Country Life March 15 2017 is our brilliant smaller country houses number, featuring Mary Berry on Agas, the art of ceramics and how to get rid of your children. Find out more here:
ARCHITECTURE: Roger White visits Rashleigh Barton in Devon to examine its lavish ornamental plasterwork
GARDENS: Yellow-flowered magnolias have long attracted the plant connoisseur, but these alluring trees deserve more widespread planting, argues Mark Griffiths
INTERVIEW: Michael Hockney, the founder of the Lord Mayor’s Big Curry Lunch, talks to Michael Murray-Fennell
AGAS: For 95 years, it’s been so much more than a cooker. Julie Harding lifts the hot plate on the heart-warming kitchen feature no country house should be without
WILDLIFE: David Profumo admires the wood ant’s strictly ordered world and its ability to shoot formic acid to defend itself
HOW TO DE-FEATHER YOUR NEST: Do you despair of your adult children, still squatting in their childhood rooms? Kit Hesketh-Harvey shares his wisdom on dealing with the boomerang generation
MOTORING: The latest Subaru Forester may be the best 4WD for ‘real country life’, says Charles Rangeley-Wilson
CERAMICS: Catherine Milner investigates the revival of enthusiasm for working with clay and discovers a new aesthetic that has transformed pottery into fine art
INTERIORS: Peter Gomez tells us what inspires Zoffany, we choose the best new fabrics and wallpapers and Giles Kime discovers what’s chic for chalets
COOKING: Melanie Johnson adds some zing with this season’s new spring onions
PROPERTY: Size doesn’t matter when it comes to charm for Penny Churchill and Eleanor Doughty finds out why we all pray for a parsonage
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50 years ago, the English country house seemed headed for extinction. Instead it was the start of a new golden ageRather than perceiving the mid 20th century as a troubled period in the history of the country house, John Martin Robinson argues that it was perhaps one of the most interesting, unexpected and enterprising. All photography from the Country Life Image Archive, by June Buck, Paul Barker, Val Corbett, Will Pryce and Paul Highnam.
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'Meat, ale and guns — what else do you need, bar glorious scenery?': William Sitwell on the Brendon Hills, West SomersetWilliam Sitwell chooses the Brendon Hills as his piece of heaven in Britain.
