IT is extraordinary to note that this year marks the centenary of Queen Elizabeth II’s birth. To celebrate, Buckingham Palace is to host a fascinating new exhibition showcasing our late Queen’s fashio

A new exhibition lifts the veil on Queen Elizabeth II’s lifelong campaign to project power and to protect the Royal Family through sartorial cyphers. Ahead of its opening, Justine Picardie decodes the military messaging of her wartime garb, and reveals the influence of the enigmatic spymaster who crafted some of her most meaningful attire

Conflict photography has been manipulated in a range of ways since the medium began, as Hilary Roberts reveals in her new book. She talks to David Clark

So Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in October 1876, charting the latest instalment of the Holbein cult. He was renting a room in Isleworth, west London, still hoping for a religious career

Self-portrait by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1896

Such was George III’s passion for astronomy that he had an observatory built to observe the transit of Venus. Although his interest remains unrivalled, scientific curiosity gripped the Royal Family for centuries, as Matthew Dennison reveals