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.
The poignant jewellery that helped make a monarch
telegraph.co.ukexplores the Coronation through portraiture, fashion, photographs, and jewellery, and will include the dress, robe of estate, necklace and earrings that she wore.
Many of us who have lost someone we love will empathise with the desire to wear a piece of jewellery or clothing that reminds us of them – and the Queen had been given this brooch on a tour of southern Africa that she went on with her parents, and which coincided with her 21st birthday. “The flame lily brooch was the first piece we saw her wear in Britain as Queen,” says Caroline de Guitaut, the deputy surveyor of The Queen’s Works of Art, “and while the diamond, platinum and white gold setting is undoubtedly lovely, I imagine it was the sentiment behind it that drew her to it for such an occasion.”The brooch is designed in the shape of a flame lily, the national flower of Zimbabwe.
It was a birthday gift from 42,000 schoolchildren in Rhodesia (as it was then called) who were asked to donate some of their pocket money to contribute to the creation of the diamond and platinum piece – and was designed by Harare jeweller H H Bell and made by Eric Kipin at Sidersky & Son in Johannesburg.
Photographs from that 1947 tour of South Africa show a laughing Princess Elizabeth enjoying the trip with her parents. “It had no doubt been taken with her to Kenya on that 1952 trip,” says De Guitaut, “but it would have been one of many pieces she could have stepped out of the plane wearing.
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