For artist Nellie Shepherd, the landscape outside her painstakingly renovated farmhouse is just as important as the colourful scene inside it

Francesca Tancini Walter Crane Books in colour 856pp (two volumes). Yale University Press. £250 (US $325). “Nothing is dearer to the heart of a commercial age than a label”, Walter Crane declared towa

Renowned for illustrating the ‘Famous Five’ series, the mercurial, motorcar-obsessed Eileen Soper lived a bucolic and eccentric life, discovers Ian Morton

Lydia Macpherson and Nick MacKinnon, both poets, have turned a property on the wild Yorkshire Moors into a magical home

Exaggerating her beetling monobrow and wispy dark moustache in self-portraits, the artist Frida Kahlo was a female force to be reckoned with, unafraid to pour her heart onto the canvas. Only last autu

Alice Loxton EleanorA 200-mile walk in search of England’slost queen352pp. Pan Macmillan. £22. Many are commemorated in stone, but few so grandly as Eleanor of Castile (d. 1290). Following her unexpec