Entertainment
Country Life UK
Breaking the doom loop
FARMERS are famously pessimistic people, but a Farmers Weekly survey reveals that the familiar litany of fears—weather, market volatility, disease and zealous bureaucracy—have been superseded by nervously waiting to see what the Government will impose on them next.
2 min |
January 14, 2026
Country Life UK
The legacy H. M. Bateman and the 'Man who...' cartoons
IN 1908, at the age of 21, Henry Mayo Bateman suffered a nervous breakdown and, in his own words, 'went mad on paper', sketching a pair of wrestlers 'without bothering a scrap about the correctness of how it was done'.
1 min |
January 14, 2026
Country Life UK
Oxfordshire: Frank Cooper's Oxford Marmalade
UNCLE MATTHEW, the volcanic patriarch in Nancy Mitford's chronicles of the Radlett family, is a man of rigid tastes: he has, for instance, only read one book in his life, Jack London's White Fang, which he pronounces 'so frightfully good I've never bothered to read another'.
1 min |
January 14, 2026
Country Life UK
Rural voices must be heard
THERE is a cack-handed operation under way designed to reorganise local government and, as a result, many local elections may be postponed.
2 min |
January 14, 2026
Country Life UK
Grow something new this year
I KNOW it's still cold and the ground may be hard as a hammer, but the days are getting longer and, when the clouds part, there's just a sense that spring might not be many weeks away.
3 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
Secrets of the fields
I RECENTLY got chatting to a Suffolk gamekeeper who spent his working years on some of the last great wild-partridge manors. Shooting has evolved greatly in only a few decades. There are gamekeepers, now in their sixties, who remember being given a bicycle when they started. They would pedal around their beat checking for grey-partridge nests before cycling on to check their trap lines for stoats and weasels. Some of those keepers now have night-vision scopes for shooting foxes and drones for counting deer.
2 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
Tate-à-tête
The National Gallery's announcement of a new wing and more modern art-enabled by an unprecedented $375 million fund-promises to reignite a historic rivalry with Tate.
7 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
Shining a light on the past
Safely stored in a dark vault in London, the dried specimens of Carl Linnaeus's 18th-century herbarium—the basis for the worldwide system of plant naming still in use today—have been revealed in their true colours.
5 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
All hands on decor
Ushering in the New Year are the Decorative Fair, brimming with good-quality antiques, and the London Art Fair, with its tradition of tipping artists in the early stages of their career
4 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
London Life - Your indispensable guide to the capital
Water, water, everywhere
1 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
Winter's tales
The 1962 freeze, spies, murder and golf-here are four novels to absorb as we wait for the days to lengthen
3 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
England expects
IN a bid to keep a national treasure in UK ownership, a temporary export bar has been placed on a Union Jack that flew from Royal Sovereign, the 100-gun flagship of Vice-Admiral Collingwood that became the first valiant vessel to engage the enemy during the Battle of Trafalgar.
1 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
Playing your cards right
Packs of cards are ubiquitous, from the drawing room to the camp fire and the pub snug, but how did they end up here? Where do the suits we know and love actually come from? Matthew Dennison shuffles the deck
4 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
On top of the world
Pamela Goodman journeys to Shakti Prana, a remote lodge with peerless views of sacred mountains in the Himalayas, only accessible on foot
6 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
A year of centenaries, celebrations and commemorations
A CONSTANT in a world of extraordinary change, Elizabeth II was born Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor on April 21, 1926, at No 17, Bruton Street, London.
3 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
Ministers set out ambitious animal-welfare agenda
THE Government's Animal Welfare Strategy, launched just before Christmas, contains ambitious and wide-ranging proposals that aim to put the onus on responsible, informed ownership through a bill that encompasses a mix of tighter legislation and outright bans.
1 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
Holy mackerel!
Spry, shimmering and occasionally even sanctified, the indefatigable mackerel is the wanderer of the sea-and one of history's most fabled fish
3 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
How to survive January
BRIDGET JONES once declared, with typical chutzpah, that New Year resolutions should begin on January 2.
3 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
Seize the moment
A GROMENES'S New Year's resolution is to help this country relearn the language of priorities. It was the Government that set him off.
2 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
What the Normans did for us
Architectural statements: the conquering Normans sent out a monumental message in the form of buildings such as Durham Cathedral
2 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
The legacy Agatha Christie and the murder mystery
TO tell the truth, I was considerably upset and worried.
1 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
Property of the week Arundel Gardens, W11
MUCH has been written recently about 'the new Chelsea'. Some have put the area's newfound chutzpah down to Martino's, a recently opened restaurant from the team behind The Dover that has induced a westbound migration among London's see-and-be-seen foodies. Others have explained it via the pendulum effect: now Hackney house prices are about the same as Earl's Court's, young people have decided that, actually, the Royal Borough ain't so bad. The true reason, I think, boils down to downsizing: longtime residents of the area have decided they don't wish to pay mansion tax and are better off converting their houses into flats to sell to plucky youngsters for less than £2 million. This is, ironically, a good thing: it means that supply in central London can finally catch up with demand and that young people are flocking back to areas they'd previously deserted in order to rent before they buy—a test drive, of sorts.
1 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
Fighting cats
THE Earl of Leicester stands beside the fireplace of the Long Library at Holkham, a 1730s interior designed as part of the family wing of this great house by William Kent.
1 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
A peculiar genius
This year is the centenary of one of the most celebrated holiday villages in the British Isles. Kathryn Ferry tells the remarkable story of this Picturesque creation
7 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
Wassail!
LAST year's apple crop pipped all the records: boughs groaned under the weight of ripe fruit and growers declared it the best season for decades.
5 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
Charlotte Mullins comments on Portrait of a Young Man
THIS captivating portrait depicts a young man holding an open book.
1 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
Veterans to restore river
IN the early days of owning Greenway House, Agatha Christie would have appreciated the crystal-clear and unpolluted River Dart that flowed close by.
1 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
Moveable feasts
Freestanding kitchens offer a world of possibilities- including the chance to take them with you
1 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
A living legacy
Swaine is celebrating a remarkable 275 years of dedication to traditional craftsmanship that ensures it is an enduring beacon of British excellence
3 min |
January 07, 2026
Country Life UK
Beyond beauty
WELSH artist Gwen John (1876-1939) was little recognised in her lifetime, except in COUNTRY LIFE, where she was described as 'a sort of a modern Vermeer' who had a 'Whistlerian touch about her early paintings' (June 19, 1926).
1 min |