Indholdsfortegnelse for October 1, 2025 i Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk AS long as autumn lasts, I shall not have hands, canvas and colours enough to paint the beautiful things I see,’ wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother, Theo, on September 26, 1888. That year, he filled his canvases with bursts of gold and orange streaked with green, standing against crisp blue skies festooned with passing clouds. As the last hooray of Nature before the end of the year, a time of browning fields and flaming leaves, fat rosehips and juicy berries, autumn has never failed to inspire artists. John Constable sang of the browning foliage and leaden skies of his beloved East Bergholt in Suffolk, Claude Monet of the resplendent reflection of the trees on…

Paperback glitz THE world’s largest literary festival is held, unsurprisingly, in India. Every January, Jaipur welcomes the great and the good to the Rajasthani capital for conversations between Nobel laureates and Pulitzer winners. Yet it is Britain that remains synonymous with the lit fest; there are so many, in fact, that you could feasibly attend one nearly every three days. Cheltenham, which will celebrate its 76th edition from October 10–19, remains the proud original: a blueprint for the likes of Oxford, Cliveden and Hay, which Bill Clinton once called ‘the Woodstock of the mind’. A lit fest is a smart affair, in every sense. In his memoir Experience, the late Martin Amis recounts an episode in which his son, Louis, asked him: ‘What class are we?’ ‘We’re outside all that,’…

West Wycombe Park, Buckinghamshire, part IThe seat of Sir Edward Dashwood, Bt,and a property of the National Trust ENTRENCHED assumptions can die hard. This is certainly the case with regard to the reputation of Sir Francis Dashwood, 2nd Baronet (later 11th Baron le Despencer), the politician and connoisseur who developed the house, garden and wider estate at West Wycombe across some 50 years in the 18th century. Dashwood has been set down to posterity as a libertine, a convenor of orgies and even of satanic rites, as a leading member of the Hellfire Club of London-based rakes. It was said that the boisterous baronet rented Medmenham Abbey on the River Thames as a venue for such activities and that the caves he had excavated inside Wycombe Hill doubled up as…

WHEN the late Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild, was nine, his grandmother Mary Hutchinson, a cousin of Lytton Strachey, gave him a painting of a hummingbird by the French artist Simon Bussy. The artist was a friend of Henri Matisse; he had, in 1903, come to England and married Dorothy Strachey, a cousin of Lord Rothschild. That first painting ignited in the late Lord Rothschild the collecting bug. By the time we met in 2023 at Eythrope—his house near Waddesdon Manor, in Buckinghamshire, completed in 1883 by the ‘maniacal collector’ Ferdinand de Rothschild—he had 60 works by Bussy. ‘I have been captured like a magpie, as a collector,’ Lord Rothschild told me at the time. ‘I am half Bloomsbury and half Rothschild and it has always been all around me…

I PLANTED my first quince (Cydonia oblonga) a quarter of a century ago and I wouldn’t be without a tree nearby. There is only a handful of fruit trees I’d grow for their non-edible charms and quince is one. As with medlars, quince grow in a nicely irregular, lightly twisting manner, full of character and individuality. Their blossom comes in spring, usually soon after the last frost; at first, they appear as tall, soft pink-white spirals, before opening out into loose dog rose-alikes. They have a light Chanel-crossed-with-daffodils fragrance that reaches the nose best when the wind and the sniffer are still and the sun is warm; you can plunge your face into the flowers and smell next to nothing, yet be enveloped in a cloud of scent as you…

The Story of Tudor Art: A History of Tudor England Through its Art and Objects Christina J. Faraday (Head of Zeus, £40) THERE is a temptation to assume that the people of past ages were just like us. In certain profound human traits—love, lust, ambition, friendship—that is undoubtedly true. Yet although our Tudor forebears, like us, wanted to surround themselves with beautiful objects, what those objects meant to them is not always what we might expect. In her revealing and beautifully illustrated book about the material culture of Tudor England, the art and architectural historian Christina Faraday shows exactly how differently our ancestors saw things. For example, the most desirable and expensive works of art then were not paintings, but tapestries, and the portraits of Hans Holbein and Nicholas Hilliard…

Ramblers target miles of stiles THE stile, which most of us probably consider to be a charming feature of the national landscape—only a fortnight ago, COUNTRY LIFE writer Harry Pearson described it as ‘a place for pause and reflection, for conversation, perhaps even romance’ (‘Stile and substance’, September 17, inset; Letters, page 46)—may be under threat. Now, the charity The Ramblers has mounted a campaign that takes aim at this very British curiosity because stiles may present an obstacle for the less able bodied. In a YouGov survey on behalf of The Ramblers, 25% responded that such barriers prevented them from using paths; this rose to 56% of those with physical and sensory disabilities. In a cute, but weaselly headline, The Ramblers claims there is ‘A stile every mile’ across…

Natural beauty I WAS so pleased to see your photograph of the cleverly convertible Vever chrysanthemum ornament (right, ‘Brooching the subject’, September 17): without it, the piece would have been hard to imagine. Both versatile and, as you said, ‘radical’, perhaps it was in Miss Jean Brodie’s mind when she declared, in the 1969 film: ‘Ah, chrysanthemums. Such serviceable flowers.’ Caroline Weston, by email Journeys’ ends WHAT a beautifully restored Austin Healey (‘Four wheels and the best of both worlds’, September 10). My experiences of the ownership of sports cars from those days have not been so joyous. A Morgan, with a wooden battery box caught fire in Knightsbridge, covering the green-and-gold uniformed Harrods commissionaire in thick oily smoke. At the same spot five years later, my TR6 stopped the…

SO long as man shall continue to navigate the ocean, and the tempests shall hold their course over its surface… disasters by sea, shipwrecks, and peril to human life, must inevitably take place… the duty becomes imperative, that we should use every means to obviate and to mitigate the deplorable consequences,’ wrote Sir William Hillary (1771–1847) in an appeal to the nation in 1823. On his return from the Napoleonic Wars, Hillary settled at Forte Anne on the Isle of Man. Here, he witnessed countless shipwrecks on an unforgiving coastline. When HMS Vigilant foundered on St Mary’s Rock in 1822, followed by the 18-gun brig-sloop HMS Race-horse, which was wrecked going to her aid, Hillary, despite not being able to swim, urged others to help him row out to rescue…

JACKSON BOXER served his first meal at Brunswick House, London SW8, in 2010. Back then, his kitchen was still a pop-up and the building better known as a giant antiques market. Today, it is arguably south London’s best-loved restaurant and, as of August 26, something of a satellite location for COUNTRY LIFE. The full story dates back to June, when several members of the team got together to discuss the fact that British beef was having what’s known as ‘a moment’. The advent of nose-to-tail cooking, first popularised in this country by Fergus Henderson in the mid 1990s and now mimicked everywhere, has dispelled the idea of red meat as a wasteful, cruel or environmentally negligent choice. Pescatarianism—the practice of eating fish, but not meat—has been on the decline, particularly…

FOR 12 years, it has been impossible to get a reservation at Carbone. That is, unless you know the chef, the maître d’ or the person on the door who turns away the blaggers. The famed New York restaurant, which serves linguini vongole and spaghetti puttanesca under the heading ‘macaroni’, has welcomed Leonardo DiCaprio and Barack Obama and has outposts in Miami and Hong Kong. It is now the toast of London, where it opened two weeks ago at No 30, Grosvenor Square, W1, instantly cementing itself as one of the most talked-about restaurants in the city. The menu of Italian-American classics is almost irrelevant. People queue for the vibe. Within the same block as the restaurant is the Chancery Rosewood, the latest addition to London’s luxury hotel scene in…

FOR decades, you would hear fondly whispered rumours in Los Angeles, US, that John Wayne kept a pet cow on his penthouse balcony at the Sunset Tower Hotel so his guests could always get fresh milk. Despite being fairly easily debunked (the lifts, sorry, elevators would have struggled with anything more than a couple of large dogs), the story endured because it spoke to a certain sort of golden-age glamour where pets—and a somewhat cavalier attitude to their care—were all part of an A-lister’s luxury lifestyle. It was a time when actress Beatrice Lillie would pop into Harrods to find a gift for Noël Coward and leave with an alligator or when Salvador Dalí would be photographed walking an anteater or cradling an ocelot. In California, Tippi Hedren filled her…

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Quiz of the week 1) Camembert is produced in which region of France? 2) Which King of England died on January 5, 1066, leaving no direct heir? 3) Name the British film director responsible for Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator 4) Where will the 2028 Summer Olympics be held? 5) Ocean liners Lusitania and Aquitania were built upon the banks of which river? 1) Normandy 2) Edward the Confessor 3) Ridley Scott 4) Los Angeles, US 5) The Clyde, West Dunbartonshire. Riddle me this: Canopy Riddle me this I’m a roof of leaves, a forest shield; a layered crown in autumn’s field. What am I? Time to buy On this day… October 1, 1906 American Lt Frank P. Lahm becomes the winner of the inaugural Gordon Bennett Cup when he…

THE trouble with the transition to clean energy, clean air and a greener future is that it starts here in the UK, where we have dirty energy, filthy air and losses of biodiversity. Yet there is a feeling of safety in what we know and that safety brings assumptions. We assume that it can go on like it is without much trouble, whereas change is always a challenge. We ask, will it work? What will it cost? By contrast, we rarely ask of the world we know, does it work and what will it cost to go on in the same way? It costs to move to clean electricity and clean air, but it will cost a lot more if we stay with oil, gas and dirty air. That, however,…

A Romantic revival I AIN HILL-TREVOR, brother of 5th Baron Trevor and the present custodian of Brynkinalt, displays one in a series of unsigned architectural drawings relating to the remodelling of the house in the early 19th century. These are professionally drawn, but, remarkably, a prominent plaque on the exterior of the building explicitly ascribes the designs to a woman. It reads: ‘The north and west fronts with the hall and staircase were erected A.D.1808 from the sole design of Charlotte, Viscountess Dungannon, whose genius planned and whose taste embellished the surrounding grounds and park.’ It continues in Latin, after Sir Christopher Wren’s famous epitaph in St Paul’s Cathedral in London: ‘If you seek his monument look around you.’ Brynkinalt has passed by inheritance through the line of Tudur Trefor…

BUY what you love. It’s the most time-tested piece of collecting advice and the history of art is full of spectacular examples of how well it can work—not least when Puerto Rican philanthropist Luis A. Ferré acquired Lord Leighton’s 1895 painting of a sleeping woman, Flaming June, from The Maas Gallery in 1963. The price was £2,000, the highest ever asked since the artist’s death. Ferré never balked. ‘I fell in love with her at first sight,’ he later wrote and shipped Flaming June to his newly founded Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico, where the work has been known as ‘the Mona Lisa of the Southern Hemisphere’ ever since. However, falling in love isn’t always so easy and staying in love is often even harder. As the current…

No complaints please, we’re British FRIEZE ART FAIR returns to London this month under the direction of Eva Langret, both contemporary and Masters shows exhibiting in Regent’s Park, NW1. Although the former has, in recent years, inspired more groans than gawps, it remains a welcome lift to the capital’s social scene at a time when many are already contemplating hibernation. One thing Frieze also prompts is a reckoning about London itself, its status as a global art capital and the current state of its museums. If you want to fit in at Frieze Masters, a good start would be to claim, loudly, that the city hasn’t had a five-star show since Lucian Freud’s at the National Gallery in 2022. A quick trip to Christie’s or Sotheby’s ahead of auction, however,…

BLUEBELL ARBORETUM started life on March 11, 1992, when Robert and Suzette Vernon bought six acres on the borders of Derbyshire and Leicestershire. They celebrated their purchase later that day by planting two seedlings of Sequoiadendron giganteum, 4in high at the time, but well over 50ft today. Both trees have flourished, perhaps surprisingly, in the wet clay soil and the arboretum now has more than 75 giant redwoods. The six acres are roughly split between the oldest part of the arboretum and the nursery that supports it, which uses its trees and shrubs as a source of propagating material. In 2004, the Vernons were able to buy another six acres to extend the arboretum and new plants are constantly added to the collection. Its great value—apart from the rare trees…

Access after hours One of the major perks of checking into Airelles Château de Versailles in France isn’t merely its location, inside the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, but the after-hours tour of the former royal residence available exclusively to guests. Anticipation is, therefore, at fever pitch for the brand’s ninth property, its first one outside France: Airelles Venezia, Italy (right), opening in spring 2026. It shares an island in the Venetian lagoon with the protected, 16th-century Santa Maria della Presentazione, the two bell towers, frescoed ceilings and marble statues of which are being restored. It is not on the same grand scale as Versailles, but a private tour promises guests a glimpse at a lesser-known slice of the floating city’s history (www.airelles.com). All aboard! The global superyacht charter…

THE sight of my semi-comatose teenage son draped like a rag doll over the back of a mule has left its scars. No surprise, perhaps, given this was a particularly reckless turn of events—one in a number of what I call ‘irresponsible mother’ moments of which I am not proud—that could have played out very differently. His affliction was altitude sickness. I have been thinking a good deal about altitude sickness, or acute mountain sickness (AMS) as it is more correctly known, over the past few weeks, in anticipation of a forthcoming trip to the Himalayas. How might I fare given a chequered medley of high-altitude experiences over the years? Following the obvious rules for AMS avoidance—the importance of allowing plenty of time to acclimatise, no speedy ascents above 2,500m…