Cool Britannia: Pippa Middleton Joins Growing Ranks of Beautiful, British Lifestyle Gurus

Nigella Lawson by Paul Harvey

My latest Yahoo feature explores the UK’s glamorous it-girls of home advice, from Pippa and her new party book to the “queen of food porn” Nigella Lawson.

“Forget the Olympics and the Jubilee,” explains my pal, the fabulous London writer Anna Melville-James, “lifestyle gurus give the real temperature of things here in 2012.

“At the moment, we snaggle-toothed, recession-hit Brits apparently want to recycle cardigans as boleros, bake Victoria sponges shaped like the Parthenon and make sausages, having explained in very reasonable terms to our pigs that they have to die sometime, so it might as well be now.

“Oh yes. We are a country with an interesting life behind our net curtains.”