I visited Camp Beagle in Huntingdon, where beagles are bred and kept in tiny cages. They have no access to outdoor space and are subjected to cruel experiments. These outdated practices must end and be replaced by modern, reliable methods.

The Met Office weather station on our Monks Wood site recorded 35.7C yesterday, 26 June. It was >30C by 10 am, and the grass temperature reached 45.2C. Imagine being a vole, hare, skylark chick, lizard or ground beetle in that heat. A foot deep, the soil was 22C.

Royal Mail boss’s pay package triples to £6.9m. Cost of postage stamps rocketing RM hasn't hit delivery target for 1st-class post since 2017, 2nd-class mail since 2020. Ofcom continues to reduce targets. Bosses rewarded for fleecing people.

A forgotten name on a Penguin book cover led me to a cache of Burberry illustrations rescued from a skip, a Vogue profile of a "spy writer's wife" and a story of how easily women's creative lives can disappear. open.substack.com/pub/stillske... #illustration #womensart #midcentury

#RIP David Hockney. This glorious exhibition is currently running at the Serpentine’s North Gallery. It’s a beautiful, life-affirming show, the very highest of recommendations. #Art #ArtSky #DavidHockney

New on the blog today, I've written about some of my favourite COMING-OF-AGE NOVELS from the shelves. Featuring books by Rumer Godden, Jean Rhys, L. P. Hartley and more! #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/06/11/c...

One of the exquisite wood engravings by Agnes Miller Parker, the illustrator of Through the Woods by HE Bates, which is the subject of this week's post. open.substack.com/pub/stillske...

This week's post explores the perfect marriage between writer and illustrator: HE Bates and the wood engraver Agnes Miller Parker, and how some books follow us through life. open.substack.com/pub/stillske...

For the past few weeks, my garden has been my refuge. This post began as a search for paintings of women in gardens which led me to Roger Fry, Jean Cooke and The Secret Garden. It became a reflection on how gardens can become places of refuge in difficult times. open.substack.com/pub/stillske...

Some more pics from Tate Britain’s excellent WHISTLER exhibition. Haunting, hazy and ethereal all spring to mind… #Art #ArtSky

A completely new creative workshop in celebration of Mid-Summer. Join me on Saturday 27 June among the hops and orchards of Brenley Farm, Faversham to make embossed foil decorations. Make hanging decorations, garlands or cards. All materials, Cake & Cordial included haggytea.com/workshops

‘…These things never die out. You can pay and pay but you never get rid of it. You think you’ve buried it all in the past but there’s someone knows somewhere, there’s a record kept somewhere, nothing’s ever wiped out.’ #BookSky 💙📚 #CeliaDale jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/05/19/o...

The acclaimed illustrator, Krystyna Turska, won the Kate Greenaway prize in 1972, and yet only a few bare facts remain of her life. This post is about my search for her. open.substack.com/pub/stillske...

My take on The Tortoise and the Hare (1954) by Elizabeth Jenkins. Hoping that (having just finished Anita Brookner) Hermione Lee might write her biography next.

New on the blog today. I've written about INCIDENTS IN THE RUE LAUGIER by Anita Brookner. I loved this precise, psychologically astute novel in which a young woman's life is cruelly shaped by an ill-advised love affair at an impressionable age. #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/05/05/i...

A wonderfully insightful review from Alexandra Harris @theguardian.com. I loved Melissa Harrison's The Given World with all my heart. Still letting it percolate. It IS stunning & both deeply familiar & strange. One of those incredible books that reveals something about yourself, to you.

Tove Jansson in her studio,1956, Finnish artist and creator of the Moomin book series #womensart #RoomArtWeek

Growing up in a working-class family in Newcastle, David Olusoga experience devastating economic decline, and racism. Yet he "rejected his rejection", and has come to love his home region, as he explain in an essay in The Bee: thebeemagazine.com/david-olusog...

Aren't spiderlings marvellous?

25 soothing minutes from an estuary landscape in remote Essex with skylarks and dry reeds swaying in the breeze. Episode 116 - Sissing plantations in open country > radiolento.podbean.com/e/116-sissin... <

Three years ago I put up my swift box. Yesterday I saw a glimpse of a bird flying in - bluetits have taken residence! @katebradbury.bsky.social

This week I’ve written about the painter Morwenna Thistlethwaite, whose work I first encountered over thirty years ago and a small pencil drawing that brought me back to it. A piece about colour, observation and the paintings that stay with us. stillsketching.substack.com/p/the-one-th...

From the archive for Donald Henderson. #BornOnThisDay in 1905, thoughts on MR BOWLING BUYS A NEWSPAPER. A wickedly satirical portrayal of a murderer operating under the cloak of the London Blitz. Fans of Patrick Hamilton & Highsmith will likely enjoy this! jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2025/02/09/m...

Washington Hilton, where Trump will soon be arriving for the White House correspondents’ dinner. End the cover-up.

Taylor's last novel, published posthumously. Loved this. A novel about grief and guilt. Really nails some of the less spoken about parts of grief - how it can reshape your world in an instant, make normal rules vanish. How it can feel so intimate, that to be observed in it can feel almost shameful

Two for joy. This pair of magpies took up residence in the garden over winter and I used to watch them chatting to each other from my window. You can see how these were made, along with a few others, in this week’s post. open.substack.com/pub/stillske...

I’m really excited to be part of the next Wild Writers salon on all things walking. Link for tix here. Join us! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/wild-women...

THE SUN AND THE SHADOW (Rangel Vulchanov, 1962). This Bulgarian film looked luminous on the cinema screen today. Playful optimism mingles with Cold War anxiety in this beautiful dreamlike tale of fleeting love. A forerunner to BEFORE SUNRISE, perhaps, gorgeously shot in black & white. #FilmSky

My Winter Visitor fieldfare makes his debut in my latest Substack stillsketching.substack.com/p/painting-w...

This week’s post is a little different. Instead of looking outward to the women artists who have shaped my work, I’ve turned back to the studio table, to show how a new collection of collage monoprints came into being. stillsketching.substack.com/p/painting-w...

'Parrot tulip with butterfly and beetle' by Barbara Regina Dietzsch (1706-1783) Bavarian painter and engraver who sold her work throughout Europe #womensart

On the blog this week, I've written about THE HA-HA by Jennifer Dawson, a striking modernist novella for the #1961Club. Recommended for anyone who likes Barbara Loden's 1970 film WANDA, as I was reminded of it while reading this gem of a book. #FilmSky jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/04/12/t...

'But Lucy’s heart was unoccupied, since the sorrowful ghost of Patrick had ceased to haunt it. Friends lodged there and enjoyed its generous hospitality, but no one called it home.' #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/04/02/l...

Really thrilled to receive this lovely review on Apple Podcasts! 😃

'She is incautious and intrepid. She will go to several wrong places, and arrive at the right one, while I am still making up my mind to cross the road. She is my opposite in character. She is cheerful and confident and expects to be happy.' #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/04/02/l...

A brilliant film, very influential! #FilmSky

From the archive for Ethel Lina White, #BornOnThisDay in 1876, my thoughts on THE WHEEL SPINS. This wonderfully suspenseful novel was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as THE LADY VANISHES. Recommended reading, even if you're familiar with the film! #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2024/03/13/t...

So many accounts of Hilda Carline's life return, inevitably, to Stanley Spencer, and it becomes hard to see her clearly. This piece is an attempt to stay with her through a small group of paintings that made me look again. open.substack.com/pub/stillske...

I made a little Golden Hare for Easter.https://www.deborahvass.com/prints

Useful reminder about watching out for ticks. Here are the main points from the poster: Tick bites are painless, so easy to miss. Ticks are tiny - the size of a pinhead. Prevent bites by tucking trousers into socks, wear long sleeves, avoid brushing into foliage. Remove ticks promptly and carefully

She was called a late bloomer-but what if Helen Bradley had been an artist all along? I came across her work by chance and found something much more interesting. A new piece on her life and paintings. open.substack.com/pub/stillske...

Helen Bradley, who finally found success at 65, was a joy to discover. Her memories of Edwardian Lancashire are a delight. open.substack.com/pub/stillske...

'You hurry toward the figure for a closer view. It turns its head and – you are looking at yourself. Or rather a perfect mirror-image of yourself only – there is no mirror. So, you know it is your double. And that frightens you...' #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/03/17/t...

‘…she looked so cold, & grey, & stony, as if she had never loved or cared for anyone; and I don’t suppose she did care for anyone, except her mistress; &, owing to the great deafness of the latter, Mrs. Stark treated her very much as if she were a child.’ 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/03/12/g...

Here's my Barn Owl linoprint again, its details, textures and delightful inconsistencies, full of chance and happenstance, no AI here. And here are the stages that my human mind, eyes and hands went through in making it, back to the pencil drawing made from a real Barn Owl. handmadebyhaggy.etsy.com

There has been something odd going on with me and this linoprint. I finished it over a week ago but I haven't wanted to share it. It's like the fragile ghostly ethereal Owl is an equally fragile part of me and I'm scared to let it out into the dark night sky of the world. But the time has come....

'She reminded me of some tea-pot with a missing spout, a compass that had lost its hands, an old-fashioned record that had had all its grooves badly scratched. She had a tense, half- apologetic, half-defiant expression on her face...' #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/03/08/t...

1/3 I'm writing a book about Nigel Farage for Headline. Some of his pals are blanking me. Is it because after I reported on the killing of a Polish man in Essex in 2016, he said that I had caused him "more misery than any other in 25 years in politics"? Do get in touch: johnsweeney.co.uk

I wrote a book called Nature’s Acre — an Irish garden memoir about wildlife, community, and making a place where life can grow. If that sounds like your kind of book, I’d love you to read it. And if you’d share this, I’d be very grateful. 🌱 #climateaction #spéirgorm gardeningwell.ie/natures-acre

This week's post took an unexpected direction. This painting of Lucie Aldridge , by her husband John, is not the picture it seems. #womenartists open.substack.com/pub/stillske...