An exhibition of the great British illustrator’s life opens this month in Ditchling village, in the South Downs countryside that inspired him

There aren’t many people who can claim to have seen a snowman fly over their house. It may sound fantastical, but every Christmas I settle down to watch The Snowman , Raymond Briggs ’s best-loved work, and watch as the red-haired boy and the plump, tangerine-nosed snowman swoop over the downs that surround the village where I live before gliding above the Royal Pavilion and Brighton Pier and on out to sea.

The Snowman , like many of Briggs’s works, unfolds against a backdrop of the East Sussex landscapes he loved, and where he lived for more than 50 years. So it’s fitting that the first exhibition of his life and work since his death in 2022 is being held not in a London gallery but at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft , just a couple of miles from his house in the village of Westmeston. Original drawings and illustrations, memorabilia, photographs and framed fan letters (including one from an American pastor enraged to discover that Father Christmas included images of Santa on the loo) give a unique insight into one of the greatest illustrators Britain has ever produced.

The late illustrator’s elephant hero is to star in a new ecological fable after the discovery of a rough manuscript and drawings

From the depths of his extraordinarily vibrant imagination, he famously conjured up Mr Benn, Not Now, Bernard , King Rollo and Elmer the patchwork elephant .

Now a manuscript and rough sketches for a new illustrated story about Elmer has been in the archive of the late British children’s author and illustrator David McKee . It will be published next year by his family.

Design Museum, London
From his steel-bar fruit bowl to his troop of wooden animals, the combative creator railed against ‘the rampant consumption of luxury furniture’ – despite his own hefty price tags

Shortly before the maverick Italian designer Enzo Mari died in 2020 , he donated his archive to the city of Milan with one condition: it must remain closed for the next 40 years. It would take at least that long, Mari argued, “before we have a new generation that is not as spoilt as today’s generation and that will be capable of using it in an informed manner”.

Those who don’t want to wait four decades should hightail it to the Design Museum in London, where a sprawling retrospective of Mari’s work is on show – perhaps for the last time in a generation or two. It is a fascinating and infuriating portrait of this self-styled contrarian, a fiery prophet of doom who carved out a career of contradictions. Mari was a lifelong Marxist who railed against the indulgent “ pornography ” of the design world, arguing tirelessly for workers’ rights and the democratisation of design. He was hailed as the “conscience” of the industry; the grumpy thorn in the side of the establishment who could be relied upon to hurl colourful insults at his contemporaries (“publicity whores!”), between puffs on his cigars.

Author and illustrator who carried on his father Jean’s adventures of Babar in more than 40 books

Laurent de Brunhoff was five years old when his mother invented a story for him and his younger brother: it told of an orphaned African elephant who escapes to Paris, where he is kitted out in a green suit before returning to the jungle to become king of his herd.

De Brunhoff, who has died aged 98, recalled how the excited boys recounted the tale to their father, Jean, an artist, who illustrated the stories and produced a book, Histoire de Babar (The Story of Babar), which was published in 1931.

Remarks scribbled in a Finnish copy of the much-loved book, to be featured in an exhibition on the author, reveal how the story was misunderstood

It is Raymond Briggs ’s most loved book, notching up sales of 5.5m, while the TV adaptation is a hardy perennial in the Christmas schedules. However, the discovery of a Finnish edition of The Snowman with notes scribbled in the margin by its author decades after publication reveal that parts of the story have been misinterpreted.

It has frequently been assumed that the melting and disappearance of the snowman was symbolic of the loss of Briggs’s parents and wife in the 1970s. Not the case, according to the author’s remarks.

The artist, 91, on not being taken seriously, his first solo sculpture show, and why his Beatles’ Sgt Pepper cover has been a mixed blessing

Peter Blake was born in Dartford, Kent in 1932 and went to art school at Gravesend Technical College. Leaving at the age of 15, he did national service and then trained at the Royal College of Art. His early works were critical to the definition of British pop art. In 1967, famously, he designed the cover for the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper ’s Lonely Hearts Club Band . In his varied career since, he has continued to develop an idiosyncratic and iconic style in paintings, collages, drawing and sculpture. He lives in Chiswick with his second wife, the artist Chrissy Wilson, to whom he has been married for 37 years.

How does it feel to be showing what is effectively your first solo sculpture show at the age of 91 ?
About 10 years ago, I was making a lot of very diverse work – painting, drawing, collages, sculpture. And I realised a lot of it would never be seen, that I was unlikely to have a third retrospective. So I decided to mount a series of shows with [the gallery] Waddington Custot. The first was portraits and people, the second drawing. This is the sculpture element of that concept. There are also three series of collages that I’ve made in the last two years. I still sit with a pair of scissors.