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.

Hampshire on a high

Country Life

Across the universe

Town & Country Notebook

Letters to the Editor

Beware forever chemicals

Athena • Cultural Crusader

My favourite painting Jennifer Francis

Regency revival • An award-winning restoration project has revived this compact Regency house as a modern family home. John Martin Robinson reports

The legacy Bamber Gascoigne and University Challenge

Charmed, I’m sure • There can barely be a parish that doesn’t play host to a selection of our 12 British finches, notes Mark Cocker, as he admires their tuneful song and thick, stubby beaks, capable of crunching even the toughest nut

Squeeze the day • Lift the spirits with a bowl of rosy-red blood oranges or a crate of Sevilles, ready for the preserving pan, says Jane Wheatley

Hold on to your bonnets • Whether comic books and operas or granny knickers and counting orgasms, the legacy of Jane Austen, who would have been 250 this year, may have shocked the author, finds Annunciata Elwes

The big freeze • Keep toasty in the snow, says Hetty Lintell, with her pick of elegant gear for the mountains

The designer’s room • Luxury bathroom specialist Drummonds added scale and drama to the bathroom of a Grade II-listed manor house in Surrey

All that glisters • Gleaming, luxurious beauties for the bathroom, selected by Amelia Thorpe

All aboard! • More reliable than Greater Anglia or South Western Railway, there’s a cast of commuters bound for the capital that you can’t miss, says Madeleine Silver

Closer to home • With the ‘race for space’ running out of steam and many City companies requiring workers to be in the office at least four days a week, good family houses within easy commuting distance of the capital are likely to command a premium this year

Those old familiar faces • Former homes of persons of note, including rock royalty, writers and gin pioneers, are as covetable as ever

Coming up roses • The sight of row upon row of roses in bloom at Whartons nurseries in Norfolk is even more magnificent than the tulip fields of Holland. Charles Quest-Ritson looks behind the scenes at our largest rose producer

Cold comforts

Kitchen garden cook Curly kale

Quick on the draw • The skills of John Flaxman, ‘idol of all dilettanti’, brought the classics of literature to life, but also his fellow artists, as art dealer Tom Edwards tells Carla Passino

Dark of the sun • Samuel Palmer painted golden landscapes that seem pickled in honey, but his visionary work met with mockery and only found recognition long after his death, as Maev Kennedy discovers

Smash hits • The end of last year saw some great sales, as one of the few works by Botticelli still in private hands and a painting by brothers Gustav and Ernst Klimt obliterated their estimates

Onwards to Croydon! • A faithful staging of the much-loved Ballet Shoes is a triumph and Sir Simon Russell Beale is outstanding as a melancholy poet in an overdue Stoppard revival

The architect as religious teacher

Bridge and crossword

Who let the dogs out?

TOTTERING-BY-GENTLY