Hold the front page

Times have changed, but COUNTRY LIFE’S Frontispiece is a rare constant in publishing

Possibly the most famous magazine page in the world: the American-born Lady Randolph Churchill, mother of the future Prime Minister, appeared on an early Frontispiece, in 1897; Nancy Astor featured in 1919, the year in which she became the first sitting female MP; Flight Officer Constance Babington Smith, a journalist who identified the flying bomb, was pictured in 1945

The Queen has appeared at least 30 times, including in this painting by Edward Seago, in which she is mounted on Winston (1956); polo player Sophie Burrell gamely agreed to be in a re-creation of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in 1999; Katie Mcdonnell showed off her credentials as a freerunner and stuntwoman in 2016

It’s not all about girls in pearls (the very first person on the Frontispiece was the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire)—members of The Queen’s Dragoon Guards were honoured in our 2017 Best of Britain issue and the artist Grayson Perry appeared in 2020. City worker Devina Majumder, photographed during lockdown in 2021, was a volunteer Covid-19 vaccinator for St John Ambulance