Life

Monday

Charlie Thomas

The scenic route

Walking up to the Valhalla is an intimidating experience. Low to the ground, it looks like a prototype race car and every bit the million-dollar starting price tag. Its large gullwing doors swing up, presenting an interior bathed in carbon fiber. After climbing in awkwardly, the carbon bucket seats hug you in and the squared-off steering wheel reminds you this is no ordinary Aston. Close the door and you’re cocooned in like a Le Mans Hypercar. The Valhalla isn’t a track-only racing machine, though. It’s a hybrid road car, made in partnership with Aston Martin’s Formula 1 team, but with surprising levels of comfort and usability. It has 1,046hp, with power coming from both the 4.

Alfred Tong

Loosen up

Oliver Spencer, designer and founder of London-based luxury formalwear brand Favourbrook, has a few thoughts about summer style. For a start, he is unimpressed by the type of men who turn up at the races squeezed into “tight suits” and seeming to want to look like an extra from Peaky Blinders. He is equally dismissive of the long reign of beige discretion. “We’re all a little bored of that ‘quiet luxury,’” he says. “No thanks. No more.” For Spencer, the answer is obvious. Summer should be fun, fancy, colorful, and, above all, joyful. He dislikes the idea of “occasionwear” altogether.

Alfred Tong

Mixing business and pleasure

British tailoring house Thom Sweeney has long made a virtue of Italianate ease refined through a distinctly Mayfair lens. The wardrobe is sleek, elegant, and relaxed enough to move from airport lounges to boardrooms, members’ clubs, long lunches, and late dinners without missing a beat. That balance is especially clear in its summer proposition, where tailoring is stripped of heaviness but none of its polish. As co-founder Thom Whiddett puts it, “I love our new chocolate-brown blazer paired with a black dress trouser” – both cut from “very lightweight and breathable wool,” which makes them ideal for warmer weather, and the silhouette works for “both business and pleasure.

Friday

Josie Cox

Down with the children’s birthday-industrial complex

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about birthdays. For one thing, I’m writing this on the very day I turn 37. For another, you might’ve heard that America’s got a big one coming up later this year: 250. Old enough to stop squabbling and act its age. But right now, the only birthday that matters in our household is my daughter’s, and it’s coming up in two weeks. New York City children’s birthday parties – at least many of the ones I’ve witnessed – are unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Not so much parties as highly coordinated tests of moral conscience. They’re diplomatic summits involving balloons, sugar and, yes, perhaps a touch of low-level psychological warfare.

pope
Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The clash between Trump and Pope Leo shouldn’t shock Catholics

I have always believed that no Catholic with a sound understanding of his faith, which represents the ultimate in realistic thinking and a realistic view of the world, should be shocked by anything. For this reason, the recent contretemps between the President of the United States and Pope Leo XIV left me completely unaffected. Donald Trump is not a Catholic and the Pope in Rome serves in persona Christi, the 367th temporal embodiment of the Lord before the Second Coming. I believe further that a great many devout Catholics devote too much attention to whoever it is who happens to be serving as the Vicar of Christ at any given moment and that it is theologically wrong to treat him as an international celebrity, as it has been the custom of Catholics to do in the postwar era.

yachts
Peter Watson

The trouble with yachts

Yacht owners are well-heeled and outgoing types, perfect devotees of good food and wine. Drinking and yachting does not carry the same stigma as drinking and driving. But yachts are not exactly small things so where, exactly, do you put your boat when you stop somewhere for lunch or dinner? A guide has now been published, telling yacht-owners which Palm Beach restaurants are boat-friendly, how much dock space each establishment has, whether or not there are docking fees, whether “rafting” is sometimes necessary (ferrying people to and from the dining area from the dock), whether overnight parking is permitted (in case you imbibe too much), what is the maximum size of boat accepted, whether table service on the boat is available and for what fee and whether sailboats are permitted.

Friday

Melissa Kite

Americans think they want the ‘real Ireland.’ They don’t

As the first Americans of the season got out of their car I scrunched up my face and groaned. “They’re all like that, remember?” said the builder boyfriend. “What if the bed gives way?” I demanded. “How will they even fit in the bed?” The BB shrugged. “Who cares?” he said, with his usual sunny attitude. I don’t mean to suggest these people were overweight. I mean they were giants. I’m sure their depth was right for their height. There was just an awful lot of them, and we are not the Premier Inn, with super-king beds that sleep two medium-sized horses. She was in sportif wear. He was tousle-haired and bearded, dressed in a flowing shirt and baggy trousers.

ireland
Nicholas Farrell

My heated argument about Italy’s birthrate

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna We were having dinner in the Osteria del Tempo Perso (the Hostelry of Lost Time). It is in the old city which in the 5th century was the last capital of the western Roman empire as, besieged by various types of barbarian, the final fall drew ever nearer. I was drinking again. The rules are simple: I can drink when abroad, defined as anywhere outside the province of Ravenna, which I rarely leave; or else when anyone foreign – i.e. non-Italian – comes to visit, which is even rarer. My younger brother Simon, the KC, had come for a long weekend with his second wife Cyrena, two of his four children from his first marriage, Sam (33) and Rufus (28), and his stepdaughter, Jemima (22).

Gage Klipper

Croquet hasn’t quite gone away

Growing up, I remember a set of strange colored mallets that occupied a dusty corner of the family garage. My mother had purchased them as a novelty, I learned, in an effort to take up croquet when she bought her first weekend home upstate. She had fond memories of playing croquet as a child, but to me it always rang somewhat ironic: the city slicker’s romantically anachronistic idea of, “What else is there to do in the country?” So when I got invited to this year’s Annapolis Cup – the 42nd annual croquet match between St. John’s College and the US Naval Academy – I wasn’t sure what to make of it. My first instinct was to assume it was a gag, a silly put-on for charity.

palm beach real estate
Peter Watson

Palm Beach is religious about real estate

A reporter, writing in one of the local rags recently, observed that “Palm Beach does not take itself too seriously.” Er… wrong. Very wrong. Palm Beach takes itself very seriously indeed and, as the location with the greatest density of billionaires, why not? And the two things it takes most seriously are money and property. As I have remarked here before, property prices are close to being a religion in Palm Beach. Not a day goes by without the local “shiny sheet” reporting the latest property price news, mostly a happily reassuring dollar figure for this condo or that beachfront palace. Given this, well, preoccupation, it is no surprise that we now have two new concepts in property. These are “property promiscuity” and “polydomary.

Ruaridh Nicoll

The marvels of Cuba’s national botanic gardens

The last time I visited Cuba’s national botanic gardens, there was a wedding in a tucked-away corner by the Japanese pool. The happy couple stood at the water’s edge as jacanas – Jesus birds – walked the lily pads behind them. I have been thinking about that couple, as we’ve just heard that the botanics have closed due to the oil blockade the US is imposing on the island. The gardens were an escape in a collapsing city, not that we could still reach them, as there is no fuel. I have a small boy, Santiago, and it’s hard to entertain him in these trying times. On calm days, there is the beach, the beautiful miles of sand to the city’s undeveloped east, but with an empty gas tank, that too is out of reach.

Friday

Ivo Dawnay

Gone fishing: In the Andean foothills of Northern Patagonia, the wild trout are biting

The casa grande could be an ancient chalet in the Austrian Tyrol. A steeply gabled roof to slough off the winter snow, dandelion-yellow paintwork, and inside a treasure trove of all an outdoorsman loves. Antlers jostle for space on every wall. There is a tack room thick with the leathery tang of saddles, a bathroom with 1950s rifle magazines for idle reading, and everywhere photos of family, ancient and modern, often with a trophy – deer, vast mountain goat, or even puma. But it is the array of polo cups that gives away the location.

Amy Raphael

Colm Tóibín explores the art of short story writing

When I was 20 and tentatively trying to write, every single person I knew read Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites (1975). It not only gave the short story a good name, but it also gave writing a good name. It was like a punk moment converted into fiction. People used the word “macabre,” but there was a sort of excitement about the characters, the strangeness of the stories, the shortness of some of the stories and just how much contemporary urban life was in them. Often people suggest I investigate a writer. I was in Toronto about 20 years ago when someone told me about the extraordinary Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod. He had written two books of short stories which were republished in 2000 in one volume called Island: The Collected Stories.

Bridget Arsenault

A new vintage

Washington, DC might not seem the obvious choice for Britain’s oldest wine and spirits merchant to establish its first US outpost, eschewing more likely suspects such as, say, Manhattan. But that’s exactly what Berry Bros. & Rudd, founded in 1698 opposite St. James’s Palace in London, has done. “We’ve quickly earned recognition across all of DC, as well as Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and more,” says Jamie Ritchie, the company’s longtime managing director. “The news that we’re here spread quickly because it’s a smaller population, a smaller competitive set. People are aware we’ve arrived.” ‘If you spend too much time looking backwards you tend to bump into the future.

Eric Walker

What lies beneath

Every J Craft’s retro-style hull conceals ultramodern comforts and a setup fit for a tech-savvy Viking If you are familiar with the Ship of Theseus paradox, you’ll know that dating back to the Greeks, the famous philosophical question is this: if a boat has all its components replaced, is it at the end still the same boat? Every J Craft’s retro-style hull conceals ultramodern comforts and a setup fit for a tech-savvy Viking In Sweden there is a near modern-day version of this taking place every year at the J Craft shipyard on the island of Gotland.

Joanne Glasbey

How luxury pen company Yard-O-Led is setting today’s digital and disposable world to writes

One day during my first job as an aspiring journalist at a serious newspaper, the editor told me how much he liked my writing. Flushing with pride, I asked which particular piece I’d penned. “No!” he interrupted abruptly, before I’d even finished my question. “I mean your handwriting.” It was the note I’d scrawled rather than any article I’d labored over that had caught his eye. Curiously, ever since I was calligraphy-shamed by a teacher for blotty, illegible cursive writing at a young age and attempted to recreate the italic script a friend had learned, handwriting has played a significant role in my life. There was the person I’d sent a written message requesting information for a story, who wanted to meet me because he admired my handwriting.

Zack Christenson

Exploring the world’s oceans with the world’s most interesting man

“You can just do things.” It’s a popular phrase on X, usually in response to someone accomplishing something remarkable, taken to mean that there’s nothing stopping you from doing something out of the ordinary. SpaceX might post video of a rocket landing – “you can just do things.” Victor Vescovo might be the living embodiment of the phrase. My first introduction to Vescovo was an email from him, extending an invitation to be a guest at his table for the Explorers Club Annual Dinner. The name was vaguely familiar to me but didn’t immediately register. Who was this mysterious correspondent?

Simon de Burton

Get your paddles ready for spring hammer time

As the high-end auction year gets underway in earnest, interesting lots are coming under the hammer over the next few months, ranging from wines forming the second-largest collection in Europe to American muscle cars, and from images created by one of the world’s most celebrated photographers to the multi-million­-dollar paintings collected by a former US ambassador. Here are some select lots. Sebastião Salgado: A Life’s Voyage; Phillips, New York April 2-10 (online) The death of Sebastião Salgado last year deprived the world of one of its most influential photographers. The Brazilian lensman was renowned for his brilliantly framed shots of manual laborers working under harsh conditions in under-developed countries.

Rachel Johnson

An Englishwoman’s home is her castle

An imposing castle that has been in the same family for 200 years, and was featured as the location for Shiv and Tom’s wedding in Succession, is well worth a visit. And now you can hire this very big house in the country for your own discerning yet hedonistic fun. “What is luxury now,” asks Imogen Hervey-Bathurst, scraping her raven hair from her pale face and ruby-red lips. “It’s authenticity, it’s soul, it’s comfort, combined with bacchanalian, opulent drama in a historic family home,” she continues, with a naughty flash. “Eastnor is, glamorous, it’s grand, it’s relaxed.

Thursday

Peter Howarth

Giorgio Armani: coming to America

After being put on the “worst dressed” list for the 1989 Oscars at which she won Best Actress for The Accused, Jodie Foster decided that she needed professional fashion help. Giorgio Armani answered the call. “For the next Oscars, I wore a beautiful and striking cream-colored tuxedo chosen for me by Mr. Armani, and guess what… I was on the ‘best dressed’ list!” recalled the actor. “From then, Armani has been my go-to designer, and he has done many of my costumes on screen as well. In 1991, I finally met him – I had the honor of having Mr. Armani personally fit me for the Oscars. We spoke in French, and it was like being directed by Visconti, or painted by Picasso – in other words, it was a moment with a master... a treasure in time.