April 14 frontispiece: Lieutenant Emma Spilsbury
Emma is this week's frontispiece in Country Life, out April 14

Lieutenant Emma Spilsbury
Emma, aged 24, is the daughter of Major and Mrs Peter Spilsbury of Breaston, Derbyshire. Commissioned in August 2007, Emma has served with 3 Rifles in Kosovo and Kenya, and is now in Sangin, Afghanistan. She will return to the UK this month.
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Country Life is unlike any other magazine: the only glossy weekly on the newsstand and the only magazine that has been guest-edited by His Majesty The King not once, but twice. It is a celebration of modern rural life and all its diverse joys and pleasures — that was first published in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year. Our eclectic mixture of witty and informative content — from the most up-to-date property news and commentary and a coveted glimpse inside some of the UK's best houses and gardens, to gardening, the arts and interior design, written by experts in their field — still cannot be found in print or online, anywhere else.
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The curious case of Cecil Beaton and Madame X
When he noticed an uncanny resemblance between John Singer Sargent’s painting of Virginie Gautreau and a Cecil Beaton portrait of Leslie Caron, Patrick Monahan called on the Hollywood Golden Age actress to investigate.
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The great house that's 'a magnificent scrapbook of cherry-picked ideas', and 'one of the most compelling products of Britain’s 18th-century love affair with Antiquity'
John Goodall looks at the sources of inspiration behind the design for the magnificently idiosyncratic West Wycombe Park in Buckinghamshire.