Alice Spawls

British Vogue was born in September 1916, when German U-boats prevented the Americans from transporting their edition to British shores. Condé Nast, who had bought the US version in 1909, wasn’t taking any risks by launching a British edition: American Vogue was the second most popular reading material in the trenches (after the Saturday Evening Post) and that was just the men. Its US editor, Edna Woolman Chase, claimed they liked the frills and furbelows: ‘a vastly different diet from mud and uniforms, boredom and death’.

When​ I walk up Bury Place on my way from Little Russell Street and the London Review office, I get the same view of the British Museum that Vilhelm Hammershøi recorded in 1906. Sometimes it’s hard to see what’s really there and not the painting. The row of buildings – now mostly hotels – that runs down Montague Street to the east of the museum is unchanged,...

Eric Ravilious’s watercolours are so cleverly executed and reproduce with such finish that you have to get up close to see how they are done. His later drawings (as he called them) do things that shouldn’t be possible – how could he know just how the brush would dry as he made the stroke, so that the fading colour gives a sense of distance, or how that never entirely smooth movement would produce a neat stippled effect to mimic the play of pale light on a field, a stony path, clouds?