IF you take a stroll around London, you’re likely to spot a few of English Heritage’s iconic blue plaques, which mark the homes of famous writers, artists and other notable people, from military leaders to scientific innovators. Each year, a handful of new names is added to this impressive roster and, in March, English Heritage announced that this year’s list includes two leading female spies, who risked their lives on top-secret missions.
Christine Granville was Britain’s longest-serving female agent during the Second World War and her daring exploits read like something from an adventure novel. Born Krystyna Skarbek, the daughter of a charming, but dissolute Polish aristocrat and a Jewish heiress, she grew up on a country estate in Trzepnica, riding horses, roaming the fields and sledging in winter. She was clearly both beautiful and precocious—she was placed in a national beauty pageant and was expelled from her boarding school for setting fire to a priest’s cassock (when the priest was still in it).
However, when her family went bankrupt in the 1920s, the young Granville suddenly had to support herself. On the outbreak of war, she sailed to London and, with characteristic determination, became a secret agent two years before the Special Operations Executive officially recruited women.
Denne historien er fra June 10, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra June 10, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
