Sans merci

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

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

Dua Lipa wears Givenchy by Sarah Burton and ...

Music was the antidote to stuffy court life that Marie Antoinette craved. Henrietta Bredin explains how the doomed Dauphine reinvigorated the French opera scene

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

Arundel Castle, West Sussex