The bumper Christmas issue on sale this week has something for all the family. Michael Morpurgo has written a charming Christmas story and Kit Hesketh-Harvey offers a survival guide for carol services; Michael Hall writes on the history of painting snow, Stephen Cleobury chooses his favourite painting and actor James Fox dips into Downton Abbey - plus a Downton Abbey frontispiece to boot!
ALSO We look back at seasonal literature and revive the art of rearing your own ham, plus there's the Editor's Quiz, the big crossword and much, much more.
And look out for the FREE travel supplement which comes with the magazine which has some incredible travel ideas for 2014 including Burma, the Galapagos and wolf tracking in the Carpathian Mountains.
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17 outstanding homes for sale across Britain, from under £250k to £6.5 million, as seen in Country LifeSomething for every budget in this week's round up of homes across the country that have come to market via Country Life.
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'We started thinking: if we were going to design a bike for Aston Martin, what would it look like? And then we simply couldn’t stop': Aston's new bike has everything you could ever dream of — except a price tagThe new Aston Martin .1R bicycle, a collaboration with manufacturer J.Laverack, leaves Paul Henderson stirred rather than shaken.
