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Bridging the gap between utility and elegance, these home office designs are a lesson in working smarter, not harder

With a strength of character that belied her fragile looks, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun pushed the boundaries of royal portraiture and, after the French Revolution, challenged the loss of female influence via every frill and fold in her work

Marie Antoinette’s passion for furniture and genius for bagatelles, however evanescent their purpose, filled the French royal palaces with beauty and charm, as Matthew Dennison reveals

Arundel Castle, West Sussex

When COUNTRY LIFE’s Henry Avray Tipping spotted a 17th-century four poster languishing in a Herefordshire attic in 1911, he set off a chain of events that saw the bed leave its ancestral home and land at The Met in New York

Samuel Pepys’s self-incriminating diaries