Lifestyle
Country Life UK
The objects that mark a remarkable life
SELECTION of items from the collection of Lady Glenconner, who was Maid of Honour at Elizabeth II's coronation and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, a friend from childhood, will take place at Bonhams New Bond Street on November 18.
1 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
When David took on Goliath
A GROMENES hates bully boys and, in the past fortnight, we have seen them at their destructive work in three of the areas most important to readers of COUNTRY LIFE: agriculture, heritage and intellectual rigour. First, there was the bullying of a small food producer. After probably the best grape harvest ever in this country, there's a good deal of envy of the emerging excellence of English wine. As the changing climate impinges on traditional French vintages, we are increasingly winning prizes, even against the great Champagne houses.
2 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Diamonds are a pearl's best friend
There was no shortage of glitz and glamour at last month's sale of the late Countess of Airlie's jewellery, but an exquisite tiara shone the brightest
3 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
The portraitist who followed the power
ACCORDING to a 19th-century biographer (John Ruskin), 'In looking at a portrait by Holbein, we are minded of the person painted, not the painter' and, considering the fame of his greatest works, the paucity of documentary evidence for the details of Hans Holbein's life is remarkable. Elizabeth Goldring's achievement is equally so. This is the first full-scale scholarly biography for a century and, as she says, it is 'the first book to tell the story of Holbein's life, art and afterlives in relation to the larger story of the history of art'.
5 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Going nuts about squirrels
HAVE you eaten grey squirrel? Me neither, but I think we should give it a go.
2 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
A royal success
The gardens of Sandringham House, Sandringham, Norfolk A home of His Majesty King Charles III
6 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Strike it lucky
We've been using matches for 200 years-but, as Rob Crossan discovers, the story of how they came to be is far more colourful (and hair-raising) than we might imagine
3 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Leave farmers to produce food
Seventy years ago, the Goverment promised farmers that it would help them 'wring the last ounce of food from the land'. Will we hear those words again?
3 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
The wonder of wood
Sykes Timber is a family business rooted in heritage, but driven by innovation
2 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Thatch me if you can
Despite their clichéd 'chocolate-box' description, thatched cottages are generally showstoppers. They tend not to remain on the market for long, so, for this quintet, it may be a case of he (or she) who hesitates is lost
2 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Report highlights agriculture in crisis
THE inaugural McCain Farmdex report has painted a bleak picture of Britain's farming industry, showing those in the agricultural sector to be under immense pressures due to factors such as policy uncertainty, climate change, soaring input costs, changing subsidies and inheritance-tax rules and declining prices for their produce.
1 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Lamppost plans cast dark shadow over Canterbury
KENT County Council (KCC) is experiencing a backlash from Canterbury residents over its plans to replace some of the city's famous bespoke cast-iron, swan-neck Biggleston lampposts with modern steel replicas. The row erupted when surveyors in Cossington Road, which is in a conservation area, informed homeowners of the council's plans and, since then, local groups and individuals have bombarded KCC with complaints, with The Canterbury Society launching a petition and Canterbury City Council (CCC) councillor Charlotte Cornell also backing the protestors.
2 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Pergola is added to new Heritage at Risk Register
THE Hill Garden Pergola, the unexpected 'discovery' of which has delighted first-time visitors to Hampstead Heath for decades, has been placed on Historic England's updated Heritage at Risk Register.
1 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Links to the past
JASON LINDSAY examines a family tree of the de Vere family compiled in 1571, happily back in the castle after 425 years. Deep ancestry was an attribute of nobility and a lineage of this kind, richly orna-mented with heraldry, was a proof of status. This example was commissioned to celebrate the marriage of Anne Cecil, the daughter of Elizabeth I's Secretary, William, Lord Burghley, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
1 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
A brush with Heaven
Stanley Spencer's talent for seeing the spiritual in the everyday, his stirring sense for the wonder of Nature and his love for the landscapes of Berkshire and Suffolk shaped his art as Matthew Dennison reveals
5 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Baby, it's cold outside
When the temperature drops, how do Britain's birds, beasts and plants keep the chill at bay? John Lewis-Stempel reveals Nature's own thermals
6 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
The enchanting East
From moated manors to modern woodland homes, East Anglia offers potential buyers serenity and history in equal measure, not to mention easy access to the capital for those who must occasionally leave the countryside behind
6 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Everybody's got a Hungary heart
The classifications of the Eastern European country's rustic, paprika-spiked gulyás stews are as multitudinous as they are delicious, proclaims Tom Parker Bowles
4 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Back to the future
From prawn cocktail and Arctic roll to starched tablecloths and 'nicotine cream' on the walls, it's out with the new and in with the old in the restaurant world
5 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
An unfenced existence
Caricatured as a suburban grouch, Philip Larkin was, in fact, an attentive and astute chronicler of Nature. On the 40th anniversary of the poet's death, Richard Barnett celebrates his lifelong love of the English countryside
4 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Fit for a king
Two properties on the Sandringham estate, Norfolk, filled with royal treasures aplenty and stylishly refurbished, are now available as holiday lets
3 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Charlotte Mullins comments on Landscape 4
‘This is a personal one. It’s by a family friend, Anastasia Lewis. She was an amazing artist and used to be a costume designer.
1 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Ox-Cam corridor site of second national forest
THE Oxford-Cambridge corridor will be the site of a new national forest, the Government announced last week, just ahead of Prime Minister Keir Starmer's appearance at COP30 in Brazil.
1 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
The legacy Hugh Hudson and Chariots of Fire
THE film Chariots of Fire, the stirring 1981 dramatisation of two British runners’ journey to the 1924 Paris Olympics, is one of the most fêted British productions of all time, scooping four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Its director, Hugh Hudson, who died in 2023 aged 86, never set out to conquer Hollywood: like Ridley Scott, his background was in advertising. It was there, however, that he met David Puttnam, the producer of Chariots of Fire. Mr Puttnam had happened upon the story of Eric Liddell, a devout Christian who refused to run on a Sunday, and needed a director with an informed, but not rose-tinted awareness of the Establishment. Hudson was ideally qualified: he had been to Eton and done his National Service with the Dragoon Guards, yet felt a deep ambivalence towards that world (one of his lifelong heroes was George Orwell).
1 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
The designer's room
DeVOL has created a family kitchen at Raynham Hall, one of England's earliest neo-Palladian houses
1 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Driving over cornflowers
WE have a gravel drive—I say ‘gravel’, but actually there’s hardcore underneath it and the fine gravel tends to pile up in the middle and along the sides, as the wheels of our cars grind down the hardcore and encourage the development of ruts in the surface.
3 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Ruin and renaissance
Dorfold Hall, Cheshire, part II The home of Charles and Dr Candice Roundell
8 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Clash of the titans
The public wins as J. M. W. Turner and John Constable go head to head in a forthcoming exhibition at Tate Britain that revives their rivalry
8 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
Come fly with me
A combination of spellbinding sport and profound empathetic connection, falconry-a partnership in which the bird maintains the upper hand-offers a window into 'the deeper magic'
8 min |
November 12, 2025
Country Life UK
The way we lived then
THIS is yet another of those number narratives—histories of the nation seen through a numerical prism—such as Steven Parissien’s recent Building Britannia: A History of Britain in Twenty-Five Buildings (including one featured here) or Catherine Clarke’s current A History of England in Twenty-Five Poems (Books, September 3).
9 min |