Rosemary Hill

Certain changes came to every kind of country house. Stables gave way to garages and as flying became fashionable some acquired landing strips. The ‘between-wars cult of the tub’ saw bathrooms inserted wherever possible and in due course electricity, which was not without risk. At Hatfield there were alarming blue sparks and at Woburn some guests groped about in the dark, having no idea how it worked. The Duke of Bedford had enamelled notices saying ‘Electric Light’ placed over the switches.

Early​ this month Sotheby’s held a champagne-and-canape viewing for the sale of possessions of the late ‘Debo’, Duchess of Devonshire. The lots were arranged to suggest room sets, with tables laid, sofas positioned by rugs and blown-up photographic backdrops, one showing the dining room of the dower house where the duchess spent her last years. Another by Norman Parkinson...

Sculpture​ conventionally does one of two things; it either creates space by carving, or creates volume by modelling. Once the material has been cut back or built up, a statue, as the word implies, is static in its relationship to space. Moving sculpture occupies space in a variable way and it has its own history, from devotional objects in the late Middle Ages fitted with clockwork to make...

Arriving​ at his prep school in the bleak winter of 1918 the ten-year-old Osbert Lancaster was made even more miserable than the average new bug by the fact that St Ronan’s, Worthing was a spectacularly sporty school. The headmaster, Stanley Harris, had captained England at football and was also a distinguished cricketer and rugby player. Lancaster, an only child who had lost his...

It is​ a curious fact of history, which my research on antiquarianism has brought home to me, that if something is believed in or wanted for long enough, it will eventually materialise. From John Aubrey’s passing remark in 1665 that Stonehenge might have been built by druids, through William Stukeley’s obsessively detailed and almost entirely invented account of the druidic...