Culture

Wednesday

Sean Thomas

A West Coast World Cup road trip

I am standing inside perhaps the most sophisticated stadium ever built: a magnificent, latticed half-dome of white steel and trillion-pixel megascreens, bent over a football pitch so green it looks iced. And I am watching my least favorite sport on Earth: American football. As I guzzle citrus beer, the players take their 683rd strategic break in the ninth quarter to bring on the seventh specialist kicker for the XY-red-zone-whatever, while the crowd, unconcerned, shovels $18 hot dogs into their faces because no one has yet told them when, precisely, to cheer. So why am I here? Because next year this same stadium will throb with a very different crowd. Real

Her Majesty The Queen

Queen Camilla’s recommended reading list

As Christmas approaches and we wrack our brains to find something that suits everyone, there is no present quite like a book. Whether it’s an unputdownable novel, a heart-stopping crime series, a thought-provoking biography or a collection of beautiful poetry, a book provides an escape, the perfect antidote to the hurly-burly of everyday life and, above all, hours and hours of pleasure. Here are half a dozen of my favorites, previously recommended on my Queen’s Reading Room, which you might like to add to your Christmas present list… or (if preferred) keep for yourself! The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard This is a series of books that I return

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Douglas Murray

The pleasure in not knowing

A few years ago, the podcaster Lex Fridman published a list of books that he was hoping to read in the year ahead. It included works by George Orwell, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Hermann Hesse and others. If he had published this in the world of print media he might have got back some encouraging noises. But because he put the list online – worse, on the platform then still known as Twitter – he received mostly mockery. “Who hasn’t read Animal Farm?” was the general tenor of the blowback, as though a man who had been a researcher at MIT was next to being a Neanderthal. I watched that passing storm

douglas knowing
Peter Jones

How the Roman ranking system actually worked

For otherwise healthy plebs in the Roman world, survival depended on four Fs: farming (the sole source of food and money), fighting, family and friends. Everything else that made life worth living meant having some degree of political control over your own existence, which could be summed up in a fifth F: freedom, or political equality. But the elite had little time for such goodwill towards men. For the plebs, there was the rub. In the 20s BC Livy began writing a history of Rome from its foundation in 753 BC. It was first ruled by a series of seven kings (none actually Roman) who were finally thrown out as

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Joan Collins

Christmas in Los Angeles and London

“Never again!” I sigh every January 6, as I pack away the abundance of Christmas decorations lovingly collected over the decades. “It’s too much!” I moan to Percy. “Let’s go to a hot island next year and get away from it all…” But I never do, because I just love Christmas. Every year in early November I eagerly unpack multiple boxes tenderly packed two years earlier because we like to spend Christmas in London one year and in LA the next, as we love both cities. I have quite a lot of extended family in each, so we know that celebrating in either one will be very “happy families.” But

Taki

Taki’s life as a writer

It was roughly 55 years ago, at the tail end of the 1960s, that I took the monumental decision to become a writer. It wasn’t exactly an agonizing one. By then I’d been on the European tennis circuit for a decade, and was kaput. Joining the circuit at 19, I traveled nonstop seeing the world. I was never tired or hungover no matter how much I partied – and I partied relentlessly. And, needless to say, there were constant thump-thumps in the heart, as at every opportunity I pursued beautiful women. I had a great advantage in this regard. As one of the worst players on the circuit, I was

Lionel Shriver

Immigration policy should discriminate

Many years ago, a friend described one of my serious literary novels as “clever.” I was offended – but I shouldn’t have been. The friend was from across the pond, where I now understand “clever” means smart. For Americans, cleverness implies a shallow, facile intelligence. Applied to people, it hints at sly, calculating deviousness or cunning. It has no positive moral qualities, as westerners understand them. Tax evasion can be “clever.” Let’s move on to “culture” – a big, fuzzy word we throw about with careless abandon, that often summons images of traditional clothing and cuisine. But parsed in its most profound sense, culture might best be defined as “what

Dot Wordsworth

What makes money ‘short?’

I heard on the wireless a reference to the growing number of small political parties getting funds from short money. I’m afraid I let it slide past me as one of the many things about money that I don’t understand. Short is an extremely productive element in English vocabulary. Short-haul journeys preceded by decades the invention of airplanes. The unlikely sounding shorthorn carrots have been with us since the 1830s. The Americans favor short hundredweights, which are only 100lb instead of the Imperial 112lb; worse, the standard ton is consequently a short ton of 2,000lb, a long way off the metric tonne, to which British tons approximate. The short-order cook

Arizona Muse

Scotland offers myths, legends and bespoke textile designs

As part of the planning for a retreat I’m organizing in May, I recently visited Scotland. I spent time near Edinburgh to learn more about the work of designer and weaver Araminta Campbell, whose approach reflects the connection between nature and clothing. Her atelier, set within a fairytale castle outside the city, is renowned for its team of skilled artisan handweavers who create bespoke textile designs. It is a place I have long admired, a magical world of tartan and tweed. As a model, you become attuned to the clothes you wear – how they shape your image and how others perceive you. But it took time for me to

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