Entertainment
Country Life UK
Toy story
Today's queues may be digital, but the fight to secure that must-have present and avoid small, disappointed faces is timeless. Tom Howells looks at the toys topping recent (and less recent) Christmas wish lists
4 min |
December 10, 2025 ( Double Issue )
Country Life UK
A historic window rejuvenated
THE east window of Stapleton's chantry within North Moreton's All Saints Church, Oxfordshire, was celebrated recently with a blessing by the Bishop of Dorchester, after the finest flowering of the courts of Edward I and Edward II in glass and stone had been saved for the nation.
1 min |
December 10, 2025 ( Double Issue )
Country Life UK
Life in the slow lane
Plundering a local byway for a spot of festive foraging, John Lewis-Stempel finds all life proliferating in the multitudinous micro-habitat of the winter hedgerow
4 min |
December 10, 2025 ( Double Issue )
Country Life UK
Muff and nonsense
Is that furry handwarmer merely a decorative symbol of feminine passivity or does it conceal a meat cleaver, a pistol or a pugnacious pet, wonders Deborah Nicholls-Lee
5 min |
December 10, 2025 ( Double Issue )
Country Life UK
Dear Chancellor..
DEAR Rachel Reeves, I am writing to you because I think someone ought to explain how your Budgets affect the ordinary people trying to run the businesses upon which the nation depends. No one around you seems capable of telling you, in simple terms, what your two Budgets have done to the countryside, where nine million of your voters live.
2 min |
December 10, 2025 ( Double Issue )
Country Life UK
The spy who came in from the page
As a new exhibition in Oxford charts John le Carré's legacy, Emma Hughes takes a closer look at his most enduring creation, George Smiley
5 min |
December 10, 2025 ( Double Issue )
Country Life UK
New Government plan gives Nature top billing
Plans to improve the environment include peat restoration and methane reduction
1 min |
December 10, 2025 ( Double Issue )
Country Life UK
Churches urgently need a plan of action
THE celebrations of the season may cause memories of the chaos surrounding the Chancellor's recent Budget to fade, but we will still have to live with its consequences.
2 min |
December 10, 2025 ( Double Issue )
Country Life UK
Far from the madding crowd
As a lifelong Londoner, Will Hosie shares his tips on how to beat the throngs and make the most of the city this Christmas
4 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
The sound of silence
Between a Constable resonating with Nature and a Castiglione blaring with turbulence, a picture by Algernon Newton captured the quietude of absolute stillness
4 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
The legacy George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four
In 1936, Orwell set off for Lancashire on a mission to document unemployment and poverty, talking to families who had suffered humiliating 'means tests' and going down a mine.
2 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
Off her own bat
Painting a local cricket match, Sherree Valentine-Daines received an invitation that changed her career and led her to become artist-in-residence at Goodwood
5 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
Let sleeping dogs lie
A furry hot-water bottle? Or a restless snoring pest? Sharing a bed with a dog isn't ideal for everyone, but it certainly warms the soul, says Bethany Stone
5 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
A matter of faith
Andrew Graham-Dixon tells Carla Passino why he thinks we have read Vermeer wrong all along- and who the Girl with a Pearl Earring really is
5 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
Kale and hearty
Of the many small consolations of winter, the sight of a tall, elegant, frost-painted perennial kale catching the early light and the flavour of the shredded leaves pushed around a pan with olive oil, chilli and garlic are hard to beat.
3 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
Still caring for the fields and the beasts
Life at the Royal Agricultural University in Cirencester is as jolly as ever after 180 years, but the diverse degrees on offer reflect the challenges of 21st-century farming. Kate Green charts a history of seismic change for the industry and Mary Skipwith talks to students past and present
8 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
London Life
Your indispensable guide to the capital
1 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
She's the one
PROBABLY no professional gundog trainer would want to admit it, but, when it comes to working breeds, I tend to think you either get lucky or you don't. Sure, there are middling dogs and, sure, they can be made better, but the countryside is full of totally useless labradors and spaniels; equally, there are some superb workers who have seemingly had all the right ingredients since puppyhood.
2 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
Season's tweetings
Jolly frock-coated robins, majestic geese and arboreal partridges make for both literal and symbolic centrepieces at Christmas, says Matthew Dennison, as he revels in the cultural history of the season's feathered fowl and game
6 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
Stuff & nonsense
LISTEN to the media (not me, mind) and you'd be forgiven for thinking that young people are a bunch of mopes, who refuse to drink, go dancing or have sex and are ruining British nightlife for all. Rejoice, then, for the tide is turning. A recent book by Norwegian sociologist Willy Pedersen argues that binge drinking in one's youth can improve career prospects. People have taken note: The Hart in Marylebone, W1, is rammed every night.
3 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
Hidden gems of North Yorkshire
Comfortable seclusion is on offer at three historic houses, each beautifully presented and set in glorious landscapes worthy of God's own county
4 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
Let there be light
Johannes Vermeer brightened his native Delft with luminous pictures of women caught in intimate moments, but the serenity of his work, of which he produced remarkably little, is at odds with a life mired in debt, as Carla Passino discovers
7 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
Are you going soft?
Cushions, rugs, upholstered stools and sofa blankets are the ingredients in a pleasing new trend.
2 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
My favourite painting Giorgio Locatelli
The Dream by Henri Rousseau
2 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
Margaret Beaufort: Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker
IN Henry VII's stupendous Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey lies the tomb of his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509), Countess of Richmond and Derby. Her magnificent gilt-bronze effigy is by Pietro Torrigiano. Modelled on a death mask, her face is full of realism, inviting us to engage, eye-to-eye, with one of the most famous women of the English Middle Ages. Although acknowledging the lifelike features of the effigy, Lauren Johnson also points to its inevitably static nature, failing to reveal Margaret's lifelong dynamism or her abiding 'sense of responsibility and duty'. These, however, are very much the qualities at the heart of what is an absorbing new biography.
2 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
Listen to the art
IN 2010, the Bate Collection of Historical Musical Instruments in Oxford commissioned craftsmen to make working replicas of the instruments being played by devils in the depiction of Hell in Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, painted in 1490–1500. When played, they sounded horrible. The collection's scholars were taken aback, but, as Huon Mallalieu observes in this ear-opening account of the relationship between painting and sound, they should not have been surprised. Medieval viewers would have had no difficulty in hearing in their imagination the instruments portrayed by Bosch and they understood that the music in Hell would be another form of torture.
2 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
A fate worse than demolition?
This year is the centenary of the enlargement of the Bank of England initiated by Sir Herbert Baker. Clive Aslet asks whether the project deserves its reputation as an unforgivable act of architectural desecration
8 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
The sound of silence
Between a Constable resonating with Nature and a Castiglione blaring with turbulence, a picture by Algernon Newton captured the quietude of absolute stillness
4 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
That's my boy-bishop
Held in high esteem and lavished with furs, velvet and precious stones, young male choristers-turned-bishops were all the rage at Christmas in the Middle Ages, says Matthew Dennison
5 min |
December 03, 2025
Country Life UK
Bringing lost London to life
A NEW book, Panoramas of Lost London: Work, Wealth, Poverty and Change 1870–1945, brings to life Britain's capital city through more than 300 atmospheric black-and-white photographs taken largely from the collection of the former Greater London Council Historic Buildings Division.
1 min |