Entertainment

Country Life UK
United colours of Rolls-Royce
The Ghost is the classic Rolls-Royce, but where does that leave it in a world dominated by electric vehicles and SUVs? Toby Keel gets behind the wheel of a Series II to find out
4 min |
March 19, 2025

Country Life UK
Where to find your own Howards End
Although Edwardian domestic architecture is often associated with London's garden suburbs, here are four country houses of the era, two of which are Thameside
5 min |
March 19, 2025

Country Life UK
Hare's to you
This fast-running herbivore, a stand-in for both witches and the Holy Trinity, has inspired centuries of artists, from medieval monks who made it into a dog-chasing predator to Barry Flanagan's monumental sculptures, as Michael Prodger reveals
6 min |
March 19, 2025

Country Life UK
A stitch in time
An intriguing variety of textiles, including an emerald silk damask woven with flowers, a 16th-century embroidered panel and a Ghanaian kente, star at the Cotswold Art & Antiques Dealers' Association Fair
4 min |
March 19, 2025

Country Life UK
The ground crew
To get up at first light and work in all weathers are the basic requirements of a head gardener, without whose extensive knowledge none of our great gardens would survive. Christopher Stocks meets the unsung heroes and heroines of horticulture
6 min |
March 19, 2025

Country Life UK
The designer's room
Orlando Atty has updated a historic Wiltshire home decorated by Robert Kime 40 years ago
1 min |
March 19, 2025

Country Life UK
It starts with a seed
Nothing gives as much pleasure in the garden as a plant that you have sown yourself. John Hoyland shows how
3 min |
March 19, 2025

Country Life UK
A uniform approach
You’re approaching retirement and no longer have to dress in your work wardrobe each day–so what do you wear? A uniform of your own design
3 min |
March 19, 2025

Country Life UK
Plants that make me smile
You could put my enduring love of pelargoniums down to a lack of imagination. They were, after all, the pot plants of which I was put in charge on my first day at work in the Yorkshire parks department nursery back in 1964.
3 min |
March 19, 2025

Country Life UK
A trip down memory lane
IN contemplating the imminent approach of a rather large and unwanted birthday, I keep reminding myself of the time when birthdays were exciting: those landmark moments of becoming a teenager or an adult, of being allowed to drive, to vote or to buy a drink in a pub.
1 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
The lord of masterly rock
Charles Dance, fresh from donning Michelangelo’s smock for the BBC, discusses the role, the value of mentoring and why the Sistine chapel is like playing King Lear
7 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
The good, the bad and the ugly
With a passion for arguing and a sharp tongue to match his extraordinary genius, Michelangelo was both the enfant prodige and the enfant 'terribile’ of the Renaissance, as Michael Hall reveals
7 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
Ha-ha, tricked you!
Giving the impression of an endless vista, with 18th-century-style grandeur and the ability to keep pesky livestock off the roses, a ha-ha is a hugely desirable feature in any landscape. Just don't fall off
2 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
Seafood, spinach and asparagus puff-pastry cloud
Cut one sheet of pastry into a 25cm–30cm (10in–12in) circle. Place it on a parchment- lined baking tray and prick all over with a fork. Cut the remaining sheets of pastry to the same size, then cut inner circles so you are left with rings of about 5cm (2½in) width and three circles.
1 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
Small, but mighty
To avoid the mass-market cruise-ship circuit means downsizing and going remote—which is exactly what these new small ships and off-the-beaten track itineraries have in common.
3 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
Sharp practice
Pruning roses in winter has become the norm, but why do we do it–and should we? Charles Quest-Ritson explains the reasoning underpinning this horticultural habit
3 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
Flour power
LONDON LIFE contributors and friends of the magazine reveal where to find the capital's best baked goods
4 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
Still rollin' along
John Niven cruises in the wake of Mark Twain up the great Mississippi river of the American South
5 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
The legacy Charles Cruft and Crufts
ACKNOWLEDGED as the ‘prince of showmen’ by the late-19th-century world of dog fanciers and, later, as ‘the Napoleon of dog shows’, Charles Cruft (1852–1938) had a phenomenal capacity for hard graft and, importantly, a mind for marketing—he understood consumer behaviour and he knew how to weaponise ‘the hype’.
1 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
A horse walks into a bar...
An elite group of equine heroes of the Cheltenham Festival are remembered in the form of thronging watering holes at the racecourse. Lest racegoers should forget where they are during celebrations (or when drowning sorrows), Jack Watkins provides a guide to the brilliant horses that have earned such immortality
6 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
Survival of the sexiest
Birds, Sex and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin's Strangest Idea Matt Ridley (Fourth Estate, £25)
3 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
How to make land work harder
The Government’s Land Use Framework should be viewed as an opportunity to be smarter with our land, but conflicts need to be resolved along the way
2 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
Yacht do you want?
Wave goodbye to your concerns about cruising aboard a small ship in the South of France, says Imogen West-Knights, who investigates what life is like on a boat designed to rival luxury yacht charter without the price tag
5 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
A regal renewal
Restoration House, Rochester, Kent The home of Robert Tucker and Jonathan Wilmot A house that received Charles II and inspired Charles Dickens has undergone a magnificent renewal over the past three decades, as John Goodall explains
8 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
Things are hotting up
ST VALENTINE, patron saint of chilli sowing is— I hope—overseeing my work this mid February. Early as it may be, I find this time of year the perfect gamble on light and heat levels, giving me a long season for chillis to mature. Any earlier and they might well fail; any later and the summer might run out of gas before my fruit ripen.
3 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
And it was all yellow
Forsythia are often sniffed at for being too brassy, but there is a lot more going for them, says Charles Quest-Ritson, although don't plant them next to clashing pink-flowering currants
4 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
If you go down to the woods today
In the High Weald, a Lutyens-inspired farmhouse and a state-of-the-art Huf Haus come to the market, together with a former royal hunting lodge that became a gunpowder factory in the New Forest
5 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
The year the stars came out
Boisterous, thriving and confident, Britain was a global heavyweight 250 years ago. Matthew Dennison explores the cultural luminaries who were born in 1775 and continue to shape our identity
6 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
Sweet escape
Beneath the papery bark of the birch tree lies a sugary resource, but be warned–it has a shelf life shorter than milk, says John Wright
3 min |
March 05, 2025

Country Life UK
In the mix
Neptune has added a collection of freestanding furniture to its range that offers a flexible new approach to kitchens
1 min |