with her, as we all are.

National Treasure status, however, has not made Prue a shrinking violet. She's been very outspoken throughout her career. In particular, Prue has been an advocate for assisted dying. An opinion not shared by her son, the Reform MP Danny Kruger. ‘Neither of us find it a problem. I mean, we disagree about quite a lot of things. He’s very Christian, and I am an atheist, so that’s a big difference,’ she explains.

The key to her youthfulness, I think, is how much she continues to do. ‘I love being busy. I love doing different things. I love doing things I’ve never done before,’ Prue says. Case in point, Prue made her singing debut on The Masked Singer last year, she will be speaking at Wasing Estate’s Well Read festival next month and is continuing to film Prue Leith’s Cotswold Kitchen with John.

The guest on the show that has surprised her the most so far has been the American actress Blake Lively. The unlikely friends met when Prue was filming The Great American Baking Show and Blakes’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, was filming Deadpool. ‘I had said to her, if you’re ever in the Cotswolds, come. I’d love you to be on Cotswold Kitchen. Blow me down, six months later she rings up and says: “Guess what? I’m in the Cotswolds and I’ve got tomorrow free. I can come if you like”.’

Despite being a very young kind of ‘old’, Prue admits that in between hobnobbing with Hollywood stars and countless new projects she does ‘love a sleep in the afternoon’. With any job she takes, a one-hour ‘nap break’ (booked in after lunch) is pre-agreed. ‘It’s one of the great privileges of old age,’ she says.

Your aesthetic hero

It has to be my husband, because he’s been so inspiring. I always liked colour, but I wasn’t as brave as I am now, but he always will push me. I often say, ‘Is this too much?’ and he will say, ‘It’s not enough — bigger earrings!’ Also, I hate shopping, and he loves it, so he buys all my clothes — so he’s definitely my hero.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

Recently, we went to the opening of the Lucian Freud exhibition at the London Portrait Gallery, and it’s amazing. I mean, if you think about it, most of us have an image of Lucian Freud’s work, and it’s generally the rather horrific pictures of naked old ladies in my head. I had the idea that he was more interested in ugly than beautiful. Actually, the drawing is just so exquisite, and masses and masses of his drawings and pictures are not of naked old ladies. They're just so characterful and wonderful, I love that.

A book you’ve found inspiring

I have found lots of books very inspiring over my life, but I'm very keen on Shakespeare, because my mother was a Shakespearean actress. The only play I know pretty well backwards is Hamlet, because I was in it when I was about 12. So the book that recently inspired me was written by the actress Dame Harriet Walter. It is called She Speaks and it is brilliant. It’s all about Shakespeare’s women.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I just bought myself a new kitten. This is in response to John who, for my birthday, gave me a Maine coon kitten who I absolutely adore. She’s called Sophie, short for Sophisticat, but she's really lonely. She tries to get the old dogs (we've got two old cavalier spaniels — bitches) but they're really old, and they just think she's such a pain in the neck. She wants to play all the time and they don't want her to play so she needs a companion, so I’ve just bought her half brother. He will be called Aristocat. I’ve always had the most contentious names for my cats.

The music that you work to

I am so non-musical. I mean, I enjoy music, but it never occurs to me to turn anything on. I have never worked with any noise at all. I got myself talked into going on The Masked Singer recently. It came about because when they rang me up and said, ‘We want you to do this,’ I said, ‘Don't be silly. I can't sing a note, I’m tone deaf and I never listen to music.’ They said, ‘Well, we can teach you.’ So I agreed, and then I discovered that their budget for teaching non-singers to sing was never going to get anywhere near me, so I ended up having to hire a private voice coach, and you know what, it worked. I mean, I don't say I was in tune, but at least I could belt it out.

The last podcast you listened to

Well, I don't listen to podcasts very much, mostly because I am very busy. I used to be really addicted to The Rest is Politics, and I still do listen occasionally. I know it's the top rating, but it is for a good reason. I mean, those two are so good, both excellent, and they don't agree with each other all the time, which is lovely.

Your favourite painting

The Royal Academy held a David Hockney exhibition a few years ago, and it was all those East Yorkshire landscapes, which I love. So any one of them. But, the one I particularly remember is The Road Across the Wolds. It’s almost like a children's illustration. Lovely little squares of fields of beautiful colours. I love David Hockney because he draws so beautifully, but they're really accessible. What's not to like?

A possession that you’d never sell

It's a funny thing to say this, because it's so unlike me, but I have one really beautiful gold necklace, which I never wear, because I just wear brightly coloured necklaces. Once in a blue moon I wear it. I bought it in a jewellery shop with a girlfriend just after my first husband died. I was really so miserable, and she said, ‘Come on, we need to do something to cheer you up. I've got a plan.’ So, we went to a gallery where they were giving away free Champagne and vodka jellies. I won't say we were rolling drunk, but we were definitely tight, and whereupon she said, ‘Let's go and look at the jeweler.’ I ended up buying this really beautiful necklace. It is the thing I'd never part with, because, in a way, it was symbolic. It was the first time when I was so unhappy that I was laughing and doing irresponsible things like buying a necklace I couldn't afford.

What you’d take to a desert island

I think I would take the complete works of Shakespeare, because I haven't read them all, and it takes time to read them, because the language is quite old fashioned to us. It bears studying, and I never had time to do that.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Well, if I don't have anything else to do, I do wake up thinking: ‘What shall I cook?’ I cook for pleasure and for relaxation, if I'm happy and if I'm unhappy. There's not a day that goes by that I don't cook something. I tend to get up quite enthusiastically anyway, because there's usually 100 things I want to do. And, of course, I'm bossy and organised. If there's nothing much to do, I will have a go at the garage or sort out something people need sorting. Classic sorter.

The items you collect

I suppose necklaces. I have a necklace wall in my bedroom. John designed it. They’re trees made of metal, about 5ft high and 4ft across.

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

Phoebe Waller-Bridge, definitely. She has a bit of Fleabag-ness about her. I always see her as that sort of slightly anarchic, chaotic, not quite together character. I'd be very happy if she could play me.

A hotel you could go back and back to

The Hotel Chelsea in New York, because it's got a lovely bohemian air, and it’s rather like belonging to the Chelsea Arts Club here — not a hotel — but it's got a rather old-fashioned bohemian atmosphere full of old people thinking too much.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

I once went to El Bulli, which was a Spanish Costa Blanca restaurant overlooking the sea. It was really famous because the chef, who was a guy called Ferran Adrià, was in the forefront of the nouvelle cuisine movement. He was into making these tiny little mouthfuls of food, which is not really the way I like to eat at all, but because I'm interested in food, and I was a restaurateur at the time, and he was the restaurant that every restaurateur wanted to go to, I went.

I had realised that if I went with my then husband, he would absolutely hate it, because it would be one of those restaurants where the waiters keep coming along with another little tiny mouthful and telling you where it came from and who grew the raspberries and what kind of beef it was. It's too much information, and you can't have a proper conversation. The trick was to take my daughter, who's very interested in food, and our head chef. So that was the party, and so we were perfectly happy having foodie talk the whole way through. There were something like 40 little mouthfuls, and every one of them was in some way astonishing and amazing, either because it fizzed in your mouth, or the combination was so extraordinary. He was into making sure that you got the maximum sensory explosion. It was once in a lifetime.

The best present you’ve ever received

I had been badgering my parents since I was six for a pony, and obviously was never going to get one one. I used to be sent off to stay on a farm, mainly to learn Afrikaans, because the farming community were often Afrikaners. I went because I wanted to ride, not because I wanted to learn Afrikaans. There was a pony there that had an accident and had learned to favour one foot, still completely ridable, but it made the pony unsellable, so they gave my parents this horse. I said, ‘You can't refuse because it costs nothing.’ Of course, it doesn't cost nothing, once you've got a horse, you've got to buy a saddle and bridle etc. But that was the best present. He was called Laddie and I had him until I went to university.

Prue and Lotte met for coffee and biscuits at The Chesterfield Mayfair. For more information and to book a stay see here. Prue will be speaking at the Well Read festival at Wasing Estate next month. For more information and tickets see here.

Alexander Armstrong is an actor, comedian and broadcaster. On June 14, he will be discussing the power of classical music at the Well Read Literary Festival at Wasing Estate near Aldermaston, Berkshire.

Where was it?

On the edge of an Oxfordshire village.

A quick description

A five-bedroom, Grade II-listed Victorian vicarage.

How did you find it?

Through word of mouth.

What made you buy it?

It was so elegant and, as with all good houses, it told us how we were going to live in it. It had exactly the right smell.

How was the purchase?

Fairly smooth. We bought it from a family trust, which meant every-thing took considerably longer.

Favourite aspect

It had a heavenly garden, mature borders and a wonderful orchard. It was next to a medieval church in the curve of a river. It was bliss.

Best memory of living there

Our first winter there was 2010, when it snowed as it used to in the 1980s, and we had a white Christmas. Had the oil lorry been half an hour later on Christmas Eve, it would never have made it through. The joy and relief that we would have heating and a work-ing stove added to the cosiness.

Biggest mistake

The house was next to some picturesque ruins. The only bum note was that every Friday and Saturday night until dawn, from late March until mid October, these ruins were where the local teenagers came to drink vodka, tear about screaming and generally have an amazing time. I would go out to speak to them and although they were unfailingly polite and genial, they would use our garden as their latrine.

Anything unusual?

A couple of years ago we met someone who had known the house for years. She said it was the most haunted place she had known and asked if we’d seen all the ghosts. We hadn’t — which is terribly sad as I love a ghost.

What happened to it?

We moved to a farm with a bit more space. However, we still look back on it very fondly.

This feature first appeared in the May 27, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Cariad Lloyd’s father died when she was 15. He was a victim of pancreatic cancer at 44. Grief has overshadowed both her life and work, but curiously, Cariad’s career was founded in comedy. ‘Definitely experiencing grief at a young age, I think I hid a lot in comedy. It's a nice place to be when everything's very sad,’ she says.

Grief and humour, you’d think, aren’t natural bedfellows, but Cariad’s career has revolved around loss as much as it has around laughter. She is quite literally dead funny. Many know her for playing Megan, who had an affair with Robert Webb’s hapless Jez in the comedy hit Peep Show. Others know her for appearing on Qi, Have I Got News For You and a slew of other comedy panel shows. Her improv show Austentatious was a turning point in her career. In the show, Cariad acts out a made-up Jane Austen novel with a cast that includes fellow comic Rachel Parris. Austentatious has sold out at Edinburgh Fringe Festival five times and is now playing on Mondays at the Vaudeville Theatre in London throughout 2026, as well as touring. One such invented Austen novel was titled North Banged Her Madly by Cariad, to give you a flavour of the show.

Cariad’s award-winning podcast, Griefcast, is the other side of the coin of her career. Created in 2016, it sees her speak to famous guests about their experiences of death. Though it is currently on a hiatus, Cariad's book based on the series, You Are Not Alone, was published in 2023. She has also recently published a children's book about grief called Where Did She Go?, though admits she has found it difficult to discuss with her own children (aged six and nine) who she shares with her filmmaker husband Ben Blaine.

‘Their understanding develops as they grow, so they might come back to you [to discuss it more and more]. For example, my six-year-old son was on the toilet, and he said: “It's sad that grandpa died.” I said: “Yeah, it's really sad, isn't it? Let me know when you finish.”’

Cariad also hosts a podcast with fellow comedian Sara Pascoe, who she met as a student while studying English Literature at the University of Sussex. Sara & Cariad’s Weirdos Book Club sees the pair discuss a new book each week, and is the reason Cariad is now on the judging panel for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. ‘The year before, for the podcast, I'd read over 50 books in a year. This year, with the prize and the podcast, I've read 90 books in a year.’

The Women’s Prize, Cariad says, is more crucial than ever. ‘I think with the news lately, we know that we don't live in equal times. We absolutely don't have any kind of sense that the work is done,’ she says. ‘There's lots of statistics, if you look at people's reading habits — women read men and women, but men mainly read men. The shops know that, the publishers know that — so I think it's so important that we keep shouting about women's writing.’

Our conversation turns to young men and their reading habits. My boyfriend is obsessed with George Orwell, I tell Cariad. ‘He would definitely be a red flag these days,’ she says (about Orwell). ‘You should tell him to read Wifedom by Anna Funder [the story of the author’s much mistreated wife]. If he likes George Orwell, that’s a sobering read.’ She would know. She’s 90 books deep this year, and has a more sobering career than most.

Your aesthetic hero

Is it okay if I say the Moomins? That’s my vibe. What I would like people to get from me is a Moomin vibe.

A possession you’d never sell

I've got a drawing that my daughter did of some flowers, which is really good. I would never sell that.

A book you’ve found inspiring

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. It is so good, and the audiobook is read by Meryl Streep. I read it and then listened to the audiobook because I needed to hear Meryl, and I just found the writing, the characters, the pace — everything — just made it one of the most satisfying, inspiring reads.

The music that you work to

I have ADHD so I listen to binaural beats — that’s how I’ve written any books. It’s a special frequency of sound. Without that, I don't do f***ing anything, I'm just so distracted.

Your favourite painting

I’m more into photographers than paintings, so I’ll actually probably say Francesca Woodman, who is a female photographer. They had an exhibition of her work at the National Portrait Gallery, and there’s one series called ‘Polka dots’. For it, she took pictures of herself and it's really interesting. She was way ahead of her time. They would have been so perfect for Instagram but because she didn't have Instagram they're much more thought through and arty.

The last podcast you listened to

Good Hang with Amy Poehler. You feel like you've eavesdropped on a conversation between really great friends. It is genuinely a good hang, and her guests are so good. The Gwyenth Paltrow episode was great.

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

If my husband [who is a filmmaker] was casting it I’d be annoyed if he didn’t cast me to play me — come on, it’s a job. I’d do a self tape. If not me… the problem is, I don’t even know any bloody actors anymore. Am I allowed to say someone old and dead? The only person I can think of to play me is Vivien Leigh, which is outrageous, because she's way more beautiful than me, but I’ve always felt like we have a kindred spirit.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

I would take my laptop to write or I would take a lot of books or a Kindle, because as long as I could write or read or do something I would be fine. It's just sitting still doing nothing that is the problem.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

Recently? The Lee Miller one at Tate Britain. I'm a massive Lee Miller fan, and have been for years and years and years, and it's been kind of weird — when I first discovered her, no one had heard of her. Now she just keeps getting bigger and bigger, which is lovely, because you get exhibitions full of stuff that before you couldn't get access to. This exhibition was amazing. It was so well curated and it was so popular. It was nice to see so many people understand the impact she had as a war photographer as someone who was reporting for Vogue. That's mad. That's wild.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

My children, because I have no option. My son comes down at 6am each morning. I would happily stay in bed until 11am pre-kids, but no. My children come down and say: ‘Where’s my cereal?’

The items you collect

Books and Moomin paraphernalia.

A hotel you could go back and back to

Charlotte Street Hotel — they do nice book events.

Most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

At The Sportsman in Kent. I had one of the best puddings of my life there, it tasted of autumn and bonfires.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

Probably the new flavor of Tony's Chocolonely. I'm obsessed with their chocolate.

The best present you’ve ever received

Sara Pascoe bought me a Moomin jumper. It’s one I had eyed up for ages but that was too expensive.

Cariad is on the judging panel for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction. The winner will be revealed on June 11 at the charity’s annual summer party in Bedford Square Gardens, London. For more information visit their website.

Right, let's start with some tough love: I’m sorry, but there’s no cheat’s way through a break-up. It’s awful and it will be awful for a while. But then, one day, it will seem less awful. And then it’ll probably feel awful again for a bit, but then, suddenly, less awful.

It goes on like this for some time — a rollercoaster of emotions — depending on how long the relationship was and other factors. I did tell you it was tough.

If someone, in the early stages of your separation, tells you that it’s better to have loved and lost than never have loved at all, try not to kick them. Trite sayings (with due respect to Alfred, Lord Tennyson) can feel incredibly irritating in the weeds of a split.

Other people might tell you that it’s better to be the dumped than to be the dumpee, but I’m not sure this is true. Both can be woeful. When you are given half-baked advice or support, the best thing to do is smile and nod. Most people, however cackhanded, are only trying to help.

After my last break-up, wonderful friends rallied forwards with many suggestions: drink, don’t drink, eat junk food, only eat healthy food; watch bad telly; go for long walks; meditate; run; take melatonin for sleep; get back out there, and so on and so on. The truth is that some of these things might help, but some of them won’t. It’s a very subjective situation. However, I’m really not sure drinking is useful. After half a glass of wine last time round, I texted my former partner and told him that I missed him. He replied asking how best to go about retrieving the coat he'd left at my friend’s house. I stopped drinking for a few weeks after that.

Generally, a no-contact rule is the best way forward. Initially, it will feel impossible. A week? Are you joking? But slowly, unbelievably slowly, this will get easier. You'll wake up one day and realise that you've gone an evening without thinking about them; and a few weeks after that, a whole day. If there are children involved, or if you’re divorcing and there are legalities to arrange, no contact is obviously trickier. But minimal, pragmatic contact is still advisable.

In Belle Burden’s hit, au courant memoir, Strangers, she reveals that her husband asked her to make him a sandwich after telling their children that the marriage was over. Don’t do this.

If children are involved, don’t grumble about your ex directly to them or in earshot. It’s deeply confusing, if you’re a small person, to have your life suddenly split in two. More confusing still to discover that the two people you loved most suddenly hate one another. My parents were very mindful about this.

Try very, very hard to avoid looking your ex up on social media. Consider blocking them, not only because then they can’t see your profile, but crucially because you can’t see theirs. Again, this may seem inconceivable in the immediate aftermath of a break-up, but psychologically it’s a huge help.

If you’re looking for a therapist to help — even just a few sessions to get you through the first few weeks — ask for recommendations. It’s bandit country on the internet when it comes to therapists. Don’t make yourself feel worse by handing over too much money to someone entirely unqualified.

Lastly, have you considered a dog?

Bethany Handley was always an outdoorsy kid. Climbing mountains, crossing rivers or surfing in the sea near her home in South Wales, she lived and worked in the wild, with a job as an outdoor activity instructor.

All that changed in the matter of a few months as illness left her in a wheelchair. Instead of being out and about, she found herself in a rural home where all the paths she once walked were blocked off to her by stiles whose existence she'd once barely noticed.

Yet she has been determined not to let that stop her enjoying nature, doing everything she can to get out in the great outdoors — from surfing on a special board adapted for her by her brother, to getting her partner's help to climb ridges in the Black Mountains.

We're absolutely delighted that Bethany joined James Fisher for this week's instalment of the Country Life Podcast. She tells her story with grace, honesty and humour — a story she's also shared in a new book, My Body is a Meadow: Finding Freedom in the Outdoors, published on May 7, 2026.

Bethany talks about everything from the thoughts that ran through her head as she lay in her hospital bed to the efforts she makes today to campaign for better access to the countryside for the huge number of people in Britain who face problems getting around. It's a fascinating and salutary glimpse into a different life; you'll never take your legs for granted again.

My Body is a Meadow: Finding Freedom in the Outdoors by Bethany Handley is published by Headline — you can order a copy here.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Bethany Handley

Producer and Editor: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

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Marcus Wareing is gearing up to start filming the newest series of MasterChef: The Professionals. It has been ‘a bit hectic,’ he admits. He tells me that he only sees co-host Monica Galetti every nine months, when they film. Presumably this is because they are both so busy with work.

That hasn’t stopped him from preparing for this interview, however. ‘I’ve gone through your [set] questions and I’ve written them down,’ he says, ever prepared. ‘They’re actually really interesting questions to dig deep into… it’s not really questions I thought your magazine would be asking… normally I flick through. I just love the imagery of it,’ he says, either not realising, or simply not caring, that this is basically the equivalent of me admitting to coming to one of his restaurants to take a photo of the food and not eat any.

Marcus was born in Southport, Lancashire, in 1970. The 55-year-old was the son of a fruit and potato merchant, which sparked his interest in food. He started his culinary career at the Savoy Hotel under Anton Edelmann, before going on to join Albert Roux at the Michelin starred restaurant Le Gavroche. Here he first met Gordon Ramsey, who he later went on to work with at Aubergine and on other cookery projects. The pair were inseparable (Ramsay was Marcus’s best man) until a much-documented feud that lasted for many years, to the delight of tabloid journalists in the British media (in 2008 he called Ramsay a ‘sad bastard’ who he ‘still adores’ in Waitrose Food Illustrated magazine, of all places).

Marcus earned his first Michelin star at the age of 25. Great British Menu followed, then came MasterChef and a slew of cookbooks alongside other television appearances. This year he was awarded an MBE. Today, Marcus is mostly out of the kitchen. One of his roles is as an ambassador for Seven Seas, the Omega 3 suppliers. ‘I love fitness… I am going to do 10-15K today, because it’s just great for thinking,’ he says. Due to his active lifestyle, people often ask Marcus what supplements he takes, the chef tells me. Being an ambassador for the brand was a natural fit, since he’s been taking their supplements since childhood. Running, however, was not something he had time for earlier on in his career.

‘I’ve sacrificed more than any other chef,’ he says. It’s an enormous claim. ‘It’s my way of saying to myself; you can’t compete with me, you can’t keep up with me … you couldn’t drag me out of the kitchen [at the start]. Aged 11, my dad had taught me how to work like no other young person,’ he says.

‘When I came to London at the age of 18 it was no fitness. It was just pure work — head down. Once you sort of get into marriage and having a family it makes you do other things,’ he says. He doesn’t run to music, preferring silence so that he has time with his thoughts. The marriage in question is to Jane Wareing, who he met aged 22 at Gravetye Manor in West Sussex. Marcus was the sous chef and Jane the front of house manager: a tale as old as time, as far as hospitality goes. She seems to be, based on the way he talks about her, pretty crucial to the Marcus Wareing operation as a whole. Without her I suspect that his life would have far more work in it, but far less joy. They have three children together aged 24, 21 and 18.

Marcus will be cooking at Wimbledon again this year for many of the tennis championship’s punters and he may be part of a new TV show, in a different style to MasterChef, but it is still currently up in the air. Although he is the least busy he has ever been, he also works with Speakers for Schools for the charity Futures for All to help young people break into the workforce. Marcus mentors adults too, as part of Forward with Marcus Wareing, his culinary training program. ‘I've got a lot to give back. I've got a huge amount of experience. So now, believe it or not, I enjoy not running restaurants,’ he says.

Your aesthetic hero

Muhammad Ali, for many reasons really; for his connection with people; for what he stood for — not as a fighter, but his political views and what he fought for in America. For not fighting a war; changing his name from Cassius Clay, his ‘slave name’, as he called it; and also for the beauty and the brilliance of him in the boxing ring and for creating a style of boxing that's never been replicated and never will be. I just think his philosophy in life was quite extraordinary. He said, in an interview with Parkinson, once: ‘If I was a bin man, I’d be the greatest bin man of all time.’ That’s one of those messages that, as a young person, sticks in your head.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

Recently, I was very fortunate to have been awarded an MBE. So I went and bought a suit from Hackett, which is really nice, to go and collect it in. I’ve not bought a suit for ages, really, and I've got lots of jackets and lots of different things, but it's quite rare. And I was like, I've got those things in the wardrobe already, but Jane said: ‘No, you're going to go out and buy a new suit.’ So I bought a suit, which meant that everyone [in my family] bought something. But it’s a special occasion — it is your life's work.

A book that you’ve found inspiring

I’ve never been a colossal reader. I’ve never had time during my working career. I read when I’m on holiday. I also don’t have an amazing attention span for focusing on something, unless I’m in a kitchen, but my son has introduced me to an author named David Goggins. He is a retired navy SEAL and a black man — in his time there weren't many black people in the marines, so he was part of the top elite. My eldest son is in the forces and he said: ‘You’ve got to read this.’ It is about how he never gave up. I read both books and now I am halfway through reading them both for a second time. I find them so inspiring because they just give me energy. He gets a lot of stick on social media, but he is the genuine article.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

Do you know, I am going to be really stupid here as I've actually not really been to many. There is one that I do want to go to see. It's the Bayeux Tapestry, which is coming to the British Museum. My wife and I watched The King and Conqueror, the TV series, and I loved that. I love history and I love watching period dramas. I remember watching it on the news and seeing that it was coming. It is quite extraordinary that they are going to move it here. My son is into fashion, and did an art A-level, along with my daughter — they've always gone out to so many different museums and things, and I never really had the time to do that, but this is the one I do want to go and see.

A possession you’d never sell

My watches, I think. They're the things that I will leave to my family. I love watches. I had quite a few of them at one point and, unfortunately, they all got stolen bar one, which was on my wrist. I had them all marked out for my children's 18th birthdays. My eldest son had his, but my other son and my daughter obviously didn't, and I had two watches lined up for them. The watches I've got now are the two things that I won't sell, because they're you — they're quite personal. I don't have jewellery. They're the only bit of jewellery that I have that I can pass on to my children.

The music that you work to

Work? No. Work out? It’s my Spotify playlist, really, whatever happens to turn up on my phone. I never used to listen to music. There was never a radio in our house, or on in the car or at work. Now I like all sorts.

The last podcast you listened to

My son introduced me to The Rest is Politics. I listen to a lot of LBC Radio and Times Radio. Every now and again I'll pop this on, and it's really good. I like both of them and they're both really good at debating. They make a good podcast.

Your favourite painting

When I opened a restaurant at The Berkeley they did all this beautiful design work, and I said to the designer: ‘What about paintings?’ He took me to art fairs around London and he chose this, which is called Oranges and Lemons by Tobias Till. It’s a massive piece showing London over different eras — it’s about six feet long. I’ve looked at it for 10-ish years and there’s always something on it which you’ve never seen before. When I closed the restaurant I took it with me.

What you’d take to a desert island

Guess what? Omega 3. Because I won’t be able to catch enough fish.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Noise, my wife getting up going to the gym or pilates and my work — it makes me really energised.

The items you collect

Wine. Since I've run restaurants, wine has been the alternative passion. I sometimes look at them as pieces of art, some of them undrinkable because of their age or their value, even down to simple bottles of rosé. I just love that whole world. I used to love just standing listening to the sommeliers’ knowledge and their passion about wine in my restaurants, and that's become one of my collecting things right now. I like to look at the bottles. Sometimes we go into the cellar and have a drink and just stare at them, because they’re beautiful.

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

It's very funny, I was chatting to my wife about this one earlier and of course you want the obvious ones — all the good lookers. But I was on The One Show last year, and I sat next to Tim Robbins, who was promoting his new TV show, and he had the same beard and the same sort of coloured hair as me. We just look like father and son side by side, it's so funny. He is also an incredible actor.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

I've had a lot on many different occasions, but where I'm from, there's a town outside Southport called Ormskirk, and there was a chef called Mark Birchall who was working there, and as time went on, this guy just got more and more known and recognised. Moor Hall now has three Michelin stars. Jen and I went there with our family, and just had one of the most extraordinary meals. I hadn't seen a dining room and a kitchen work together so beautifully, and also at the same time deliver stunning food.

The best present you’ve ever received

My wife stopped me from going to work on my 40th birthday, and we went into central London. She took me for a fabulous breakfast in a restaurant in Mayfair and then we walked to a shop called Pogson & Davis and she bought me a tailor-made suit. Jen had set this all up. It was a really little shop just around the corner from Claridge's with two amazing proper tailors — real characters. We drank champagne, chose some materials, and made this suit. I can see them right now in my head. I put on a shirt and a tie, and one of the men saw me doing my tie up and said: ‘Leave it to me.’ He tied the most perfect tie — absolutely perfect. I've never undone it. I've still got it today, 15 years later, I tell my children: ‘Do not touch that tie.’ It's the only tailor made suit that I've got, and it was my birthday present from Jane.

A hotel that you could go back and back to

Gravetye Manor, where I worked. It was an amazing place. I always wanted to run a country house hotel, because I just love the countryside, and I met my girlfriend there, who's now my wife. We go back periodically for birthdays and celebrations.

Marcus is working with the Omega 3 supplement brand Seven Seas to raise awareness of Omega 3 and healthy ageing. You can find out if you're getting enough Omega 3 in your diet with a quiz from Seven Seas here.

Time travel is already happening. Granted, thus far it is only a simulation for subatomic particles, according to research by the University of Cambridge, but who is to say it won’t one day extend to people?

We could go back to see man make the first mark on a rock in a cave, Phidias shape the statue of Zeus for the temple at Olympia or 14th-century Sienese artists forge the art of painting.

There is a spanner in this plan’s works — well, another spanner — which is that some scientists believe time may in fact not exist, that all presents, pasts and futures can concur at once and even influence one another (raising the question as to whether, say, Dame Tracey Emin could have had an impact on pre-Renaissance Siena).

Until time’s inexistence is proven, however, one can dream of travelling to the foreign country that is the past.

Who? Hamish Mackie

What? Sculptor

Where would you go if you could time travel?

Back to the great era of exploration — Lewis and Clark’s (1804–06) would have been an exciting time to be alive.

Or whizzing around in 2600 BC, when Stonehenge was being built, and fast forward 50 years later to see the construction of the pyramids.

What’s the one thing you want to see?

Woolly mammoths within an untouched wilderness — I’ve always had a passion for elephants.

Because time-travel would allow, I’d cheat and also see Pythokritos (active 210BC–165BC) sculpting the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which is high in my list of favourite objects on the planet.

Who is the one artist you would want to meet?

It would have to be [Auguste] Rodin (1840–1917) — not very original, but in my mind the greatest sculptor so far. He manages to get so much emotion across in cold hard metal or stone.

What would you bring back if you could?

I have been fortunate to travel widely across our present-day world and have encountered some remarkable artefacts along the way.

Many moons ago, visiting Iran with the idea of sculpting the nomadic Qashqai tribe, together with carpet dealer Nick Oundjian, I found myself in a bazaar in Isfahan.

There was a very beaten up 4th-century BC copper bread urn for sale. The asking price was $400. It was intriguingly beautiful and very tempting.

Yet, I’m not convinced that even time travel would excuse smuggling. In the end, I suspect I would return not with objects, but with memories.

Visit Hamish Mackie's website for more information on the artist and his work.

Where is it?

Near Sidmouth in Devon.

A quick description

A barn ‘conversion’, built on the site of my event horses’ old yard. The yard was originally part of a farm that I adapted for horses early on in my career.

How did it come about?

An owner, Nick Engert, told me that he thought the yard buildings would make an amazing conversion. It sparked an idea, so I began breeding horses and I sold some to finance the project. One, Kings Temptress, was sold, but I kept the ride.

Was it a smooth process?

The site is in the East Devon National Landscape and, with so many restrictions, it took about three years to get planning permission. Initially, it was supposed to be a conversion, but the builders took off the roof and the walls fell down, so I had to go through the whole process again for a new-build.

Favourite aspect of the conversion

I couldn’t afford smart architects, so a friend, Jackie Michelmore, was instrumental in the design. It was her idea to have full-height glazing in the sitting room and over the roof. She made it truly special and I love this room where the light floods in and the log burner, set on a raised plinth with a tall, exposed silver flue, is a real eye-catcher.

Best memory of living there

Waking up on the first morning and having my horses just outside the door. Every day for 20 years, I had driven 15 miles to and from my husband David’s farm to the yard. He was reluctant to move, but now he loves it.

Biggest indulgence

The Aga, underfloor heating and a solid wooden floor.

Dual Badminton winner Mary King, who recently retired from eventing, will be on the Ariat Stand (No 81) at certain times during the MARS Badminton Horse Trials, Gloucestershire, May 6–10.

Any self-respecting country house numbers among its bedrooms one distinguished from all others. Details may differ — the size of the bed, the fanciness of the tassels, the richness of the silks (which may well now be in shreds) — but it matters not. What counts is that a royal personage once slept there. Even if it happened 700 years ago and your house has been rebuilt three times since, a room in which royalty once reposed is enshrined ever after.

This doesn’t mean that the visit was at all pleasurable for either host or guest. The presence of a royal bedchamber celebrates less the awe of majesty than the family’s ability to survive the often appalling jeopardy of welcoming a royal, which could all too easily result in financial ruin, social disgrace and even death. Unlike modern royals, who might show up with a maid or valet and the odd bodyguard, royal visits once meant vast retinues landing on your doorstep, including high-ranking courtiers and domestic staff, who all had to be accommodated according to their station. Edward I would even bring along a keeper of the royal cows, to ensure a supply of fresh milk.

Hosts effectively handed over their house to their royal guests, who were attended by their own staff and would often eat in a separate room with food prepared by their own cooks. Medieval manners lingered; at their coronation banquet in 1685, James II and his wife, Mary of Modena, sat alone at a table of about 170 dishes, including 24 cold puffins and four fawns, ‘two larded’. Lord Burghley had to double the size of Theobald’s, his house in Hertfordshire, all too conveniently situated a day’s ride north out of London, to accommodate Elizabeth I and her vast entourage on her annual summer progresses. Luckily for him, he was compensated by a high and lucrative office that allowed him to pay for it all.

Poor Sir Christopher Hatton, on the other hand, built palatial Holdenby in Northamptonshire with the express desire to entertain the Queen, but bankrupted himself in its building and Elizabeth I never visited. By contrast, she stayed for an unprecedented 19 days at Kenilworth Castle in 1575 with her favourite Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who erected a building the size of a small country house with its own dancing chamber especially to accommodate her.

Nineteen days was nothing in comparison with the almost 19 years that Mary, Queen of Scots spent on the longest and unhappiest royal visit, as Elizabeth I’s prisoner. For 15 years, Mary was hosted by the Earl of Shrewsbury, who, at the start of his wardship, was one of the richest men in England and happily married. Within weeks, he was complaining that Mary would ‘make me grey-headed’ and the burden eventually ruined his temper, wrecked his marriage and dented his finances. For reasons of security, Mary was initially housed at the Earl’s least desirable property, Tutbury Castle, Staffordshire, a damp old hunting lodge where everyone got colds and the privies stank through lack of drainage. Elizabeth I sent up soft furnishings from the Tower of London, but her subs didn’t cover all Mary’s expenses and, in one month alone in 1575, the Earl spent £300 on her French wine, fine linen, live birds, sweets and writing paper.

In becoming Mary’s gaolers, the Earl and Countess had effectively become near prisoners, too, and whenever there was a plot to rescue Mary their entire household came under suspicion. Although relieved of the duty for her final period of captivity, the Earl was required to be an official witness at her execution, an event that left him devastated.

Three hundred years later, another lodge with dodgy drains was almost the death of the future Edward VII when, as Prince of Wales, he and his wife, Alix, were guests of Lord Londesborough in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, for a grouse shoot in 1871. The house was filled with a ‘deadly vapour’ from the sewage backing up at high tide and many of the guests became ill with diarrhoea, including Alix. On his return to Sandringham in Norfolk, the Prince fell so ill with typhus that The Times reported his imminent demise. Although he eventually recovered, another guest, Lord Chesterfield, died. Londesborough Lodge later became a Turkish and medical baths and is now a Tibetan Buddhist centre, the pernicious drains and their deadly consequences quietly forgotten.

The monks of Lanercost Priory in Cumbria had their peace badly disturbed by the first King Edward when he unexpectedly descended on them in September 1306, taken ill en route to Carlisle. Used to living in near silence, they must have been driven mad by the five-month stay of about 200 people, including the Queen, her eldest son, government officials and a large retinue, not forgetting the royal cow keeper, as well as endless visitors bringing food, medicines, and the heads of Scottish rebels to add a positive spin to the progress of the King’s wars in Scotland. Although Edward added two churches to Lanercost’s endowment for his ‘long stay’, it was poor compensation for the trouble caused by the wars Edward started: in 1311, Robert Bruce, King of the Scots, stayed at the priory for three days doing ‘an infinity of injury’.

It wasn’t only human members of the Royal Household causing havoc. Queen Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother, stayed at Walmer Castle in Kent every July as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, preceded by a Harrods van full of her own furniture and such essentials as bowls and beds for her corgis. As her Tudor predecessors had done, she decorated the sparse interiors of the castle to her own taste and to the relief of the curators, whose furniture was spared the attention of her less than content corgis.

In the 800 years or so of its existence, Muncaster Castle in Cumbria has endured several royal visits, none more hazardous than in 1464 when Sir John Pennington risked his life sheltering Henry VI from his Yorkist enemies after his defeat at Hexham during the Wars of the Roses. The King gave him a ‘curiously wrought glass cup’ with a blessing that so long as it remained intact, the family would keep the castle. ‘Henry VI’s visit here, and his gift of the Luck, is so central to our story,’ states Peter Frost-Pennington, the current owner, ‘that it infuses our whole ethos and for me is perhaps the reason we are still here.’

Was it the Luck offering protection when, in 1874, Queen Victoria’s son Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, stayed on his way up to Balmoral and was treated to explosive displays by the British Dynamite Company that blew a tree into the air, knocked over the esteemed guests and shattered the castle windows? Luckily, the Luck was spared. When the future Edward VIII stayed in the 1920s, he was naturally given the ‘King’s Room’. There is no record of how he slept, but his bodyguard in the corridor outside later confessed that he had spent the worst night of his life, ‘what with the draughts and a ghost that bothered him’.

It sounds as if he could have done with the discreet passage on the back stairs at Sandringham, where footmen enjoyed a quiet tipple of whisky, gin or vodka to help them get through long dinners. ‘In those days, we never thought of the hours,’ recalls John Hudson, a footman in the Royal Household in the 1970s. ‘I’d be up to do the ladies’ breakfast trays by 6.30am and not finish until 1am. If there was a state visit, I’d do the carriages, then lunch, then a banquet in the evening.’

Long gone are the days of the retinue. When the late Princess Margaret stayed at Glen in the Scottish Borders in the early 1970s, Anne Glenconner would hire a butler for the weekend and take on a few extra ladies from the village. ‘Princess Margaret thankfully travelled with her own maid and we were frightfully lucky to have the Incredible String Band living on the estate to come and play if we wanted to dance,’ she explains. For those anxious to avoid the disasters of the past, Lady Glenconner — who as lifelong friend and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret has 90 years of experience as host, guest and retainer to the royals — advises: ‘The trick... is meticulous planning and thinking of it like a stage set, really, with all the right details — which books they might like to read and favourite bath salts, which Floris scent — and a good mixture of guests and entertainments. Princess Margaret didn’t like surprises, and it very much helped to ask in advance what she might like to do.’

Sound advice, as much for her Elizabethan and Stuart counterparts as to the wise host today.

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

Rankin is a British photographer, publisher and film director best known for his striking portraits and fashion photography.

He has photographed The King, Mick Jagger, Monica Bellucci and Mikhail Gorbachev, among many others, and he has published more than 40 photobooks.

His work has appeared in magazines, including Dazed, which he co-founded, Vogue and Esquire, and has been exhibited in galleries from MoMa in New York to the V&A Museum in London. He lives in London with his wife and dogs.

Last year (November 2025), Country Life's Lotte Brundle was photographed by Rankin. Click here to find out what it was like.

Air fryer

I find it funny that people think air fryers are similar to microwaves. They are not. What they really are is control: heat, time and a clear end point.

There’s a health benefit to the simplicity. You use far less oil without thinking about it, making food lighter by default, not because you decided to be virtuous. Portions stay sensible because you are cooking what you need, not filling an oven out of habit. It is quick and low effort, so you are more likely to cook proper food rather than something processed out of convenience.

A favourite is air-fried edamame.

My dogs

I live with four of them, and every day I am aware that it’s a privilege to share my life with them. They keep me sane and make sure I exercise. They force me out of my head and into the real world, regardless of what I think is urgent or important. They don’t negotiate, which I appreciate. They give shape to my days and, without trying, make everything feel more human. They’re not a lifestyle accessory, they’re family. You don’t own them, you look after them for a while, and in return they give you presence, affection and an uncomplicated love that’s increasingly rare.

Audiobooks

They are a godsend. I have always been a voracious reader, so this isn’t some compromise, it is an upgrade.

Listening to audiobooks has sorted my sleep, because they stop my brain from racing the second I lie down. I can walk the dogs and read at the same time or travel without feeling as if my life is being wasted in transit — long journeys are far less boring when you are inside a good book.

Anybody who claims it ‘doesn’t count’ is confusing the fetish of paper with the act of thinking. Hearing Robert Elms read Blitz: The Club That Created The 80s adds something that the printed page can’t: cadence, memory, lived authority. It’s closer to how stories used to work before we pretended silence was superior.

Time

The real luxury. Not endless time, and not time that has been aggressively optimised, but time with enough space in it to get bored.

Boredom matters. It is where ideas turn up. Walking, travelling, sitting around (listening to a book), all of that creates mental breathing room, and I protect it quite fiercely now.

This feature originally appeared in the February 25, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Your grandmother was right: going for a walk really does do you a power of good.

Just how much, though, is something that we're only just beginning to discover — a point made beautifully by the writer and researcher Annabel Streets, who joins James Fisher on this week's Country Life Podcast.

Annabel's book The Walking Cure has been hugely successful, and she spoke to us on the eve of its paperback publication. It's a hugely intriguing chat, ranging from psychological impact of getting up off the sofa to the very real difference that where you walk can make.

A walk along the sea front brings a completely different feel to a walk through the woods — and scientists are also discovering that a walk through a city, though stressful in terms of dealing with traffic, can be enormously stimulating in an entirely different way, something which new scientific techniques are beginning to show for the first time.

Annabel also talks about her own walking journeys across the world, and how they've changed her. It's a fascinating talk — and the ideal thing to listen to as you get out and about for a walk near where you live.

Annabel's book The Walking Cure is out now in paperback — see more details. Annabel Streets also writes, and posts on Instagram, as Annabel Abbs — you can follow her here.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Mark Hedges

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

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The Observer once called 5 Hertford Street ‘London’s most secretive club’. Maybe they were referring to its location, as I had become spectacularly lost on my way to meet Clodagh McKenna, and was more than a touch frazzled when I finally found her. ‘Have a tea. I think that would make you feel good,’ she says, maternally, her blue eyes piercing me from underneath a halo of fluffy blonde hair.

The Irish chef, author and TV presenter is best known for whipping up delicious dishes on ITV’s This Morning, but also has her own lifestyle brand. Clodagh, 50, is married to the Hon Harry Herbert, the founder of Highclere Thoroughbred Racing Ltd and the son of the 7th Earl of Carnarvon. She is ridiculously well connected. Jeanne Marine, Bob Geldof’s wife, is a close friend. So too is the designer Jasper Conran, Lady Carol Bamford and the Duke of Richmond — and I am sure more names would’ve been added to the list if I hadn’t been so late for our interview.

Clodagh and her husband have a farm and live together on the Highclere Estate (where Downton Abbey was filmed and home of the Carnarvon family). ‘We moved in there nine years ago, and we restored a part of the park, which is called Broadspear,’ she recalls.

Broadspear is a rural idyll. On her farm, Clodagh has Aberdeen Angus cows, woodland pigs, ducks, bees and six different varieties of chicken — and that’s just the animals. She has a working walled vegetable garden, a glass house, plenty of cutting flowers, pickling sheds, and she makes her own ice cream. ‘It’s an obsession, but it was an awful lot of work at the beginning,’ Clodagh recalls. ‘It’s all kind of like a juggling act at the moment, which I really love. I love that juggle.’

Clodagh grew up in the countryside, so it makes sense that she’d feel at peace among nature. ‘My memories of my childhood are of freedom and being in nature, building camps in the woods, running down with friends and jumping into a lake. We lived in a tiny little house that somebody else owned,’ she says. ‘I go back home about once a month.’

Her father was in the police force and then became a semi-professional golfer, before running a golf course and Clodagh’s mother studied for a law degree by night while working as a legal secretary by day. ‘She worked so incredibly hard, had four children [of which Clodagh is the youngest] and made sure there was food on the table,’ Clodagh says. Of her own family, particularly her children, Clodagh is tight-lipped, refusing to discuss them. ‘I’m quite protective over my family because I choose to be in front of the camera, but they don’t — that’s how I always view it.’

Clodagh began her training as a chef at the Ballymaloe Cookery School. She started doing TV work when she was 26 and had her own TV series in Ireland that then got bought up by PBS in the USA. The Today Show and The Rachael Ray Show followed, before a contract from ITV for This Morning arrived. ‘Live TV, it's always unnatural. It's not the most natural thing to do compared to, like, farming,’ she says. She’s currently working on a new cookery book, Clodagh at Home, which will encompass everything from her journey at Broadspear to recipes more generally. It will be her tenth book. ‘I love the process of it,’ she says. ‘I’m really happy in my own company.’

Your aesthetic hero

Can I have two people? Jeanne Marine, Bob Geldof's wife, who is an amazing actress and a really great friend of mine. She is definitely one of my style icons. She is a French actress, singer and songwriter, and her style is amazing, even when we're on holidays together and we're just on the beach — she’d just throw a scarf around her hair, and her earrings and everything — it makes me feel so happy. And for interiors, it would be Jasper Conran. I love his interiors, I love his passion. He's also a friend, and his eye is just incredible.

A book you’ve found inspiring

A book about the life of trees. At home, we have the most amazing woodlands, and I wasn't educated about trees, the importance of the root system and the fungi system. I just didn't know. Since I’ve read it, my whole world has changed. I look at everything so differently. I just love the energy from trees. I love doing forest bathing, which is a Japanese bathing ritual. It’s really simple and basic, you just literally go into the woods and you lie on the ground, and put your hands into the soil so that you're connected with the energy. You look up to the tree, and you do breathing exercises to breathe in all of the energy with the tree. I do it as much as I can.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I’m not a material person. My husband's the most generous person I've ever met, and he loves to spoil me because he thinks I'm always doing everything and, because I don't like buying things for myself, he goes overboard. The last thing I bought for myself was a dehydrator for my pickling shed. That was my big spend about a month ago. I've been experimenting with it, with raspberries and figs, but I'm excited for when the summer starts, and I can get that really busy.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

Diane Arbus, I saw an exhibition on her in France. She is a Jewish New Yorker photographer, and all of her photography is of, let’s say… unusual situations of families. So it could be like a picture of a massive giant with his mother who is a dwarf, or a Jewish family's home in the 1960s in New York, and all their furniture is covered in plastic, and they're just sitting there. It's amazing, quite dark, but also just brilliant.

A possession that you’d never sell

I would never sell my engagement ring. My husband designed it with one of our best friends, Theo Fennell, who’s a jewellery designer. There's kind of a special engraving on it — there's only one person left in England that does this — and the engraving is all Broadspear, our chickens, the trees, our house. It's really special.

The music you work to

At the moment, it's Bob Dylan. Obsessed with Bob Dylan.

The last podcast you listened to

I love Aspire with Emma Grede, that's one of my favourites, but I also love the Goop podcast. My favourite is Martha Stewart’s podcast. She's amazing. I love her so much. I think we're the same person.

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

I think that if it was my friends, they would say Goldie Hawn. Everybody says that.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

Olive oil.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

I am a really big morning person. I have to push myself to stay in bed. This morning I woke up at five. I’m lucky, I was born — I think it's definitely in my genes, my mother was the same — getting excited when I wake up in the morning, and about the day, about doing things, about getting started. I used to always try to make up excuses for it, because I was always too shy about saying what I just said.

The items you collect

I collect crockery. No matter where I am in the world, I'll go to markets. It could be pots or vases or egg cups. My last find was a preserving bowl — they don't make them anymore. It’s a round terracotta bowl with holes in it. It's like a colander, but it's pottery, and it's massive, and you put all your fruits and everything in it, and because it's aerated they don't go off.

A hotel you could go back and back to

I love the Merrion hotel in Dublin city centre.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever had

My most memorable meal would have to have been with one of my great friends, Carol Bamford, who founded and started Daylesford Farms. She has an amazing chateau called Léoube in the south of France, and she produces some beautiful wines and olive oil. I go down about once a year and dinner in her chateau is an experience of a lifetime.

Your favourite painting

It’s brand new, the Duke of Richmond gave it to me as a present. It’s not a painting, but he is an amazing photographer, and he just did an exhibition last year of sea grasses. In the Bahamas, he photographed all these amazing sea glasses, and made it into this big collection, and he kept looking at our wall in London going: ‘One would look so beautiful on that wall’. One night there was a knock on the door, and it arrived from Goodwood, which is their estate. It now sits very proudly in our living room in London.

The best present you’ve ever been given

The best present I ever received was being invited to the lunch at Fortnum and Mason’s where I met my now husband, who's the best gift I've ever gotten in my life.

For more information on Clodagh McKenna and her lifestyle brand visit her website

Its not often that you can say someone was very, very lucky to have contracted severe pneumonia, by James Ismay was just that.

For had James not developed the pernicious lung infection, he would have joined his older brother, Joseph Bruce Ismay, on the maiden trans-Atlantic voyage of the family’s White Star Line-owned steam liner, Titanic.

The two brothers had been made partners of the prominent passenger and shipping company in 1891; their father, Thomas, retired a year later.

They ran the successful Liverpool-based business for a decade before life took a tragic turn. In 1901, James's wife, Lady Margaret Ismay, died, aged 32, from a blood clot. James was devastated and embarked on a punishing round-the-world voyage before relinquishing his post.

Inside the May 21, 1904, issue of Country Life there was an advert for a 2,612-acre estate in Dorset. Iwerne Minster lingered on the market for three years before, in December 1907, it was announced that it had been bought in its entirety by James Ismay.

James poured his business acumen, knowledge of the land and great fortune into the estate, and went about turning it all into the perfect model village and farm (complete with bacon factory, dairy and its own electricity generator) with the help of an architect called John Francis Doyle — the co-designer of his father's Dawpool estate.

Country Life visited in 1910, and the writer was astounded by the amount of work that had already been achieved.

Ismay’s desire to look after his animals was strong, but his attention to the needs of his tenants was stronger. He believed that a contented workforce was a hard-working workforce, and so set about installing the villagers' cottages with all of the necessary modern conveniences.

He also built a pub and a village shop, and provided new facilities for the village's wheelwrights, bricklayers, plumbers, painters, carpenters and joiners, among others.

On Valentine’s Day, 1914, the magazine published a brief article updating readers on progress at the estate. It talked of James's new and well-catered-for flock of Hampshire Down sheep

Country Life returned firstly towards the end of the First World War — which did little to dampen James's efforts — and secondly in 1921.

During the way, he gave each home a pig, and constructed a secure compound for Germans prisoners of war to live in, in exchange for work on his land. And each prisoner was given a small plot of land in which to grow their own vegetables.

The magazine paid a final visit to the farm in 1929, reporting that the philanthropic landowner had stuck to his principles of quality and fairness (once he'd found a market for his produce, he didn't change course if his accounts showed that a certain sector might provide a higher, short term financial yield).

Unfortunately, James died in 1930, aged 63. The village went back on the market and reverted to a more conventional existence, and his home was converted in a school.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

Sir Gregory Doran asks if I am feeling better. We were supposed to meet a few days prior, but I was ill, and a breakdown in communication means my message didn’t reach Gregory in time, leaving him waiting in a gastropub in Islington on his own. It’s to his credit that he cares how I am, given that he ‘sat there with a lonely gin and tonic looking like a wallflower’ for God-knows how long.

The former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is softly spoken and kind. He lost his husband, the actor Sir Antony Sher, four years ago to liver cancer, and it has clearly shaped who he is today. His book, Walking Shadow, is a tribute to his two great loves: his husband and The Bard.

The book is a detailed exploration of grief; half Sher’s ‘dying diaries’ and half Gregory’s quest to track down as many of Shakespeare’s First Folios as he could, a mission which he termed ‘The Folio Roadshow’. ‘In effect, it was a massive displacement activity,’ he says, looking back. He admits he couldn’t read the diaries for two years after Sher died.

‘I remember him describing the process of dying as being the strangest thing he had ever done. He approached it as the next part he was going to play,’ Gregory recalls. Sher is still omnipresent in his everyday life. Sometimes, when we talk about him it’s like he isn’t really dead at all, just away, perhaps on holiday. The pair met at the RSC and married on the very first day that it was legal for same sex couples to do so in the UK. ‘When I got my knighthood we would have been the first married knights. He’d have appreciated that joke,’ Gregory says, fondly.

A two-time Olivier Award winner, Sher famously played Richard III (on crutches), Falstaff in Henry V Part I and Part 2, Othello’s villainous Iago, and Macbeth, among many more roles. ‘He would morph into the people he was playing,’ says Gregory, who often directed his husband. ‘He was a very private, very unassuming lovely man, and not at all like the people he played.’ Several times he took a role of his to a psychiatrist and asked: ‘Why is this person behaving like this?’ Gregory recalls. When he was preparing to play Macbeth, in a production directed by Gregory, Sher found two murderers to talk to, to help him understand the role. ‘I really worried about it at the time,’ Gregory says.

His love of Shakespeare, really, has been his salvation. ‘I’ve directed all of them. It’s been over a long career, so I’ve never really tired of them,’ he says of the bard’s work. Whether it’s solving the problem of how you show ancient Egypt on stage in Anthony and Cleopatra, or what Vienna means to an English audience today in Measure for Measure, or the classic Shakespearian director’s debacle of: ‘How do you do the donkey’s head in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?’ — Gregory remains keen to tackle them all. He calls his relationship with Shakespeare ‘an untainted love affair’. It is one he is truly indebted to. ‘He helped me sort of process and understand and grieve when I lost Tony,’ he says.

Gregory will be speaking at Cambridge Literary Festival about his new book later this month and is currently preparing to revive his celebrated puppetry production of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare’s great narrative poem, for a UK tour this June. Almost every one of his answers below is related to his beloved ‘Tony’. Gregory’s life is dedicated to one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of all time, but Sher’s standout role was not as Macbeth, King Lear or Falstaff — it was as Gregory’s much-missed husband.

Your aesthetic hero

I don’t know who I’d choose really! I have no idea — that’s rather unimaginative of me, isn’t it?

An exhibition that has really impressed you

The Hawaii exhibition at the British Museum, which is really quite astonishing and opens up your eyes to what was, for me, an entirely new cultural novelty.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I don't buy very much, I mean apart from necessities and food. I guess I spend an awful lot — too much money — on books. I did an inventory of all the books in the house to find out just how many I had and discovered that I had nearly 5,000 books. The last one I bought was a book called Year of the Rabbit and it’s about the murderous reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It's a graphic novel, the first I've ever bought, and I didn't know if I was going to like it, or what I would think about it, but it really pulls you into the story of these people who live under this terrible murderous reign.

Your favourite painting

That’s easy. My favourite painting is, of course, one by Tony Sher, because he did many. I'm looking at it now across the room. It's a portrait of him and Harriet Walter as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. They're both wrapped around each other. He's behind, hugging her, and it's a painting about their fear, the horror of what they've let themselves in for, and yet it's also about their independence. Their arms look like the loops of a curled snake as they wrap around each other.

A possession you’d never sell

A bust that my oldest and best friend, Richard Sharples, made of Tony. It appears in the book Walking Shadow. It's a beautiful, great likeness of Tony, but it's made of this sort of copper, so it has a kind of organic look. It captures how transient life is, really, because it just feels as though it's impermanent, but at the same time it has a great depth and profundity. It was made for Tony. He saw it before he died, and loved it, and it sits in his study downstairs. I would never part with it.

A book you’ve found inspiring

The Complete Works of Shakespeare — how will that do?

The music you work to

I always have Radio 3 on. I love having music in the house, and Tony did too. We shared our love of music.

The last podcast you listened to

Well, to be honest, I don't listen to podcasts. I did do my own podcast briefly for the RSC about the Folio Roadshow. I have friends who absolutely swear by them, and my brother listens to them all the time, but no, I've not got into podcasts, I'm afraid.

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

I don't know, but we had a very interesting thing doing the audiobook of Walking Shadow, because who was going to read Tony's bits? There was a point where I could have had somebody reading my bits as well, which would have been the equivalent of your question. In the end, somebody said: ‘We could recreate Tony’s voice through AI,’ because there's lots of examples of him speaking and acting. I thought to myself, what would Tony have thought of that idea? And he would have roundly said: ‘What, you're going to put another actor out of work?’ So I've cast somebody who is not particularly famous, but a great RSC actor, called Antony Byrne. That was a very interesting piece of casting, because he doesn't sound like Tony really, but luckily I didn't have to cast me.

The items you would take with you to a desert island

I would put the same answer I said on Desert Island Discs. My shelf of photograph albums, because I made one for every year that Tony and I were together.

What gets you up in the morning

I have a project on at the moment and I can’t wait to get up and start writing. Like Tony, writing is an addiction, but I love it.

The items you collect

Grey hairs?

The hotel you could go back and back to

That’s a good question. So, if I say this, will the said hotel be likely to invite me to stay? When I got my knighthood, I got all of my family along and we stayed at Cliveden, which is the hotel near Windsor. It's a wonderful, old, stately home.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

There was a lunch in Nice in the south of France, which was a very simple Bouillabaisse. It was on the harbour in a little restaurant, and it has to be one of the best meals I've ever had.

The best present you’ve ever received

Tony, for my 50th birthday, had a brilliant artist called Michael Leonard paint my portrait. Leonard does these amazing sort of period images. He had done Tony, which is how he knew him, as a portrait of a Renaissance man holding a little carnation, and it is both perfectly a Renaissance picture and Tony. So for me, he cast me as a kind of cavalier. They're in pencil, but they look as though they are photographs. It was the most beautiful present.

Sir Gregory Doran will be speaking about his new book at the Cambridge Literary Festival on April 25. For tickets see their website. Gregory’s production of ‘Venus and Adonis’ will be touring the UK this June.

What David Beckham was to football, Monty Don is to gardening — but with more skinny scarves. At 70, his ceaseless energy for all that is green and abundant, and indeed for life itself, is still palpable. ‘If somebody gives me something that has a use, I immediately want to go and use it straight away,’ he tells me, eagerly. ‘I think: “Great!” You know, if it was a kitchen knife at Christmas, I'd immediately go and cut something with it.’

The English horticulturalist is best known for Gardeners’ World, the BBC show which is now in its 57th series and which he presents from his garden Longmeadow, in Herefordshire, where he lives with his wife Sarah. Born in 1955 in West Germany, Monty has had a long, very green-fingered career, spanning more than 30 years in television, a 12-year stretch as the Observer’s gardening editor, a 10-year stint as the president of the Soil Association and an OBE.

He has also written copious books, the latest of which is British Gardens — and a collaboration with the photographer Derry Moore. It catalogues their journey visiting our isle’s most beautiful greenery. ‘We did our first book together in 2010 and this is our seventh book together,’ Monty says. ‘We're an unlikely couple, you know? We're sort of two slightly elderly men, although I'm 20 years younger than Derry. He'll be 90 at his next birthday.’

Although he ‘never has favourites’, Wollerton Old Hall in Shropshire was ‘magical on the day’, as was Scampston Walled Garden in Malton. Lowther Castle in Penrith also stood out and Balmoral Cottage was ‘utterly charming’, although Monty did add that if we continued the conversation much longer he ‘would probably name every single garden in the book’.

As he gets older his relationship with gardening hasn’t massively changed, but he does note: ‘It’s becoming increasingly less interesting to me how you do things, and much more interesting what you do and what the result is’.

Monty is, unequivocally, a man that speaks his mind exactly. ‘I don’t have a favourite,’ he tells me when I ask what his favourite painting is; ‘I don't really go to exhibitions,’ he says when I ask for his favourite of those. Other things Monty Don doesn’t have are: an aesthetic hero, (‘obviously’), any thoughts about who would play him in a film (‘absolutely no idea’), and even the slightest concern about some of my questions (‘I don't think it's a very interesting question, to be honest’).

When it comes to things he doesn’t do, they are likewise abundant. ‘I never sell possessions,’ ‘I’m not a collector’, ‘I don’t relax to music — ever,’ and ‘I never lie in’. He doesn’t like weight loss drugs (‘there’s something inherently immoral about it, but it’s quite hard to put your finger on what’), ‘cheffy food’ (‘I just think it’s all about the chef and not about you eating it’), or the state of the world right now (‘let's hope you will make a better world than this current lot — which are just a f***ing disaster — are doing. You can quote me on that.’)

Given that the format of Consuming Passions is that I ask for a definite list of the things that are meaningful to, and liked by, our guests and they answer, you could see this as a set back. However, answering questions, and indeed living his life, exactly how he wants to is, I come to realise, part of the man’s innate Monty Don-ness. And it is that which makes him so likable.

Your aesthetic hero

Obviously, I don’t have one, but I’m trying to summon one up from the aether. Let me say Constantin Brâncuși, because I love the way that he dressed, I love his sculptures, I loved his studio.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

Well, I don't really go to exhibitions in the sense that I live in the middle of the country and avoid cities except for work. Obviously, over the years, I've been to lots of exhibitions, but it sounds a bit tragic, if I name one that was 30 years ago. The truth is, the most impressive exhibition of my life was a Van Gogh exhibition at what is now Tate Britain. Then it was just the Tate Gallery. It was overwhelming. I mean, I couldn't speak, I could barely breathe. I can almost remember the intensity of the experience now.

A possession that you’d never sell

I never sell possessions anyway, but if I absolutely had to I wouldn’t sell this. It’s a stone that I picked up off the beach on Robin Hood's Bay in Yorkshire in 1979. It's almost round, it looks like a cannonball, and it's been with me since then. I wouldn't sell that for anything.

The items you collect

No, I’m not a collector. My wife Sarah is, I’m not. That's not the way my mind works.

A book you found inspiring

Well, there are at least 1000 of those, but one in particular, which, in a funny way, changed my life. When I was 18 I read a book called The Goshawk, by T. H. White, and I was profoundly affected by it. It's a very simple book. It's very short. It’s about how T. H. White attempted to train a goshawk using medieval techniques (this was in the 1930s). By then, of course, nobody was doing that. It was completely the wrong thing to do, which he didn't know, and goshawks are famous for being the most untrainable, certainly of all birds of prey, and pretty much of most species. So it was doomed to failure.

But it's the story of how he did it. And the whole point was that he had this intense relationship with this animal that didn't want to have a relationship with him. I just thought it was a marvellous piece of writing and also incredibly romantic in a very, very self destructive way.

Your favourite painting

I don’t have a favourite, but there are some I love more than others. I love Rembrandt. There's a painting by him called ‘A Woman Bathing in a Stream’. It is incredibly beautiful. No other painter has painted tenderness in the same way. He’s extraordinary. So if I had to choose a favourite painting, that's the one I would choose. She hasn’t got a particularly stunning body, she's not particularly beautiful, it's not particularly bright, but she's hitching up her shift to wade into the water, and it's just exquisite. She's made beautiful by the painting, but that is through his love and tenderness, rather than because she's objectively a great beauty.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

Topiary hornbeam balls.

The music that you work to

I don't. I used to, but I find now — in the last sort of five years or so — whether it's part of my hearing going a bit so therefore I have to listen harder — it’s distracting. But when I used to work to music, it was always Baroque music, namely Bach. I don't relax to music ever. What I found was it put me in the right space in order to focus. Almost the opposite of relaxing. I think it's sublime music. I hate background music. I hate it when people put music on at dinner parties and things because I just think that it means that the music has no value, has no importance. It is wallpaper music, and I don't like that. So what I find now is I either want to listen to the music or I want to work, but I can't do both simultaneously.

The last podcast you listened to

I came to podcasts a few months ago. I'd never heard one at all until this year, and I have been listening almost obsessively to The Rest is History, which I think is brilliantly done.

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

I have absolutely no idea or interest. It's not something I've ever thought of. What a boring film. I don't know how to answer that question, because I have no concept of anyone who's like me. Now, that's either because I'm such an egomaniac that I am sort of completely self obsessed, or… I just, I don't think it's a very interesting question, to be honest. I know it's not one you’ve devised probably, so I don't know. I don't think I see enough films.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

A sculpture by Brâncuși or Henry Moore, Sarah and my dog.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

The sun streaming through the window. But actually, what gets me up, as opposed to awake, is just a sense that I've got a lot to do. In the garden we always have an 8:30am meeting, and by then I like to have exercised, washed, had breakfast, fed the dogs. So in summer, I normally get up at about 6am.

A hotel you could go back and back to

I associate hotels entirely with work, and I stay in a lot. It wouldn't be uncommon for me to stay in 50 different hotels a year. There's one in Venice that I like, I can't remember what it's called though. It's not very grand, it's not a fancy one, but it's just really central. And what I like about it is that you just walk out the door into a boat. Usually for me it’s all about: is it quiet? Is it reasonably comfortable? Are the sockets where I want there to be sockets so I can charge things? Is the food any good? Is there room service? It's all about function, rather than a lovely place to be. I never spend time off in a hotel.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

I’ve had lots, I’ve been lucky, but plucked at random: we were filming a series I did in Italy, a long time ago, and on the first day's filming, we shot just outside Naples in a small holding. And the people there said we must have lunch with them. They had this modern house with a very modern kitchen, and they put up tables on a tarmac driveway in front of the house, and we proceeded to have the most delicious meal imaginable. It was nothing fancy.

I can remember it to this day, pasta with lemons and peas, with the best lemon in the world, and these peas that were picked fresh. And he made the wine from his grapes, and they'd pressed the olive oil themselves. The family were all there, and it was just joyous. This is why you have a mouth and you need to put calories inside it. It chimed completely with the philosophy that Sarah and I have which is, you take simple, fresh, seasonal ingredients, you treat them with great respect, but not with solemnity, and you do things simply and sort of just try and get the very best from them. And this was a supreme example of that, and it was the incongruity of the location and the wonderfulness of the food that made it completely memorable.

The best present you’ve ever received

My first dog. For my 21st birthday I received a dog from my mother and a field from my father. The dog was called Gretel, which is slightly odd when I look back on it, and she was a labrador.

‘British Gardens’ by Monty Don and Derry Moore is out now and available in all good bookshops, in store and online.

It’s jolly unfair, really. One day you’re the captain of rugby at school; the next, your hair starts falling out. Women obviously have it quite hard with various biological challenges, but male pattern baldness isn’t much fun either. Some of my friends went from lustrous-haired Goliaths to Prince Edward, seemingly overnight, while they were still in their early 20s.

One way to deal with it, of course, is to simply shave your head (see Jason Statham) and thereby avoid that dodgy combover period where the bare scalp is 'disguised' by two or three strands of hair. Another way is simply to carry on like, well, Prince Edward and try to manfully pull off the bald look.

Or, there’s the hair transplant. An expensive surgical procedure, yes, but in recent years, a more common one. Wayne Rooney might have been the original poster boy, but others to have undergone the knife include Robbie William, Jimmy Carr, James Nesbit and various Sloaney chaps that I’m much too discreet to mention by name.

My friend Jenn George, beauty director at SheerLuxe, tells me that the go-to man in London is Christopher D’Souza on Upper Wimpole Street. ‘I think men are still so secretive about it (compared to women and tweakments), but less and less so. The procedures are brilliant, these days — you’re in and out in a day; hide away for only a few days; hat for a couple of weeks, then new, natural-looking hairline.’ Jenn's top tip for men planning on taking the surgical plunge is to start wearing a baseball cap ‘months in advance — so it doesn’t look odd that they suddenly start wearing them in recovery.’

If you can afford a transplant, and losing hair bothers you, I’m of the ‘why not?’ persuasion. Who wouldn’t want a full head of hair like Paul Anthony Kelly as JFK Jr in Disney’s Love Story? Phwoar.

The remaining question is: do you want to talk about it after you've done it? Hmm. Tricky one. It’s not unlike ‘being on the pen’, in some respects. If you’re taking Ozempic, or Mounjaro, or another fat-loss drug, the results may be quite obvious. It doesn’t mean you have to discuss it with anyone, but some people may suspect; some may ask; some may crack jokes.

Same with hair transplants. You could be upfront — which I would probably advise. If you come out with it and own it, then it will likely save you the predictable and tedious jokes. (‘Had a nice time in Turkey, mate?’) You’ve done a brave thing. Be proud of it.

And what should you do if you see a friend who’s clearly had a transplant? Do you mention it? The jury is out. Some say you must; others say you should only comment on it if they bring it up first. ‘You look great!’ is a suitably catch-all phrase to deploy here if they don’t raise the subject, a tacit acknowledgment that they’ve had something done without making them feel self-conscious about it.

One pal says that he did had to say something when a friend of his arrived for dinner with a bleeding scalp. So, yes, I do see that addressing it in such a situation might be necessary. Even if it’s a simple ‘Are you OK?’

Remember, a baseball hat is your friend.

In a corduroy blazer, jeans and argyle-patterned socks with loafers, John Wilson is the archetypal Centrist Dad — which is, fittingly, the name of the cover band in which he plays the bass in his free time. During the week, he’s on BBC Radio 4 presenting This Cultural Life, interviewing everyone from Paul McCartney to Sir Salman Rushdie. On the weekend, he rocks out to Icona Pop and Charli XCX’s ‘I Love it’, with ITV News's political editor Robert Peston on vocals and the former Labour shadow chancellor Ed Balls on drums.

‘I am a dad, I work at the BBC, I make arts programmes, and I try to offset that sense of boring normality by playing bass in a punk rock band,’ says John, before sighing deeply and adding ‘I find the name embarrassing.’ I propose that it’s not the name alone that is embarrassing. For example, one may look at Ed Balls and not immediately think: drummer. ‘That's because Ed Balls is not a drummer. Ed Balls has a go at anything and commits fully,’ John confirms. All the proceeds from the band's gigs go to charity. They recently played at Dingwalls in Camden and raised £10,000 for Great Ormond Street Hospital. ‘Half the Cabinet were in the audience. It was kind of quite weird. Ed Miliband dancing at the back, and the Foreign Secretary [Yvette Cooper] — she is always there right in the front. It's quite strange. I don't know why. She seems to be a fan.’

We are speaking in the Green Room at the National Gallery, where John is preparing to present a new monthly in-conversation series called Picture This. We were meant to be in the staff canteen, but the sparsely populated room made John feel self-conscious, as though people may have listened in. Ironic, given he has made a career out of people listening in, although usually he isn’t talking about himself.

John was born in London in 1965 on Millionaires row, which is now Billionaires row, in Hampstead — ’that road which is just now just ludicrous, ostentatious, bad taste mansions’. His family lived in Enfield and one of those houses was then the maternity wing of the North Middlesex Hospital.

Broadcasting runs in the family: John's father is the former Arsenal goalkeeper and sports presenter Bob Wilson. John grew up just outside of London, near Potter’s Bar, but had a farming family on his father’s side, and consequently spent a lot of summers in Lincolnshire, working on their farm. His duties included mucking out chicken coops (‘Disgusting. I can still smell it’), and working in the grain silo, plagued by gigantic rats which it was his job to exterminate (‘I still sometimes have nightmares about that’).

It was after flunking his A-Levels (apart from English) that John got his first job as a young hack for a North London outfit while repeating his final year of school. He worked for titles such the Islington, Haringey and Enfield Advertiser. A degree in English and Media studies at the University of Southampton followed, after which he became a reporter on the Camden New Journal and then a presenter on Radio 5’s The Mix. He went on to present Radio 4’s flagship arts series Front Row.

He now lives in his former stomping ground of Camden with his wife, Tessa, an artist and interior designer, and their dog Billie, ‘a very cute Scottish Terrier’. They share four children — two from her previous relationship, one from a previous relationship of his, and one other. John has just recorded the 150th episode of This Cultural Life. The elusive, now deceased, German-British painter Frank Auerbach was his favourite interviewee. The artist was famous for not giving interviews, but aged 92 sat down with John after the broadcaster had met his son at a party, and convinced him that it would be a good idea. The most intimidating interview John has done was with David Bowie in New York in 2002. ‘I was terrified,’ he says.

‘I'm a different interviewer now from the way I've worked in the past, definitely. I say a lot less,’ he says. ‘It’s quite weird being interviewed as well, because although I ask short questions, I clearly give long answers,’ he says referring to our hour-long chat, which we have merrily run over.

Your aesthetic hero

Growing up in the suburbs in the 1970s my musical hero, and aesthetic hero, is Paul Weller. The weird thing is, nearly 50 years later, he's a friend of mine because we worked together and I edited a book of his lyrics. Paul Weller is still the best dressed man. He's just impeccable, always. I would say him or Steve McQueen.

In terms of aesthetics, I probably have to mention my wife, Tessa, because she's an interior designer. She basically makes my life look better, because the interior of my house just looks so much better because of her amazing eye. I live in a very aesthetically pleasing way because of her.

A book that inspired you

Germinal by Émile Zola was amazing, and it stuck with me, the imagery, because it's about a coal mine strike in France in the 19th century. The layers of detail of the lives and the descriptions of life underground are amazing.

The possession you’d never sell

My dad’s shirt, which he wore in the 1971 FA Cup Final, which is the day he won . He gave it to me for my 50th birthday.

The items you collect

Records. I can't go past a record shop without going in and coming out with at least one or two records that I never knew I needed.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

I saw the Gerhard Richter exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Foundation recently in Paris, which was just amazing. I love Richter, he has such a range of work, and it's almost like whatever he turned his hand to, he was a master of. His paintings were astonishing. As are the subject matter, for example: the post-war German experience, the sense of freedom he conveys. I’d love to interview Gerhard, but he's now too old and doesn't speak very good English. I met him once, actually. That was quite a thrill. But he doesn’t do interviews.

A hotel you could go back and back to

I go back and back to Paris all the time, and I'd love to go back to the hotel there, called Château Voltaire, which is quite new. It's too expensive for me to stay there again (I managed to get a deal last time) but they had beautiful rooms, very comfortable beds, amazing breakfast and the staff were just fantastic.

Your favourite painting

I don't have a favourite painting, but there's one that I always come back to here — because we're in the National Gallery, and the format of this interview series I'm doing [Picture This] is that the guest picks a painting. So, I would probably go for not one of the big ones, as much as I love those, but actually there's this painting which I always stop in front of. It's quite small, it's John Singer Sargent, and it's called Wineglasses, and I'd like it because it's the sort of painting that I could hang on my wall at home, and it would look good. It's just sunlight coming through, it looks like it's in France, there are two wine glasses and a table, and it looks so inviting. It’s beautiful.

The music that you work to

Because my job is interviewing people, primarily, I can't work to music when I'm doing that. When I listen to music, I am really engaged with music. I listen to a lot of music but I would say anything by Víkingur Ólafsson, the Icelandic classical pianist, is my favourite. He's just got the most incredible poetic touch, and he plays with such grace and beauty and fluidity. It’s absolutely mesmerising.

The last thing of note you bought for yourself

Quite recently I bought myself a new bass guitar. A Fender Precision. I was in a band when I was at university, and we were kind of quite serious. We thought we were going to make it. My claim to fame is that we supported My Bloody Valentine on Valentine's night in 1988. We never made it, and 40 years later I started playing in the most silly comedy band of all time [Centrist Dad], and I did have a bass, because I've always had a bass, but I bought myself a nice new one.

What happened was, I was at a dinner party, and Robert Peston was there. I sort of knew him a bit. His neighbour had invited us around for dinner, and he had a guitar. I picked up his guitar, and he said: ‘Do you play?’ And I said: ‘No, I play bass.’ He said: ‘We will have to have a jam sometime,’ to which Robert replied: ‘Well, if you need a singer, I'll sing.’ I was thinking, this is a terrible idea, so I said: ‘Well, yeah, the problem is, it's always impossible to find a drummer,’ to which Robert replied: ‘Well, Ed can play.’ I said: ‘Who's Ed?’ and he said: ‘Ed Balls!’ It turned out, when we had the first rehearsal session, that Ed Balls couldn't play drums, but that didn't stop him. We started off doing things like the Buzzcocks, The Clash and the Sex Pistols, but actually now most of our repertoire is Chappel Roan, Taylor Swift and Charli XCX.

The last podcast you listened to

It would have been The Rest is Politics this morning, listening to Alistair and Rory talking about the madness of Donald Trump and how he's gonna dig himself out of the hole that he has dug for all of us to live in.

I know This Cultural Life is a podcast, but I don't listen to a lot of podcasts because I find a lot of them so self indulgent and rambling and boring. I work in radio and our programme is tightly edited, and I just think the art of editing has been lost with podcasts, because very often they start recording, they start talking… and they ramble on for an hour and a half.

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

Steve McQueen, because he's already got the clothes.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

Desert boots for a desert island and a flare gun, so that I can be rescued — I don’t want to be on a desert island.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

My dog, Billie. In the morning she can be very loud, because we have a garden and we have foxes, which of course drives her mad. She's Billie the girl, because there's lots of cool Billies: Billie Eilish, Billie Piper, Billie Whitelaw, Billie Holiday.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever had

I went to Iran three times, and there was a meal I had in Isfahan, which I always think about, because it was just the most incredible food. I had this one meal near the main square, which is called the Naqsh-e Jahan Square, and has the Great Mosque. It was magical. That was one of the most amazing meals, which makes me very sad to think about, because I loved Iran, loved the people — absolutely hideous, brutal government, obviously — but the people were the most welcoming, hospitable people I think I've ever met, which makes what's happening at the moment with the follies of the idiotic Donald Trump so heartbreaking.

The best present you’ve ever received

My children. The gift of fatherhood.

For how to buy tickets or other information on the National Gallery's new in conversation series, Picture This, hosted by John Wilson, visit their website. Events run until June 26, 2026.

I will admit, I went through a phase of setting ‘funny’ out of offices. We’re talking a decade ago or so.

‘I’m currently sipping a piña colada on a sunbed. I’ll respond when I reply.’ That kind of thing. I shudder with horror now, but we’ve all done silly things when young.

A couple of years ago, while loitering on a Tube platform, I observed that British Airways had launched a new campaign – ‘Take Your Holiday Seriously’ – featuring billboards of similarly ‘amusing’ out of office replies.

‘Hi there, I have received your email. I have printed it off. I’m now using it to light flaming cocktails for the entire bar. Best, Lucy,’ said one.

‘Hi there, I’m out of office atm. Replying to your email is on my list of things to do. Just below licking a jellyfish,’ said another. You get the point.

While I applaud the sentiment of taking one’s holiday seriously and not remaining a slave to the old inbox, these days I think such replies are tiresome. Sorry! Life’s too short; time is too precious to agonise over what your out of office says. Straightforward is the way to go for everyone involved. ‘I’m currently out of the office. I will return on such-and-such a date and respond then.’ That sort of thing.

Of course, everyone’s looking at their emails almost all the time, nowadays, even while drifting about the South of France or Puglia in August. There are very few places, pockets of Wiltshire aside, which don’t have 5G, so it’s a nonsense, by and large, to pretend that you’re not seeing emails at all. But at least setting an out of office lets the sender know you won’t necessarily be responding for a week or so, and if it’s urgent they can try someone else in your organisation if you’ve given an alternative contact (please check that this is OK with your colleague before you merrily paste their email address into your out of office (OOO)).

Some take a more aggressive approach, not only declaring that they’re away, but that all emails will be automatically deleted during that period, and that anything important will need to be re-sent when they return. This is irritating, in my honest opinion, because it’s creating more work for the sender, who now needs to remember to send the same email down the line. If you’re taking a sabbatical for several months, or maternity leave, this makes more sense. It’s unlikely you’ll need to read an email sent in March when you return in September. But it’s quite self-important if you’re only hopping to Mallorca for a week.

Talking of self-importance, I wonder, too, about the necessity of setting an out of office if you’re away from your desk for a mere afternoon. Are you the Prime Minister? Will the sky fall in if you don’t get back to someone before the following day? And where does this performative busyness end? ‘I’m currently getting a coffee from the canteen downstairs and will respond on my return,' perhaps, or ‘I’m currently on the loo and will reply — with nice clean hands — when I’m back.’ If you’re out of the office for a day or more, fine. If it’s less, it’s a touch pompous.

Finally, ‘annual leave.’ This suggests you’re in the military. I’m not saying you have to state that you’re on anything so wanton as ‘holiday’ in your out of office. Good heavens no, we can’t have anything thinking that you’re enjoying yourself. But you could just say you’re ‘away’ until a certain date. Why not? A little air of mystique never hurt anyone.

The South African-born cook moved to England in 1960 to study at the Cordon Bleu Cookery School, going on to found the renowned Leith’s School of Food and Wine.

Over nearly 60 years, Prue has risen to the top of the British food scene. She was a judge on BBC Two's Great British Menu from 2005 to 2016, and Channel 4's The Great British Bake Off from 207 to 2025. Aside from writing 12 cookery books, including Leith's Cookery Bible, she has written eight novel. Her memoir, Relish, was published in 2013.

Butler & Wilson jewellery

For 40 years, I’ve occasionally bought Butler & Wilson pieces. I love their over-the-top glamour, their glitz, their colour.

I have a diamante elephant brooch about 4in across whose trunk moves if I giggle, but my current favourite is a pair of earrings bought for me by my husband — who likes vulgar colour as much as I do.

Cavalier King Charles dogs

I’m not sure our Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Tattie, is a luxury, and she’s not really mine as I gave her to my husband for our wedding present, but I’m pretty obsessed with her.

If ‘a luxury’ means expensive, then she’s certainly that! Up to now, my dogs have been rescue ones, ours for a donation to the charity, but John had once had a Cavalier he swore was the perfect dog: it would walk to heel across Piccadilly without a lead, it went everywhere with him and sat under his seat.

Well, all I can say is Tattie is spoilt rotten, badly behaved and has never heard the word ‘no’. When I protest, John says: ‘She’s a princess. Princess Tatiana.’ I remind him she’s called Tattie to go with Neeps and Haggis, his other dogs.

A Thermomix

My Thermomix is a monster German machine that heats as it blitzes. I’ve had mine for 30 years and it cost an arm and a leg at the time, but it’s earned its keep many times over.

It makes soup, marmalade and breadcrumbs, grates cheese, chops nuts and even grinds bones for the dogs. It makes brilliant hollandaise and I suspect does 100 other tasks I’ve never asked of it.

The makers keep offering me a new one, and my brother loves his, but I adore my old workhorse and if it ain’t broke, why sling it?

This feature originally appeared in the October 31, 2028, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Claire Foy and I meet on the ground floor of the Soho Hotel in a room seemingly lifted from a Country Life interiors spread. I arrive early and move an elaborate flower display from the centre of a vast coffee table, on either side of which are plush, yet deceptively sturdy sofas that take both of us by surprise as we try to sit down. We joke that it resembles the setup of a Presidential interview.

Claire, who turns 41 next month, arrived bang on time, a pot of Earl Grey (no milk) in tow. She declines the biscuit that accompanies it — butter and lemon — and insists that I take it. She wears a thick woollen jumper by J. W. Anderson, various threads of pink and pastel green woven together into an oversized knit that belies her delicate frame, which she pairs with blue, partially torn, patchwork jeans. Her hair is slicked back into a bob while her makeup is minimal, save for a spot of rouge on her lip.

We are here to discuss her new film, The Magic Faraway Tree, an adaptation of the Enid Blyton series of the same name. Claire stars opposite Andrew Garfield as a family matriarch who moves to the countryside after becoming disillusioned with life. ‘I knew that my role was to serve as a conduit between the original series and the adaptation,’ she explains. ‘My character is not particularly faithful to what’s in the book.’ In Blyton’s series, the mother embodies a traditional role by looking after the children and cooking their meals. The new adaptation transforms her into the breadwinner — and is generous enough to give her a name.

Polly Thompson is an engineer who once dreamt of building spaceships and sold her soul inventing an Orwellian, voice-controlled fridge that tracks its users’ movements in order to optimise recommendations (‘You normally drink wine at this hour’). She experiences a moral crisis and quits, prompting the family to up sticks and move to the countryside so that her husband, Timothy, can reconnect with his Italian roots and make tomato sauce. The children are introduced as tech-addled gremlins who, thanks to time spent in the magic faraway tree — which they discover in the enchanted woods near their farmhouse — turn out to be rather enterprising. Here is proof that time in fantasy lands (and indeed, the great outdoors) can bring joy and enlightenment to even the stroppiest of teenagers.

‘It’s so difficult to please all fans of the original books,’ Claire says, ‘but I think we’ve at least got the essence of it — and the humour and the madness of the world that Blyton created.’ Polly, she says, ‘is there to represent the mothers who are trying to work, have kids… do it all and still don’t quite know which is the right direction to go in’. What does she, a mother of one, think of doing it all? ‘So much of it is based on the idea of a woman being exhausted — whether you have kids or not,’ she replies. ‘I just think you have to be kind to yourself and do as much as you possibly can, to the best of your abilities.’ Her daughter, Ivy Rose, is now 10.

Claire split from her husband of four years, the actor Stephen Campbell Moore, in 2018 and has been open about the practical challenges of balancing work and motherhood, describing it in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar in January as ‘a logistical s***show’. She talks of her time on the set of The Magic Faraway Tree, however, as if it were less of a professional engagement than a holiday. She explains how she grew close to the film’s child actors (‘The movie is very much Delilah’s, Billie’s and Phoenix’s,’ Claire beams). ‘They’re incredible actors and really, really special kids. There was something really beautiful about being in a film that wasn’t about you, at all.’

It must be a welcome change for an actress who earned her stripes with leading roles in some of the most recognisable period dramas of our time. Cementing her status as one of Britain’s finest with her Emmy Award-winning turn as Elizabeth II in The Crown, Claire followed this up with parts in Andy Serkis’s biographical drama, Breathe (in which she played Diana Cavendish) and in Anne Sewitsky’s A Very British Scandal (in which she played Margaret, Duchess of Argyll).

How does she learn her lines? ‘I don’t really learn lines per se,’ she says. ‘I do lots of work on the script and read it over and over again. Dialogue, for me, is an extension of feeling. If I don’t remember a line, it’s because I haven’t understood why I was saying it.’ She pauses. ‘The only time I’ve actually learnt lines was when I did a play [Lungs, at the Old Vic] and I needed to know them off by heart before we started rehearsals. That was really hard. I was on holiday with my family, which made it even harder. They were splashing in the pool while I was on a balcony and I would look at them and think: “Ugh, I wanna do that!”’, she says with an exaggerated grimace.

This June, Claire will return to the silver screen with a veteran of the form: Richard E. Grant. The two will star together in Savage House, a black comedy period film that is to combine both their favourite genres. ‘He’s a very special human being,’ Claire says of her co-star. Is there anyone in the trade whom she hasn’t yet collaborated with, but wants to? ‘I’d love to work with Baz Luhrmann,’ she says. ‘The visual world he creates, be it in Moulin Rouge or in Strictly Ballroom, is so incredible. I would love to be a bit extreme like that — a little bit over the top, for a change.’

Claire’s flirtations with fashion have so far sated her desire for more flair and fantasy (her roles, she says, tend to be ‘quite real’). ‘I went to the new Bottega Veneta show last month and I thought Louise Trotter’s clothes were just incredible. I love being so close to that level of craftsmanship, and the sets designed for those shows are always so much fun.’ This year’s iteration featured a red carpet and 421 specially commissioned Max Lamb chairs. ‘The clothes were all so deftly pleated,’ Claire continues. ‘In order for just one element of it to move, you kind of need 15 different pieces of fabric? Anyway, it blew my mind.’

‘I also loved seeing older models on the runway,’ she adds. Would she ever walk in a show herself? ‘I’d love to!’ she gushes. ‘It’d be an absolute dream. I recently watched the America’s Next Top Model documentary, and golly, I used to devour that show — rightly or wrongly… I mean, getting up on that runway is kind of peak performance, isn’t it?’ Who is her favourite walker? ‘I’ve never actually seen Naomi Campbell walk in person,’ she says, ‘but just watching videos of her in shows and seeing her strut… It’s like watching a rock star.’

Your aesthetic hero

Carrie Bradshaw. I watched Sex and the City at such a formative age and although I’m not one for designer pieces, which she and some of the other characters are wont to wear, I enjoy when things clash — the whimsy of Carrie Bradshaw. As far as interiors are concerned, I mine much of my inspiration from film sets. I absorb so much from what I watch and always wonder to myself: ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if your house was like the one from Something’s Got To Give?’

Your favourite painting

Anything by Turner. I love the skies, and I could happily live in any one of his pictures.

An exhibition that really impressed you

Fittingly, I went to the Turner and Constable exhibition at Tate Britain recently, and loved that.

A book you found inspiring

Thinking about the books that shaped me when I was a child, I remember being drawn to stories where you could see animals not just ‘being human’, but also what was happening to them behind the scenes. I loved books where you could see what kind of house they lived in, like the Beatrix Potter series or Fantastic Mr Fox. I was drawn to tiny details and to actual illustrations — Dogger, by Shirley Hughes, who wrote as well as illustrated the book, was also massive in my house growing up. I think illustrators are extraordinary.

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

Everyone on the set of The Crown said that Viola [Prettejohn], who played young Elizabeth, looks identical to me. So probably her? Although I’m also really fond of Delilah [Bennett-Cardy], who plays my eldest daughter in The Magic Faraway Tree. She’s brilliant. I’d get her to do it.

The last thing of note you bought for yourself

Probably plants. I replaced one in my kitchen recently and bought myself a jasmine.

A possession you’d never sell

That’s such a fun question. I guess as an actor you’re always thinking: ‘When times get tough, what can I sell?’ What would I never sell, though? I suppose, any of my family photos or pictures that my daughter has drawn and I’ve had framed. Anything sentimental. There’s no way anyone is getting their hands on those.

A hotel you could go back to again and again

There are so many. I love hotels, which is a bit of a problem. I really love the hotel that’s inside the Palace of Versailles: I’ve never had service like it in my entire life. It was insane. Unbelievable. I hasten to add that this wasn’t a trip I paid for. I don’t know whether I have as high expectations when I take myself on holiday.

I’m also a really big fan of an English bed & breakfast. I think we do them really well. I also love Heckfield Place and The Newt. Anywhere with a spa, a steam room, a sauna and a plunge pool.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

Hmmm. There’s one I come back to again and again, which is the schnitzel at The Delaunay. I always come away from it thinking ‘Mmmm, that’s really good’. But as for most memorable, I had my 40th birthday at Primeur in Islington. They change the menu every week depending on what food they get from their suppliers, and everything they do is amazing. Although one of the items on the menu at my birthday was tripe, which didn’t go down very well.

The best present you’ve ever received

I’m really fond of candles, bath products, pyjamas — that sort of thing. But really, it’s anything from my daughter. Anything she’s made for me.

The items you collect

I like to collect ceramics from various locales. I love a souvenir, even if it’s just a single plate from somewhere I want to remember.

'The Magic Faraway Tree' is out in cinemas now.

When it comes to the recent matter of Chappell Roan and an 11-year-old fan, who’s in the right? A brief recap if you’ve missed the story. The American singer was enjoying her breakfast in a Sao Paolo hotel when an 11-year-old fan called Ada, staying in the same hotel and who just so happens to be Jude Law’s daughter, walked past her idol’s table. She didn’t say anything, supposedly, it was just to smile and check it was her. Drama ensued moments later, however, when Chappell's bodyguard appeared at Ada’s table, and ticked off her parents for allowing the girl to ‘disrespect’ and ‘harass’ the star. Ada’s step-father, Brazilian footballer, Jorginho, took to Instagram to vent about this overbearing incident; Chappell later denied it on her own account.

Phew. What a drama. Poor young Ada, and yet it must be pretty exhausting, if you’re a celebrity, to be constantly gawped at. Can a star not enjoy their hotel buffet breakfast in peace?

I have some sympathy with the celebs, though, because — without wishing to sound like a terrible show-off — I’ve been in public with the odd famous person before, and the behaviour of some people around them is extraordinary.

Once, at a restaurant, a young lad rushed up to a famous sports star (I’m not going to tell you who, sorry, because that would be vulgar and name-droppy).

‘Can I have a selfie?’ the teenager demanded, as we ate.

‘Hello, how are you? What’s your name?’ the star responded, turning in his seat and politely making the point that this boy had demanded something from him without any social niceties. I understand that it’s hugely daunting to approach someone famous, someone you admire, but it’s also extremely rude to demand a piece of them, a photo, without even bothering with a ‘hello.’

On another occasion, in a pub with an actor, I noticed people beyond us sneakily trying to take a video or photos of him, pretending that they were photographing something else. This is also pretty rude and tiresome, especially if said famous person is with their family. And is that grainy photo taken from across the restaurant going to be any good? Almost certainly not.

I quizzed a friend about this, and he said he said the general rule is don’t approach anyone if they’re with their children. Young children of celebrities can, understandably, find their parent being harassed confusing, and become protective. Also, don’t bother anyone in a restaurant. They’re trying to eat; they’re really not ‘on duty’.

Be polite and say hello before you hold your phone up for a picture. Understand that some people may not be in the mood. Other celebrities have a blanket ‘no selfies’ policy. If there was any doubt over this, that is entirely their call, not yours.

Don’t bother them for too long, either. A greeting and sentence or two about how much you admire them will suffice. Although nerves can of course get the better of you, here. A few years ago, at Chelsea Flower show, I spied Anna Maxwell Martin and felt the sudden urge to tell her how brilliant she was. I didn’t want a photo; I just wanted to offer my appreciation. So, steeling myself, I walked up to her.

‘HelloAnnaIjustwantedtotellyouhowmuchIlovedyouasReganinKingLearattheNationalafewyearsago,’ I gabbled, so fast that the words were barely decipherable.

Anna’s eyes widened in panic at this deranged woman in front of her. ‘Er…thank you very much,’ she offered back, whereupon I felt so embarrassed I turned and fled. I’m not sure Anna would recall this encounter, but I think of it reasonably often and feel a full body cringe at the memory. So, if you see someone famous out and about, think about it first. In fact, do you need to bother them, or is admiring from afar, perhaps, the safer option?

Producing 18k-gold jewellery is a natural fit for someone whose surname is Goldsmith. Sheherazade Goldsmith's Loquet boutique in Belgravia, where we meet, has few decorative elements, apart from a large bowl of sweets in a glass jar. It’s a tribute to the ‘pick n’ mix’ nature of her playful charms, such as a martini glass and a diamond-studded octopus, which can be used to personalise the pendants that her business is known for. Born Sheherazade Bentley, she launched Loquet with the model Laura Bailey in 2013.

Before a career in luxury jewellery, the 51-year-old wore a number of different hats. She worked in fashion, as a PA for Joan ‘Mrs. B’ Burstein, the founder of London boutique Browns. Then Sheherazade was an environmental activist with an organic food business, Deli'Organic, in Battersea — ‘running that was a nightmare’. She wrote columns for The Sunday Times and Harper’s Bazaar, and took a sabbatical to study investigative journalism at City St George's, University of London, before she realised ‘that I was not the journalist I wanted to be.’

‘I was slightly bored by my own journalism,’ she says. Sheherazade writes all the copy for Loquet’s website and their newsletter, but still finds ‘every word painful’. She adds: ‘There is a real shame in changing careers. You feel like somehow you're changing because you failed that version of yourself in some way, but I don't think that's true.’

Born in Camberwell, London, to the financier and entrepreneur John Bentley and the actor Viviane Venture, Sheherazade was privately educated at the French Lycée in London and Aiglon College in Switzerland. She married Lord (then Zac) Goldsmith of Richmond Park in 1999. They are divorced, but share three children and Sheherazade has been in a relationship with the public-relations executive Matthew Freud since 2021.

When we meet she is wearing a large green puffer coat that has a series of small rips on the right sleeve. Her short brown hair is pinned back with small black bows and, as she considers a question, she gently rests the heart of her locket between her two front teeth. The beauty of her job, she says, is that it is a way of adding some sparkle to the everyday. ‘You could easily wear that from day to night,’ she says of one of her necklaces. ‘I definitely make jewellery made for wearing. I think it's just because of my own chaotic life — it's like, you just have to put on what you've got!’

Your aesthetic hero

I really love AnOther Magazine — it’s really cool and I love visually how they do everything — whether it's the graphics, the photography itself or the print. I really appreciate print as well. Anything in print. It’s kind of an old-fashioned thing, but I love how it comes out. My visual inspiration has probably come through fashion brands. People that really inspired me in the 1990s were Miuccia Prada — and she still does — everything about her collections has always been really focused on craftsmanship, but also she's really allowed women to express themselves and be playful. Phoebe Philo, as well, just again for her design ethos, and her career trajectory: when she was at Chloé, the femininity that went with the Chloé collection, and then when she transferred to Celine, her use of colour, I felt, was amazing. Again, it allowed women to dress in a very simple, elegant way, but really have fun with colour — she really introduced that into people's work wardrobes.

A book you found inspiring

I read a book last year [Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov] that was the International Booker Prize winner, and it was really beautiful because it was about somebody who has Alzheimer's, but it was the idea of: history is whatever we make of it, and how we remember things. That book, I thought, was amazing, because it is about your stories, but how you remember them.

The last thing of note that you bought yourself

A silk Prada bra. It is fluorescent yellow and there was something really happy and sunny about it.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

The latest Jenny Saville I went to at the National Gallery was absolutely superb. She’s kind of like a Lucien Freud, but there's a feminine something about her — instead of visualizing humans through a male perspective, there's just that female understanding of what it means to be human.

A possession you would never sell

My kids made me this really sweet gift. It’s a blue jar, and it has all these twigs in it that they picked up from Richmond Park — we used to live near there — and they attached leaves to them, and wrote what I represented to them on the leaves. They’ve redone it twice since they did it, because they were quite little at the time, and so the branches have collected more and more leaves. That is one possession I would never sell.

The music that you work to

Silence. I curate my surroundings, so I need objects that are attached to fundamentally fantastic memories.

The last podcast you listened to

It’s quite a boring answer, but I listen to The Daily, by The New York Times. I really love news. I mean, it's kind of an odd thing, but I like discussion and news — my children are quite interested in news and politics and so on. The Daily is the one I go to first, but then I try and get different opinions, always, so I'll listen to something by the Guardian, or I'll listen to The Story, which is The Sunday Times’. I'll swap about just to try and understand, and to get a 360 on it all. I don't feel safe unless I know what's going on, and the truth is I don't have time to read a newspaper during the day, although I do read the Financial Times on the weekends. Weirdly, being a jeweller, because you're affected so much by the price of gold, production, tariffs, all the rest of it, you sort of know what's going on, because it's going to affect all of those things. I sort of know when the price of gold is going to go up again just because of what's happening.

Who would play you in a film of your life

Léa Seydoux

What you’d take with you to a desert island

I’d probably take my locket, actually, because it would have the people I love inside and would have something to do with feeling strength or hope or some kind of mantra or message, so that when I was feeling depressed or in despair I’d have that to hold on to. For the charms inside, I’d have my children’s three birth stones and a little blue iris, for hope; the moon, for female intuition; and probably the happy face, to remind myself to keep smiling.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

A cup of tea.

The items you collect

I don't really collect anything as such, but it is probably jewellery, I guess, if I had to say something.

A hotel you could go back and back to

The Bull in Burford. It’s a country hotel in the Cotswolds and has the most delicious food.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever had

Probably the River Café, in London, and it isn't one particular meal, it's what the River Café is associated with. It's a restaurant that I've gone to for forever. It's kind of seen me grow up, if you like, and it's always been a celebration, whether I'm just meeting friends, or whether I'm taking the children because they've graduated, or it's a birthday. So those meals are always memorable, but it's less to do with the food and more to do with the fact that we're all together, aside from the fact that the food is also incredible.

Your favourite painting

There’s a beautiful Lowry [Children on the Beach with a Dog], which is unlike a Lowry, and it's three people walking on the beach with a little dog and it just reminds me of my little dog [Shady, a Bedlington Terrier/whippet cross] and my three kids. It’s my screensaver on my phone.

The best present you’ve ever received

Somebody gave me a first edition of Pablo Neruda love poems — that was pretty amazing.

For more information or to shop pieces by Loquet, see their website.

Going skiing with friends more successful than oneself comes with several perks — chiefly, access to the BA lounge at Geneva Airport. It’s an underwhelming experience — all cold cuts and soggy pasta — but the conversations you overhear are so delicious they more than make up for it. There last week on the armchairs opposite our own was a family of four who had decided to conduct a verbal autopsy of their hotel. ‘We’re making an exception for the junior manager,’ the father complained on the phone — one assumes, to the senior manager — ‘but this has otherwise been a truly heinous experience.’

The daughter egged him on with nods and vivid hand gestures, presumably blind to anyone (read: everyone) staring at the debacle. ‘I don’t care how you deal with the night porter!’ her father continued. ‘I want the Ferrari!’ she whinnied. Should our ears have been quite so wide open? It’s not like we had much of a choice: listening when someone in the same room as you decides to make a personal phone call is not eavesdropping but an immutable part of modern life. Take quiet carriages on trains, which have been commandeered by headphone refuseniks for several years now, broadcasting their lives to less-than-willing listeners. As most people seem so hellbent on being heard all the time, the rest of us might as well lean in. Eavesdropping, as the young say, is so back.

A cultural reassessment of eavesdropping has, I believe, been brewing for some time. Last month, Amelia Tait published her musings on the topic in FT Weekend, where she examined the author Joe Gould’s theory that meaning can be extracted from overhearing conversations. She found, after earwigging all over London for a day, that we cannot identify much from mere ‘snatches of dialogue’. Better, then, to eavesdrop with a purpose: namely, gossip.

Although George Harrison once sang that this was the Devil’s radio, Yuval Noah Harari wrote in Sapiens (2011) that gossip was integral to evolution, a kind of social glue that allowed us to build larger human networks. I like his theory better — one that few dramas articulate better than Netflix’s Bridgerton, in which the supposedly dignified members of Queen Charlotte’s Court sniff around for dirt on one another in the manner of truffle pigs. (The show’s fourth season concluded last month, garnering close to 40 million views.) It is a world in which eavesdropping is a powerful tool — secrets are buried or traded as in a game of social chess — but also, at times, a vital public service, as paving over potholes or booing a bad stand-up comedian are today. Indiscretions are rarely something to be proud of, but gathering intel to use wisely will always be the ultimate power move.

This feature originally appeared in the March 11, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The River Tamar that forms the Devon-Cornwall border comes within four miles of making Cornwall an island. In and around the Scottish Borders, many people define themselves as Bordermen first, and Scottish or English second. And the the great medieval border created in the years of Danelaw both split Britain, and lives on today as one of the biggest roads in the country.

These are just a few of the fascinating tales woven together by Richard Collett as he talks to James Fisher in this utterly fascinating episode of the Country Life Podcast.

Yes, a border is a line on a map — but it's also a state of mind, with many of the lines that divide us, define us and even unite us taking on very different meanings depending on where you live.

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Richard Collett has spent years travelling Britain and talking to people throughout the land about our borders, where they come from, and what they mean — and the result is a fascinating book, Along the Borders: In search of what divides and unites the British Isles.

The book is published in April 2026 by Penguin — you can pre-order a copy here — and we can't recommend it enough, if only to read the tale of the English sailor who got shipwrecked on Shetland, and has now spent decades fighting for its recognition as an independent country.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Richard Collett

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

Sarah Raven, the gardener, writer and cook, is definitely more in touch with the outside world than she is with a screen. Three times during our Zoom call her microphone connects to a different device (she doesn’t know which) leaving her mouthing silently. ‘Sorry about that,’ she says when she re-connects. ‘I’m not good with technology at the best of times.’

Sarah and her eponymous business are titans of the gardening world. Her company, which delivers seeds and plants to order, was begun from a small cutting patch using just six plants from her mother’s garden. This inspired her first book, The Cutting Garden (1996), which she wrote during maternity leave. She has since written many more and has gained notoriety for her appearances on Gardeners’ World. Her podcast, grow, eat, cook, arrange, is much beloved, as is her garden at Perch Hill, where she regularly teaches gardening courses and which is open to the public to visit on set days.

‘It’s not very nice weather, is it?’ she bemoans when we talk. Wrapped up in a large grey cardigan, she is clearly suffering withdrawal symptoms from enjoying her beloved garden in the sunshine over the winter months. Sarah has had a love of the great outdoors from a young age. She was born a twin in 1963 in Marylebone, London, and was the joint youngest of five children. Her father, John Earle Raven, was an amateur botanist who sparked her interest in plants. He was a classics don at King’s College, the University of Cambridge, where Sarah grew up. ‘I used to run on King's College Chapel’s lead roof as a sort of game,’ she recalls. Her gardener mother, Faith Raven, also had green fingers and inherited the Ardtornish Estate in Lochaber, Scotland, famed for its gardens.

As a child, Sarah went to a school run by Catholic nuns who, she told Desert Island Discs, thought she was ‘naughty’ and eventually asked her to leave, aged 16. ‘It’s unbelievably beautiful … but I found Cambridge slightly prickly… that whole academic sphere is quite bitchy’, she recalls. Sarah studied for an MA in history at the University of Edinburgh before changing tact to train as a doctor at the University of London, waitressing at the River Café in her free time. ‘[When I graduated] I thought: “Well, what do I really want to do?” I knew a couple of doctors, and I just always admired them, and loved hearing about what they did in their day to day work life, and so I just decided I had to go back to college because I hadn't got physics or chemistry A-level,’ she says.

Shockingly, Sarah’s gamble paid off, despite her receiving just 8% in her first physics end-of-term exam, and she went on to work as a junior doctor at Charing Cross Hospital in London. ‘I really loved it,’ she says, ‘but then I had children, because by the time I came out of that sort of sausage machine [education] I was 30 and I was married and I just wanted a child, basically.’ The gruelling hospital shifts were untenable, Sarah found. She had met her husband, the writer Adam Nicolson, on a skiing holiday, which she was invited to by his sister. After she gave up medicine they moved to East Sussex, to live in Perch Hill.

For a while, the family also lived at Sissinghurst in Kent, the former home of Vita Sackville-West, who was Adam’s grandmother. Sarah shares two grown-up daughters with Adam, as well as three stepsons from his previous marriage. ‘They are all in London, bar one, and all have kind of professional serious jobs,’ she says, proudly.

Sarah will be speaking at the Cambridge Literary Festival on April 23 about her new book, A Year of Cut Flowers, which is out now.

Your aesthetic hero

I think Vita Sackville-West, she was a gardener, but she also had incredible bohemian tastes in interiors — and I really love her interiors. Very kind of shabby but glamorous, and beautiful textures and very rich colours. I'm married to her grandson, he's sort of grew up in her home, so his aesthetic I also admire very much.

The music that you work to

I don't. I used to. I find it difficult to concentrate now, which is sad in a way, but I have to have absolute quiet. Even if there's a radio three rooms away, I would need to go and turn that off.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

The Marie Antoinette exhibition at the V&A Museum. I mean, it is a bit of a cliche, because I know a lot of people have written a lot about it, but I really enjoyed it. I botanized when I was there, because, of course, the accuracy of the needlework is incredible, and so a lot of the plants in the fabrics are completely identifiable, and I loved looking at that, as well as the sort of crazy flamboyance of it. I enjoyed it, but it was overcrowded. They've sold too many tickets.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

I would definitely say one or other, or ideally both, of my dogs (mongrelly labradoodles called Curly and Dusty). I don't think I'd be allowed to take my daughters, because they have to get on with their lives, but if I could I’d take my family, too.

Your favourite painting

A Tom Hammick. He’s a friend actually, and we have a lot of his stuff, including a huge woodcut of somebody watering a garden, which I absolutely love.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

I get up very early: between 5:15 and 5:30am, and nature and the garden is what gets me up. In the winter, not so much, so I tend to write very early in the morning before work — that's what gets me out of bed. I make a very weak, very long black coffee with very nice coffee in a huge mug, and I come upstairs and I write.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I bought some perfume, but it was actually a present from my husband to me. Does that count? It smells of tomato leaf and one of my greatest joys in life is pinching out my tomatoes. It’s Vétiver Écarlate by L'Artisan Parfumeur.

The items you collect

Oh, God, everything. My current fad is on sale, cashmere jerseys in a small size, so that I can wear them underneath as a kind of under layer. I feel the cold very badly, so sometimes I might even wear three underneath a dress.

The best present you’ve ever received

As a family, we spend a lot of time in Crete, and we really love it, because we're nature freaks, and the wild flowers are amazing. And we spent a winter in Crete, and when we came back, Adam had bought this [a small boat made of clay filled with pomegranates] for my birthday. He had it made. This is a traditional thing — a welcoming house gift — when you set up a new house, because a pomegranate is a sort of a symbol of the home. He found a potter who made it for me.

A book that has inspired you

There's a massive book on Cretan endemic wildflowers, and I find it really inspiring when the weather's a bit crap and spring is coming. Quite often, I just start flicking through it and it just makes me think: ‘Oh yes, there's beauty out there’. I find nature very inspiring and reassuring, so when things are feeling a bit dire in the world, and we have world wars and things, I sort of focus in a lot, and find nature very reassuring, but I think I particularly love wild, abundant beauty, so I just gaze at these pictures.

A possession you’d never sell

A tile that Vita bought in Tehran, when she went travelling. It's just the most beautiful colour, and she was very keen on this colour [a type of turquoise] which came from Isfahan. This particular glaze has got lead in it, so you can't get it anymore, because it's quite toxic. I just really love it. I put a vase on it and, even if it's tiny, it just makes it look so glamorous and beautiful.

The last podcast you listened to

I really love This Cultural Life. I listened to one last night — the Salman Rushdie episode, which is about two years old. I've listened to them all several times. I listened to Tracey Emin yesterday. I just find them such a rich resource of information about what's going on at that moment. But actually even beyond that, I find them really brilliantly broad. I'm not so keen on the actor-y ones, I suppose, just because I'm not a great film or theatre buff, but I love the ones on music, culture, art and artists. I just find it really educational. I really enjoy them. I have a funeral on Tuesday, and it's a four hour drive there and back, and in the past I would have rather dreaded that, but I was just thinking: ‘I'll just download lots of This Cultural Life, and I'll just listen to them again’. I find I hear something different, even if I've heard it before.

Who would play you in a film of your life

Who is the woman who's married to the Mumford and Sons man? Carey Mulligan. She's brilliant in The Ballad of Wallis Island.

A hotel you could go back and back to

I’m not a big hotel person, actually. Because I love cooking, I tend to prefer renting a house to hotels. I did really like this hotel in Deauville in France, on the beach, which is called Hôtel Barrière Le Normandy. Would I go back there again and again? Yes, if I wanted to write. As Adam and I both write, when we're here [at Perch Hill] we get a bit dug into what's going on day to day, and so if we have a deadline, quite often, we might go off somewhere.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever had

Probably globe artichokes served whole with something called Angelica sauce, which isn't made with the herb Angelica, it's hard boiled egg, anchovy, capers, olives, lots of parsley, red wine vinegar and olive oil. I had it all the way through my childhood — I spent a lot of time in Italy as a child, and you would go to the market and buy these amazing globe artichokes at Easter — because they're very early to crop there, and often in Sicily, even earlier. So we've got artichokes in the garden so I make it a lot with, maybe on the side, really good bread and unsalted butter or perhaps some really nice, waxy new potatoes just dug up from the garden and cooked with salt and mint, and possibly a green salad — and that would be it. That would be my most memorable meal.

To see Sarah at the Cambridge Literary Festival on April 23, visit their website. A Year of Cut Flowers: A life of growing and arranging for all seasons by Sarah Raven is out March 12 (Bloomsbury Publishing, Hardback, £30) Photography by Jonathan Buckley.

The high-maintenance bride

So maniacal are Trixie’s preparations that she’s given up texting as it takes too long. Instead, a volley of lengthy, rambling voice notes issues urgent instructions/ideas/pleas and complaints to her mother, her betrothed, her maid of honour, the wedding planner and her brood of hens.

All missives require an immediate response, either in agreement and/or sympathy, depending on the sentiment.

Of course, she should chill out; she knows that there’s more to life than her forthcoming nuptials — and that they are still more than a year away — but that’s not how it feels when she awakes at 5am, tortured by a long list of anxious thoughts.

One nagging worry, however, is, once it’s all over, what on earth will she find to talk about?

The alternative couple

The only reason that Saffron and Tiger are bending to societal norms by getting hitched is to please their parents, whose wedding photographs paint a picture of cultural reinforcement, the patriarchy and gender stereotypes, out of step with their new-found home in East London.

The civil ceremony at Hackney Town Hall is followed by a reception in a room above their local, a famous haunt of the Kray twins that has been bought by a Bedales contemporary and offers a vegan menu and organic ciders served in jam jars.

The casual wedding attire of the couple and their friends is in stark contrast to the morning dress and fancy frocks of the older generation, who later retreat to the comforts of Fegato alla veneziana at Ziani’s and a nice glass of Barolo (served in a glass).

The wedding planner

There’s nothing that Jasmine can’t turn into a spreadsheet — timetables, options for canapés, music — plus, of course, it’s invaluable for updating the rapidly burgeoning budget.

Jasmine’s iPad is clamped beneath her arm like a fifth limb, heavily laden with Excel pages ready to be fired up to reveal everything from menus and wine lists, as well as moodboards she has created to show the magic that can be created with special-effect lighting, lilac chair sashes and 50 illuminated nylon cherry-blossom trees (‘you absolutely won’t regret the extra £6,000, plus VAT, delivery, oh, and, in the interests of transparency, my 20% mark up’).

Jasmine knows that the happy couple wants a dream wedding — and that those dreams don’t come cheap. She knows, too, that they find her really annoying, but frankly, someone has to take control.

After all, the less time they spend organising their wedding, the more time they’ll have to earn the money to pay her fees.

The in-demand wedding guest

The succession of fashionable schools Hamish attended has blessed him with a sprawling social circle.

As a wedding guest, he’s much in demand — thanks to his devastating good looks, dry sense of humour and capacity to add a rakish glamour to even the most lacklustre reception.

His performances on the dance floor make most men’s efforts look plain embarrassing.

He exerts a magnetic draw on both young and not-so-young, human and four-legged.

Yet whatever overtures are made towards him by guests of all persuasions, he always disappears alone into the night, stone-cold sober and inexplicably single.

The helicopter father

Jeremy would rather pay for the wedding than let the happy couple cut corners and make a hash of it.

In his book, he who pays the piper calls the tune, so the fizz, wine and canapés were all his choice. The silent disco and sobering midnight mocktails were also his idea, but his demand to sign off the best man’s speech met with some resistance.

Nevertheless, he’s confident that, after a tense phone call, the young man doing the honours realises that his card is marked. After all, he explained, in chillingly calm pass-agg mode: ‘Why ruin an expensive wedding with a few cheap laughs?’

He’s earned his place in the driving seat, too: it was he who had the prescience to ensure that the garden would accommodate a marquee before he chose the house (when the bride was still a toddler) and also that the nuptials would coincide with the flowering of the prized Magnolia grandiflora he planted. Undoubtedly, it will be the star of the show.

The same-sex couple

When they decided to tie the knot, Rob and Dave were keen to avoid the tired old clichés, particularly given that they met at their local rugby club.

When the wedding planner pointed out that straight weddings were camper than Christmas, they decided to go for unbridled Hollywood glamour.

The pair of matching ivory-coloured linen suits and gypsophila buttonholes looked splendid beneath the rose-swathed cupola at the riverside restaurant they chose for the occasion.

But it was the choice of wedding gifts where the clichés really came into play; who knew there were so many pairs of needlepoint cushions, each emblazoned with the words ‘Mr’ and ‘Mr’?

The best man

Hector has watched Hugh Grant’s heroic performance in Four Weddings And A Funeral umpteen times, spent hours practising in front of a mirror and even sought the help of AI to write the speech, but is still toiling away in his B&B the night before the wedding.

The groom’s BSc in Actuarial Science and passion for both brass rubbing and madrigals offer few opportunities for gay wit and repartee.

That said, his over-enthusiastic consumption of beers, wines, spirits and flaming Sambucas unleashed a genie that he and the stags feel duty-bound to push firmly back in the bottle.

Not Hector, however, whose distasteful reminiscences just about saved the day.

The beach bride

Given that Roxy has spent some of her happiest times in palm-fringed paradises, it seems only fitting that she and her betrothed should get married somewhere with a relaxed vibe.

The consensus on the group chat she set up was that Thailand was a step too far, so the Kostas Taverna Beach Bar on a sun-kissed Greek Island seemed like a good compromise. With Easyjet flights and a few nights at the Aphrodite Hotel, there wouldn’t be any change out of £2,000 per head, but that was surely a test of their friends’ commitment to their happy union — and would filter out some of the ‘duty’ invitees.

The celebrant is a British expat married to a local, whose Shirley Valentine jokes quickly lose their sparkle, but when someone swaps the dreary Ibiza-inspired playlist for the Mamma Mia! soundtrack, things begin to go with a swing. And wow, the sunrise shots on her wedding Instagram are ‘just, like mind-blowing’.

This feature originally appeared in the March 4, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

The designer Manolo Blahnik has been crafting covetable footwear for more than 50 years.

He travels to Milan every season to bring his collections to life, each shoe developed from his personal sketches, and divides his time between homes in London and Bath.

Blahnik has published numerous books, has been the subject of exhibitions, sponsored and designed a capsule collection for the V&A Museum’s Marie Antoinette: Style exhibition (until March 22, 2026), and was honoured with a CBE in 2007.

He loves reading, watching old films and gardening, and remains ‘forever curious’ about the world.

His dogs

I have 12 dogs and they are my greatest joy. I adore spending time with them, usually with a good book in hand… there’s nothing better.

I have always said I prefer dogs to people — they are endlessly loyal, honest and far more entertaining.

Suits from Anderson & Sheppard

Since the 1970s, I’ve only worn Anderson & Sheppard on Savile Row. The ‘drape’ cut suits me perfectly — they have my measurements and are next to my office in Mayfair: it works perfectly.

Sometimes, I choose classic colours, but I do love a bit of madness. My latest, a bright-blue check with yellow and red, reminds me of a circus tamer.

Art supplies

Art supplies from Green & Stone in Chelsea, is my haven — it’s the only place I can find my favourite Dr. Ph. Martin’s inks.

It has every shade imaginable and I could spend hours simply admiring the colours.

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

Although Eve Myles is best known for gunning down campy aliens with unbridled enthusiasm as Gwen Cooper in the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, in reality the Welsh actor is about as kick-ass as a kitten. In her own words, she is ‘very fluffy… very quiet, not very good in social environments and constantly living under a hood of imposter syndrome’.

Why then is she constantly being cast as a woman that is a force to be reckoned with? ‘I don’t know what they see in me,’ she says ‘but I have had very strong feisty women around me all my life, my mother being top of the list … so I can identify with women like that. I wish I was a bit more like that, but I'm the most non confrontational person you'll ever meet, whereas most of the characters I play are the most confident, confrontational women going’.

The new ITV six-part thriller Gone sees her star alongside The Walking Dead’s David Morrissey. ‘He is someone everybody does need to work with, because he’s extraordinary,’ she says. In the show Eve is Detective Annie Cassidy, tasked with investigating David’s character, an impassive headmaster whose wife has mysteriously disappeared. When I mention that I’ve watched the first episode, I’m surprised at how eager she is to know if I liked it.

The actor has, after all, received accolades for not just Torchwood, but for portraying Claire Ripley in Broadchurch, for her role as the Queen’s personal dresser Mrs. Jenkins in the period drama series Victoria and for her moving performance in ITV’s recent re-telling of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, The Hack. Not to mention, she has won two BAFTA Cymru awards for Best Actress: one in 2007, the other in 2018, and was awarded the highly coveted title of Wales’ Sexiest Woman in 2013. When I tell her that I found the first episode of Gone gripping, she graciously thanks me. ‘I think people forget that it’s very nerve wracking for us,’ she explains.

Born in 1978, Eve grew up in Ystradgynlais, Powys, on the edge of the Brecon Beacons. In 2000 she graduated from the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, after meeting her husband there, before landing her first major role in BBC Wales’s drama series Belonging.

Eve got her break in 2006 as the lead in Torchwood, a role which was written especially for her by showrunner Russell T Davies after her one-off appearance in Doctor Who. He described her as ‘One of Wales’ best-kept secrets’. Her role in the thriller Keeping Faith orUn Bore Mercher, as it aired in Wales, saw her embrace an iconic yellow raincoat, and her heritage, by learning to speak Welsh. She starred in it alongside her husband Bradley Freegard, with whom she shares three children aged 16, 12 and 4. ‘Sleep’s for losers, Lotte,’ she tells me about parenthood. She is the kindest celebrity I have ever interviewed by a country mile — and the sleepiest.

Your aesthetic hero

Linda Hamilton, the original Sarah Connor, who I got to meet. I based Gwen Cooper on her, actually. I think that she is physically strong, mentally strong — and when she brought that character to the screen [in The Terminator] we had never seen a female like that before. She said that she turned up for the second film and even Arnold Schwarzenegger said: ‘Oh my god: this woman is ripped’. It was shocking and thrilling to see that, and I loved it.

An exhibition that really impressed you

My daughter’s artwork in her school hall.

A book you found inspiring

To Kill a Mockingbird. I think Scout is one of the greatest female characters ever written. I love it so much that I bought it for my daughter for Christmas. She's about to do her A-level in English, and needed to do some extra reading. I said: ‘You have to read this book.’ It’s just such a fantastic story, and incredibly-character driven and vivid. It changed my life, that book, actually. It’s probably why I became an actor, really. I just couldn't believe how the characters just spoke to me and that I completely escaped into that world. It really sort of started my creative juices flowing. I found it an incredible form of escapism, and I identified with Scout as a child — a tomboy climbing trees and getting into trouble. That was me.

The last thing of note that you bought yourself

I've just bought four slow cookers for all the runners on my last job, because it's important they eat well — they've looked after me for four months, you know, bringing me hot tea and hot water bottles when I'm in the mud, and working their arses off. And I thought, well, how can I look after them? What I did buy for myself yesterday was a Pret chicken laksa soup, chilli crisps and a pot of mango. Can’t go wrong. Actually, I’ve also bought myself a new Saul Leiter photography book. He’s my favourite photographer and I buy myself a new photography book after every job finishes. It’s a treat to myself.

A possession you’d never sell

I would never sell my mum’s vase.

Your favourite painting

My favourite painting is by a Scottish artist called Alexander Miller, and it's called A Wee Backy Doon The Brae. It's a little boy on the back of a bike holding onto his dad's donkey coat with his little welly boots kicking out. His dad’s a miner and it's a silhouette of them from the back. I spotted this painting in a gallery in Stratford-upon-Avon when I was at the RSC there, and it reminded me of me and my dad, who was a Scottish man. There were always stories growing up that my father would try to cycle the hill up to our house from our tiny village on his bike with me in a seat at the back, and if he wasn't going fast enough, I would pinch him to go up faster. And so we'd always say that the painting was granddad and me, to our kids. I bought it — it was very expensive for me at the time — and I paid every month for it.

The music you work to

Every character has a different playlist. Music is really important to me. For Keeping Faith, I brought Amy Wadge on board to write music for that, because she was absolutely the right person. Before scenes, during scenes, I would have her in my ears, because it's like the soul of a character to me, music. It brings out different things, unlocks certain things, it's something that really influences me. I've just done Crow Girl now, and that's very much your Agnes Obel. My artist for Gone is London Grammar. They were played on repeat for Annie Cassidy.

The items you collect

Scripts. Oh and I love a teapot. I’m obsessed with tea.

The last podcast you listened to

It's something I really want to get into, actually — I genuinely don't have time — but I know the podcast I want to listen to, and that’s Kathy Burke’s podcast about death [Where There's A Will, There's A Wake].

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

Well, you wouldn't believe how many Emily Blunt pictures get sent to me to sign. It’s become a bit of a joke in our house because so many people send Emily's picture to me. So I guess, aesthetically, possibly her — and she is a superb artist. But ultimately, I’ll go with my wonderful co-star Gabrielle Creevy, who I did The Guest with. We've got very similar backgrounds.

A hotel you could go back and back to

The hotel where we got married in Italy. I will never ever tell anybody which one it is.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

My husband.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

The kids. We have a four-year-old who shouts: ‘Team! Team!’ every morning, like we are a basketball team. That gets me up.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

The fish and chips and bottle of champagne I had to myself after doing the London Marathon. It was absolutely exquisite.

The best present you’ve ever received

A run bath at the end of a hard working day.

Gone will premiere from Sunday 8 March on ITV and ITVX