Service & sacrifice

Our charity shop goes upmarket

The grand, sweeping staircases of old country houses are loaded with centuries of architectural, romantic and ghostly allure, reveals Melanie Cable-Alexander

Without the generosity of one remarkable man, Sir James Roberts, the Brontë Parsonage Museum might never have come to be. Roberts’ own rags-to-riches story sounds like something from a book. He was bo

From George Stubbs’s golden vision of the labourer’s place in society to Ford Madox Brown’s heroically monumental celebration of manual labour, artists gave individual interpretations of work, as Michael Hall reveals

Joan Carter’s most memorable war stories centred on her time working in the NAAFI canteens. Her favourite involved her supervisor, who had taken a serious dislike to her, ordering her to shine the flo

The age of noblesse oblige may have passed, but the aristocracy continues to play an important role in shaping and preserving life in the countryside, says Eleanor Doughty