Entertainment
Country Life UK
Charlotte Mullins comments on Portrait of George Frideric Handel
ACCORDING to the Bath Chronicle and Herald, the celebrated composer George Frideric Handel visited the spa town on three occasions: in 1730, 1749 and 1751. Although born in Germany, he spent much of his life in Britain, working at the courts of George I and II, as well as writing dozens of independent operas and oratorios.
1 min |
July 30, 2025
Country Life UK
Remains of the day
Buying a property that includes a ruin carries undoubted romance, but there are caveats, reminds Lucy Denton, who advises on the help at hand
3 min |
July 30, 2025
Country Life UK
The hare's breadth
HARES today, but hares gone tomorrow? Once again, there are calls for the introduction of a closed shooting season to save the brown hare from decline. Baroness Helic has introduced a private members’ bill and a petition on the same grounds is doing the rounds. The latter is organised by former political adviser Chloe Dalton, whose lock-down memoir Raising Hare, about her care for a leveret, has been a publishing success.
1 min |
July 30, 2025
Country Life UK
A new way of seeing
IT is a rare privilege for a gardening writer to have a new edition of a book published posthumously.
3 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
The hounds of love
Gentle, soulful and elegant, greyhounds inspire unending devotion among their many admirers-not least Dame Jilly Cooper and Twiggy-discovers Katy Birchall
6 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
Kitchen garden cook Sweetcorn
Sweetcorn and herb gratin with summer seafood and chilli
1 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
Eastern promise
These three East Anglian houses include a medieval moated manor once owned by the inspiration for Shakespeare's Falstaff, the home of a sculptor and a converted watermill
5 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
The legacy Denys Watkins-Pitchford (‘BB’) and rural writing
The wonder of the world The beauty and the power The shapes of things, Their colours, light and shades These I saw, Look ye also while life lasts.
1 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
Et in Arcadia, ego
A 68 year old should be well into enjoying the promised upswing in the happiness age curve. Numerous studies show the curve bottoms out in a person's forties and achieves euphoric heights in their seventies. I'm not feeling it, however. The current state of the world brings despair. Usually, literature is a trusty refuge. To escape into a good novel is to leave idle cares behind for a spell, but that has failed me.
2 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
One for the record books
Brown Jack not only won six consecutive times in Ascot’s Queen Alexandra Stakes, but was also the model for one of only two finished sculptures by Sir Alfred Munnings. A cast of it made top price at auction—as did a Canaletto at another sale
3 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
A tale of transformation
Sennowe Park, Norfolk, part 1 The home of Charles and Virginia Temple-Richards In the first of two articles, John Goodall looks at the creation of a Georgian lodge and its Edwardian transformation at the hands of a local architect into a luxurious home
7 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
One pine day
The pine marten may have a taste for jam sandwiches, but its razor-sharp claws and appetite for eggs and grey squirrels makes it a predatory force to be reckoned with
6 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
The delphinium that wouldn't die
WHEN a customer arrived at Graham and Nina Austin's Hertfordshire nursery 15 years ago bearing a cutting of a beautiful deepblue delphinium, they knew straight away that it was the rare and endangered Delphinium 'Alice Artindale'.
1 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
Let them eat venison
INITIATIVES are being established across the UK to get more venison, a ready source of lean, vitamin-rich meat, onto plates. Deer numbers—at about two million—are at their highest level for 1,000 years; landowners report losing more than a million pounds’ worth of crops a year to deer damage, plus they destroy woodland; up to 74,000 deer are involved annually in road-traffic accidents. The obvious solution is a culinary one, but there are challenges.
1 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
Let sleeping cows lie
THIS week, our cows are in Great Broad Oaks, the field closest to the house. Sadly, after weeks without rain, there is not the usual supply of lush grass, but, as we're not overstocked, we ought just to manage. It’s hard for them in the hot sunshine, despite the shade from overhanging trees. Oddly, cows don't always seem to congregate where there is shade, but range over the field with no discernible pattern, except, being cows, they tend to end up on the drive just when I want to get out.
2 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
Game on for hot topics
UNSURPRISINGLY, inheritance tax, the future of farming and other threats to the rural way of life will be issues for debate at this year's Game Fair, which takes place at Ragley Hall, Warwickshire, this weekend (July 25-27). Other topics under scrutiny in the Carter Jonas Theatre include how shoots can improve their conservation credentials and what to do about the increasing problems of moorland wildfires and river pollution.
1 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
A canary in the coal mine?
LAST week, there came the unhappy announcement of proposed redundancies at the National Trust.
2 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
And so to bed...
Forget the standard double: country-house sleeping arrangements have undergone all sorts of intriguing (and eyebrow-raising) shifts throughout history
5 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
All change for gun owners
SHOOTERS are feeling nervous as the Government prepares to consult on restricting shotgun ownership by aligning parts of firearms-licensing legislation.
1 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
My favourite painting John Gilhooly
The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio
1 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
‘Though she be but little, she is fierce’
Scourge of the bird feeder and a master of ‘shock and awe’ assassinations, the sparrowhawk pursues its quarry with such tenacity and unpredictability that it often blindsides its prey
3 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
Tales from the riverbank
These houses with fishing rights would make great catches for keen anglers, says Arabella Youens
2 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
A blank canvas
Grove Ley garden, Somerton, Somerset The home of Dr and Mrs Michael Horder With many viewpoints and changes of level, this was not an easy site on which to make a garden, but key to its success, writes Caroline Donald, has been enlarging the pond and creating long beds full of robust perennials and grasses
4 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
Love conquers all
AS rebellious acts go, commissioning a large silver sculpture of rutting stags society.
1 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
Water, water everywhere
Hokusai imagined a massive breaker about to crash on tiny fishing boats. Sandro Botticelli had his Venus float in her shell on a mere sea ripple. Large or small, soothing or frightening, waves have long captivated artists, finds Michael Prodger
5 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
Gettin' piggy with it
As he coaxes a galumphing porcine up to her summer abode on a bright July morning, John Lewis-Stempel considers whether it was an uphill struggle or simply a pig of a day
4 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
Sleeping at the Cathedral
ONE of the most exclusive addresses in Britain is now available to rent.
1 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
The sound of (almost) silence
Whooshing trees, clattering fish, fizzing reed piles: at the National Trust's Wicken Fen Nature Reserve, a new trail conceived by audio-visual sculptor Kathy Hinde gives voice to the life that hides under or around the surface of ponds and ditches
7 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
I do like to be beside the seaside
HAPPY are the seaside railway-terminus stations, for they signal the escape from the dusty inland city and the beginning of the summer fun. The names trip off the tongue: Eastbourne, Brighton, Skegness, Scarborough, Blackpool and Llandudno are among the best known of these resorts of human delight. Perhaps that description belongs in the past tense, however. In 2023, in her lugubriously affecting The Seaside: England's Love Affair, author Madeleine Bunting drew a picture of a relationship turned sour. Some of these places are now resorts of despair for the left behind.
2 min |
July 23, 2025
Country Life UK
Ayes on the ground
THERE once was a time when MPs fell over themselves to go to The Game Fair (held this weekend at Ragley Hall, Warwickshire) and other countryside events in order to burnish their rural credentials and impress potential voters. Similarly, the serious press attended to report what they had to say for the next morning's papers. Now, it seems that country dwellers need to go directly to Westminster to attract the attention of politicians and to explain the realities of life.
1 min |