Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter. She is known for narrative songs about her personal life, which have received widespread media coverage. At age 14, Swift became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house and, at 15, she signed her first record deal.
Her 2006 eponymous debut album was the longest-charting album of the 2000s in the US. Its third single, "Our Song", made her the youngest person to single-handedly write and perform a number-one song on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in 2008.
Buoyed by the pop crossover success of the singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", it became the US' best-selling album of 2009 and was certified diamond in the US. The album won four Grammy Awards, and Swift became the youngest Album of the Year winner.
Jake Fiennes: ‘No one in Westminster has the interests of the country at heart’
telegraph.co.ukhuge national nature reserve and thousands of acres of commercial farmland, as well as woodland, parkland, a beach and miles of salt marshes.Fiennes is conservation manager at Holkham, where he has worked for the past three years.
He is also on a mission: to save the British countryside through the regeneration of farming, and he wants to introduce me to the good and the bad in the hedge world as a starting point.So here we are in Taliban Alley (his name for it), an area that borders a field belonging to one of Holkham’s 20-odd tenant farmers which is, says Fiennes, ‘pointlessly hostile to the natural world’.
The hedges are cut brutally – short and stubbly, as if they’ve been given a ‘no 1’ crop in a south London barber shop. The only plant sprouting through is a bit of ivy.
The fields they border are ploughed right up to the edge, there is no turning space for farm machinery, and the crop is monoculture.It is, says Fiennes, ‘deeply depressing’. ‘It’s not a reflection on the tenant farmer, who has been here for many years; it’s the policies that created this a long time ago: policies that don’t value nature or incorporate it into our food systems.’ Even though – according to the National Farmers’ Union – almost 90 per cent of farmers are in favour of hedgerow restoration as a simple carbon-cutting measure, many still want everything to look ‘tidy’.Fiennes talks fast and only stops to breathe or smoke.
Read more on telegraph.co.uk
