The culture shapers: barbie’s world

Today’s queues may be digital, but the fight to secure that must-have present and avoid small, disappointed faces is timeless. Tom Howells looks at the toys topping recent (and less recent) Christmas wish lists

The platinum blonde in British history

Let’s take a nostalgia trip back 30 years to discover how the most-wanted toys of the festive season season worked

When did you first hear about Adel Rootstein? When she turned up at the front door of my little design studio near Paddington Station in London in 1969, following my first fashion collection. She’d tr

From ‘a little town with a lot of hard knocks,’ as Dolly put it, came the biggest-selling female country singer the world had ever seen

Instructions for Santa’s elves in 2025: we want small plush toys with round fluffy bodies, gruesome grins and spiky teeth, rabbit ears, large wholesome eyes and keychains to hang on our bags. We want