Country Life

Published by Time Inc. (UK) Ltd Country Life, the quintessential English magazine, is undoubtedly one of the biggest and instantly recognisable brands in the UK today. It has a unique core mix of contemporary country-related editorial and top end property advertising. Editorially, the magazine comments in-depth on a wide variety of subjects, such as architecture, the arts, gardens and gardening, travel, the countryside, field-sports and wildlife. With renowned columnists and superb photography Country Life delivers the very best of British life every week.

Ms Sasha Compton • Sasha is an artist and designer who specialised in illustration at Central Saint Martins and now creates ceramics and decorative art. She has worked with brands such as Fabergé, Martin Brudnizki and Save Venice Charity. Sasha is married to Thomas Holliday and is the daughter of Richard and Lucinda Compton of North Yorkshire.

I heard it on the grapevine

Country Life

Town & Country

Town & Country Notebook

Letters to the Editor

All change

Athena • Cultural Crusader

My favourite painting Philippa Thorp

The devil is in the detail • It will be interesting to see how lavish manifesto promises pan out for agriculture

Salvaging the vine • In the first of two articles, John Goodall describes the initiative of a Bishop of Lincoln to establish a college in Oxford and the long struggle to bring it to fruition

The legacy • Thomas Twining and tea drinking

Oh, crumbs! Secrets of the sponge • Buttery, light and deceptively simple, sponge cake is the nation’s favourite teatime treat. Flora Watkins discovers how a vanilla-scented jammy sandwich came to reign supreme

The dog with the waggiest tail • Crufts has nothing on the village dog show, where politics, pride and local hierarchy hang in the balance, says Madeleine Silver

Rooting for the truth • With a knack for pilfering groceries and a penchant for Chardonnay, wild boar are widely considered a pest. However, these ‘ecosystem engineers’ fulfil an important ecological role in Britain, says Vicky Liddell

Earn your stripes • Blue-and-white stripes are eternally elegant, says Hetty Lintell, who selects lovely pieces for home and away

The experts’ experts • Leading names in design salute the people who transform their projects

A new lease of life • Extraordinary restorations have reinvigorated an ancient abbey once flooded with cats, a 16th-century manor and Florence Nightingale’s childhood home

Anyone for tennis? • Houses for working on your game

Ancient and modern • John Nash’s Picturesque vision has been given a clever contemporary renovation, writes George Plumptre

Name dropping

If you’re lookin’, you ain’t cookin’ • Sausages are all well and good (unless simultaneously raw and burnt to a crisp), but the primitive art of barbecuing over charcoal lends itself to far grander fare, says Tom Parker Bowles

In the dock • Renowned as a ‘land robber’, docks don’t have much going for them, other than alleviating nettle stings–but do they really work? John Wright heroically finds out

A thing of the past • She spends most of her working time among some of the world’s greatest paintings, but it’s a Biedermeier vitrine from 19th-century Vienna that Sotheby’s Europe chairman Helena Newman cherishes most, she tells Carla Passino

Word on the street • Duke Street, in London’s St James’s, started life as the address of the man that plotted against James II, but with a little help from some larger-than-life characters, royalty and The Beatles, it is now firmly established at the heart of British art, as Carla Passino discovers

A passage to India • A Madras-set portrait of Lt-Col William Sydenham and a view...