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[Madonna], the American pop star, was said yesterday to be on the verge of buying Ashcombe, a large estate in Dorset which was once the home of the photographer [Cecil Beaton] and carries a guide price of pounds 9 million. The present owners, David and Toni Parkes, bought Ashcombe from Beaton's landlord, Hugh Borley, in the early Nineties. He had let the house deteriorate during the 50 years he lived there but the Parkes have restored it meticulously.

Some people are just born glamorous. You know the type: elegant in white tie and tails, totally at ease with the fabulously rich and impossibly good-looking. Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann - later to be known simply as Horst - was one of these. Born in Weissenfels-an-der- Saale, Germany, in 1906, to a pragmatic, prosperous and Protestant family that ill-suited him, like contemporary Cecil Beaton, young Horst seemed destined for a life in the arts. In 1930 Horst arrived in Paris, where he feasted on classical art and apprenticed in the studio of the interior designers Le Corbusier, involving himself in the redesign of a lavish apartment belonging to a Mexican millionaire in the Champs Elysees. But architecture was not for Horst. Within months, he met Baron George Hoyningen-Heune - the so-called \"Baltic Baron\", whose father had been chief equerry to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia - who was then chief photographer for Paris Vogue. The pair became friends immediately, and with Heune, Horst's world opened wider than he would ever have imagined. Soon he was soaking up the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum and lunching with film designer Oliver Messel and Cecil Beaton's sisters Nancy and Baba, while Beaton photographed him, resplendent amid his garden statuary. Horst, however, was not initially at ease in English society or with Beaton, who eventually developed a grudging respect for the nascent artist who photographed him - with varying degrees of success - in the following years. Then came the defining moment. Would Horst like to be a photographer, wondered Dr Mehemed Agha, art director of American Vogue, in the spring of 1931? Within days, he was working at the Vogue studios in Paris and a career was born.

My parents, Reed and Diana Vreeland, moved our family from Europe to New York in the late 1930s when I was 10. We lived in a series of apartments, first at 65 East 93rd Street (across from Byron and Thelma Foy's big townhouse), and then at 400 Park Avenue (I remember the dining room's Chinese lacquer bat-wing doors), directly opposite where Lever House was built in 1950. Each apartment was an extension of its predecessor: the same Venetian blackamoors, seashells, powder horn collection, silver sacred Indian fish, brightly enamelled doors, lacquer screens and banquettes. Only the size of my parents' collections grew as we moved, with the addition of gifts from admirers, or purchases from A La Vieille Russie. After 10 years at number 400, my parents made their last move, up Park Avenue to number 550, where they stayed until they died. I remember well the first time I saw this co-op apartment. It was 1955, my first year in architecture school. We were standing in the empty shell. They were probably looking to their fledgling architect son to help them plan their new home, but none of my newly acquired knowledge of Mies or Le Corbusier could have prepared me for what my mother decided to do. From the apartment's central square room, on to which the front door opened (and which I was prepared to preserve at all costs because of its purity), she extracted a quadrant to make an entrance hall, leaving the remaining L-shaped space as a combined living and dining room. And it worked surprisingly well. For almost 40 years, it served as the framework for countless dinners and soirees, at which guests passed fluidly from cocktails in one leg of the L to dinner in the other, with no break in the mood, and then back again for coffee after dinner.

When they leave the factory, these sparkling soldier sequins, born of such brutal means, will be fashioned into drop-dead jackets, dresses, coats, shirts, skirts, tops, kitten-heeled mules and knee- high boots. They will be worn with pride in coming months by stylish men and women in France, Germany, Spain, Australia, South Africa, Russia and Poland. British teenagers will buy them at Top Shop, Warehouse or Miss Selfridge; as will thirtysomethings who dress at Jigsaw, French Connection, M&S, Ghost, Amanda Wakely, Whistles, Betty Jackson; and those who wear Joseph, Escada, Chanel, Frank Usher, Gucci or Givenchy. Taking their name from the French form of the Italian zecchino, a gold coin minted in seventeenth-century Venice, sequins were once extremely rare and worn only by the privileged few. In the Orient, they were worn by lords and merchants even before they were introduced to fifteenth-century Europe. A design for a sequin press made of wood, attributed to the medieval artist Leonardo da Vinci, is one of the very few still in existence. Now sequins are being produced in their millions for the mass market at an unassuming little factory in the East End of London, manned by 40 people and shipped all over the world - even back to Italy. It is almost as if, like the blaggard little extroverts they pretend to be, sequins always knew that they shine only in the company of others and that, if they did not stick together over the years, they ran the risk of obliteration. The humble sequin lends itself as fuel for escapist fantasies, of course, and in Britain earlier this century it was music hall and cinema which helped increase its popularity as a fashion item. Film star fashions, like the \"glitter embroidery\", beaded fringes and sequinned velvet headbands worn by the likes of the Dolly Sisters, Louise Brooks, Ginger Rogers, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo allowed the ordinary woman to shine just like them. Black sequins under transparent organza, as favoured by Shiaparelli in the 1920s . . . Art Deco and Cubist-influenced Jean Patou columns in white sequins . . . a 1935 Cecil Beaton portrait of Coco Chanel wearing a straight, full-length, high-necked, long-sleeved evening dress completely covered in sequins shows that she, too, succumbed to the glamour of the era.

In her acknowledgements, Jan Dalley declares her hand. Diana Mosley (who is nearly 90), would not let her see letters or diaries - either her own or those of her late husband Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. And having read the manuscript, Lady Mosley wanted a published disclaimer: \"the book does not reflect her views, either of herself or of the past, nor does she endorse its contents or opinions\". The fourth of the seven Mitford children, Diana was the quintessence of social glamour: tall, titled, blonde, clever. Evelyn Waugh was infatuated with her. He dedicated Vile Bodies to Diana, Cecil Beaton photographed her, Augustus John painted her. She was a friend of Winston Churchill, Gerald Berners, the Sitwells, Harold Acton, Chips Channon, Lytton Strachey. A tireless party goer and giver, she was there at the dinners for 70, the hunt balls, the fetes- champetres, dressed as a goddess, with Cecil Beaton in shells and a boa. Home, as a child, was the privilege of manor houses, servants, magnificent gardens and sporting pleasures. All the Mitford children - Jessica, Unity, Nancy, Deborah, Pamela, Diana and Tom - had vivid personalities. Diana had a series of governesses, dreaded the thought of being sent away to school (\"for one thing I cannot abide the zoo- like smell\"), and left at 18 to marry Bryan Guinness. His fortune financed an apartment in Paris, a Lutyens town house, a box at the opera and lavish parties.

SUPERSTAR [Madonna] and film director husband Guy Ritchie may be on the verge of buying the pounds 9million former home of royal photographer Sir Cecil Beaton.

(The 1950s magazine ad, right, was photographed there.) The show's curator, Andrew Ginger, has recreated parts of two rooms from those houses, installing Beaton's Circus Bed, complete with unicorns, sea horses and barley-twist posts.