This week on the Post, making beds and adding layers of bedclothes for winter warmth, inspired by reading one of Dorothy Whipple's superb short stories, 'Susan', in which an eiderdown, 'magnificent and highly floral...like a coil of monstrous satin sausages' takes on huge significance. Eiderdowns have all but disappeared since we converted in the 1970s to 'continental quilts', as duvets were known when first introduced by Terence Conran in 1964. The British proved reluctant to give up sheets and blankets; The Eiderdown (1920s, Manchester Art Gallery) by Sydney Carline (1881-1929) emphasises old-fashioned feather-filled comfort and weight.

Amélie Nothomb (b.1967 Etterbeek, Brussels) is one the most popular and internationally acclaimed French-language authors. She is prolific, publishing on average a book a year, many of which have been translated into English. She divides critics and opinion, but undoubtedly has a huge following in many countries.

Jacqueline Poncelet (b Liège, 1947) is an internationally famous artist who studied ceramics at Wolverhampton College of Art and the Royal College of Art. Anyone who has driven past Edgware Station or waited for a Circle Line Tube train there will have seen her huge, colourful 'Wrapper' (2012), part of Art on the Underground. "The work, created in vitreous enamel, dresses the building in a grid of patterns...each pattern relates to a different part of the local area...like an enormous patchwork."

Diane von Furstenberg (b. 1946, Brussels), the Belgian dress designer and highly successful business woman with an aristocratic German surname, made her name with the launch in 1974 of her smart, versatile, flattering but comfortable knitted jersey wrap dress. She appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 1976, by which time she had apparently sold more than five million wrap dresses.

Audrey Hepburn (1929-93) is known the world over as an outstanding English film actress. She was, however, born into an aristocratic family in Ixelles in Brussels. Her complicated peripatetic childhood and teenage years in Belgium, Holland, and England may account for her unique accent which worked to her advantage when she played a 'European' princess in the wonderful Roman Holiday (1953).

To coincide with a visit to Belgium, this week on the Post we have five internationally famous Belgian women. According to her obituary, the film director Chantal Akerman (b. Brussels, 1950-2015) "attained a somewhat legendary status among cinephiles as a cinematic radical, a formal innovator and a pioneer of modern feminist cinema". She is best known for her cult classic Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080, Bruxelles (1975) which La Libération in France described as “one of those experiences that change your way of thinking, of seeing, of imagining cinema”. The BFI has a list of her 'ten essential films'.

The Hepworth Wakefield has recently created the most amazing garden (open to the public at all times). It was designed by Tom Stuart-Smith, and it's fitting that tulips are the focal point in spring, as Wakefield has played an important role in the history of tulip-growing. The Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society dates back to 1836; a tulip show has been held every year since. The society is the last remaining of its kind in Britain, and specialises in showing rare and precious tulip varieties descended from those cultivated in the mid-C17th, known as English Florists' Tulips.