Bitten by the bug

John Hoyland never misses a chance to scour a second-hand bookshop for old gardening books, not only for advice, but for a glimpse into past gardening lives

Whether it is adding contemporary paintings to a gallery of Old Masters or branching out into territories as diverse as Modernist chairs, Iranian tiles or Churchill memorabilia, the passion for collecting seems to run in some families, as Eleanor Doughty discovers

When I was a child, we had a tortoise called Winnie who had belonged to my father when he was a boy in the 1950s. He called his pet Winston after Churchill, but this name had to be changed when he dis

They say you should never meet your heroes – or your heroines in this case. Well, they – whoever ‘they’ are – are wrong. At least in this case. In the flesh, Dame Joanna Lumley is everything you’d hop

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On a summer’s day earlier this year, Evan McPherson, senior valuer at Auctioneum, was carrying out a standard valuation at a house clearance in Bristol. Inside, he found the usual collection of furnit