What a Dame!

The late Vera Lynn – Oldie of the Year in 2018 and a great friend to the magazine – wrote her last piece for us in May, aged 103

Profitable Wonders: Batting for bats

Besides elegantly wielding his bat at the crease, former England Captain David Gower is a long-standing admirer of the other, flying version.

Christopher Robin did adore his bear

He told me he loved Winnie-the-Pooh – and his father, AA Milne

The strongest link

Lockdown reunited Anne Robinson and daughter Emma Wilson in her Cotswolds barn. It brought joy, chaos – and ‘home screaming’

London's finest egg-loos

Behind its Georgian, stucco façade, a Mayfair restaurant heralds a new dawn in British lavatorial design

The Mayflower's Essex boy

Four hundred years after the fabled ship sailed to America, William Cook salutes its captain

Raise a glass to the greatest TV chef ever

As Bill Knott reopens his restaurant, he remembers being slapped by Keith Floyd – a great pal, a disastrous restaurateur and a telly genius

Getting Dressed: Puttin' on the glitz, Dynasty style

Pamela Bellwood dazzled viewers in Claudia Carrington’s jewels

An odyssey round my treasured islands

As Greece opens to tourists, Taki Theodoracopulos sails home across the Ionian Sea

What's the point of the cactus?

‘It seemeth a strange herb,’ wrote the Spanish physician Nicolás Monardes in his Joyful News out of the New World (1568) of his first encounter with a cactus. ’One of its thorns pricked me. They are as sharp as needles and did hurt.’

Travel On top of the world

As a boy, Melvyn Bragg biked up and down the fells. At 30, he bought a cottage there. Now 80, he is still bewitched by the Lake District

Reaching for the stars – in their dressing rooms

For 20 years at the BBC, Jenny Bardwell sprinkled stardust over dull broadcasts. Now she’s found the old tapes – with their rich, lost voices

Hunter on the Heath

For 60 years, Hunter Davies, 84, has walked – and swum – on wild Hampstead Heath

Home, sweet Gothic home

Ever since moving into the Old Rectory at Hedgerley 40 years ago, I’ve kissed its walls every day

Their finest hour – in their finest planes

Eighty years ago, the Battle of Britain changed the course of history, thanks to the Hurricane and the Spitfire, says Leo McKinstry

The oldie easy riders

Country roads are crammed with OAP bikers, says Peter McKay, a ton-up boy for 60 years

Radio's King of Comedy

Martin Jarvis has now recorded 195 Just William stories and PG Wodehouse’s funniest books, he tells Valerie Grove

Peter Sellers, the mad magician

On the 40th anniversary of the actor’s death, his biographer Roger Lewis admires a sinister genius, who was quite off his head

Naked truth of modelling

Deni Bown became a life model as a broke single mother – and ended up loving it

The best of times...

The great novelist died 150 years ago, on 9th June 1870, aged 58. Four writers tell Simon Hemelryk their favourite Dickens moment

Las Vegas, Yorkshire

In the late Sixties, a miners’ club near Leeds hosted stars from Louis Armstrong to Eartha Kitt, discovers Reverend Steve Morris

The awkward art of acting English

Diffidence, restraint, over-politeness... Robert Bathurst, the modern master of playing Englishmen, salutes the craft of his heroes

She's a Lady!

I first became a Lady in 1961.

My Canterbury tale

850 years after Thomas à Becket’s murder, Ferdie Rous revisits his Kent school, the oldest in the world, and exorcises his bullies’ ghosts

Treasured island

Tamsin Calidas left London for a Hebridean crofter’s life. She found heartache, rejection by locals – and redemption through swimming

More eccentricity, vicar?- LUCINDA LAMBTON

The Rev Stephen Hawker designed his own Cornish vicarage, was friends with Tennyson – and liked dressing up as a mermaid

Hammer glamour girl recalls the horror!

When ailing Hammer Films needed a boost 50 years ago, budding actress Madeline Smith discovered nudity was a must

Farewell to the garden of a lifetime

Christian Lamb helped plan D-Day. Now, as she turns 100, she leaves a beloved garden

Eyes and the needle

After cancer surgery, Lucy Deedes thought she was tough as old boots – and then she faced the agony of a cataract op

The birds that weave magical nests

We had already spent an entrancing hour birding on Tanzania’s Lake Manze – imperious, white-chested fish eagles soaring overhead; glossy, blue, wire tailed swallows flitting over the water; stately yellow-billed storks patrolling the shore.