Gabriel Stone celebrates the best children’s books, that can be read again and again, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to The Jungle Book. Meet the bane of fox, postman and unwanted visitor. When it comes to country-house security, guinea fowl are the new birds on the block, says Netia Walker.…
Penning Poison By Emily Cockayne Who among us wasn’t morbidly fascinated by the anonymous email sent the day before to all the guests attending George Osborne and Thea Rogers’ wedding? Some of us might even have gone to the trouble of finding the epistle online, and relished the allegations of…
The Philosophy of Cocktails By Jane Peyton There’s an ineffable quality to cocktails – probably because, as Jane Peyton neatly observes, ‘they are the liquid definition of the idiom “greater than the sum of its parts”’. I rarely drink them. Not because I don’t love them but really because they’re…
Giles & Mary: Country Life by Giles Wood and Mary Killen Giles Wood and Mary Killen are best known for their appearances on Gogglebox, which have gained them a dose of fame and an affectionate following. In real life, Wood is a rather good landscape painter and Killen an agony…
The Hampshire Hunt: 1749-2022 by Adrian Dangar Making a foray into unfamiliar hunt country is always diverting, especially when High Leicestershire is home. What better reason for broadening the horizons than The Field contributor Adrian Dangar’s new history of the Hampshire Hunt. This glossy, comprehensive volume full of diverting anecdotes…
Why We Garden by Claire Masset My immediate reaction to the title was to respond “but I don’t”. However, this is true only insofar as I outsource it because others are better at generating the horticultural joy I crave in the extremely restricted space that passes for a London garden.…
The Lighted Window by Peter Davidson The subtitle of this meditative, lyrical, affecting work is ‘Evening Walks Remembered’, and there is indeed a rambling quality to it – in the best sense. For what Peter Davidson is undertaking here is a cultural, philosophical and intellectual meander around the motif of…
Names of the Fish by Chris McCully Have you ever stopped to reflect on why a trout is thus called when it could have been saddled with something else entirely? A shoat? A ruff? Even if you haven’t, Chris McCully makes a powerful case here for his belief that “cultural…
Creating a library is one of life’s great journeys. Daniel Pembrey meets the companies that can not only help amass a great collection, but create beautiful country house libraries to store them, too. For more on country house interiors, carefully appointed lodges, clubs and interiors have become an extension of…
The best vinatge fly tying books are not tomes that need to be dragged down from dusty shelves. These books may have been published in 1800 but are free to download from Google Books. Michael Radencich has compiled his list of the best vintage fly tying books below. You can…
