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France’s summer smash at the cinema is set to be a comedy called The Perfects. It opens next week with an all-star cast that includes Scottish actor Alan Cumming. The Perfects are a family of con-artists who flee France to escape the police and they end up in Scotland where madcap adventures in tartan ensue. It’s further proof that France can’t get enough of Bonnie Scotland. Films, television documentaries, newspaper features and even a puff piece earlier this month on the primetime lunchtime news about a visit to the most isolated pub in Scotland.  Billy Connolly once famously likened Scottish folk singers to ‘singing shortbread tins," churning out clichéd lyrics about mountains, heather and a Roamin' in the Gloamin.’ "Garbage!

My grandparents’ home was a proper house, on the cusp of Hampstead Heath in North London, with roses and flagstones at the front. It was the sort that looked like it housed a robust wine collection – solid on account of good, aged European bottles, bought at a time when standards were, one assumes, higher.  There was one bottle in my grandfather’s possession that came with particular fanfare: a 1974 Bordeaux whose label was so far gone you couldn’t see exactly what it was. As a treat, I arranged to have the sommelier of the Connaught Hotel examine and open it. Once the cork gave way, a thud of brown sediment rocked the bottle. It was decanted and it breathed – inasmuch as a long-dead thing can breathe. Still hopeful, we tried the sherry-looking stuff – and it was nasty.

Show me the money. Show it to me in the dedicated pages of national newspapers, in documentaries and TV series and on social media, where influencers make their money by showing me the money. Let me revel in all the clichés we’re offered – the poorer man’s idea of wealth, defined by supercars and mega-yachts, houses pent and country, dinky handbags and preposterous watches, fat cigars, deep tans, Tic Tac teeth and honed abs, for even the body is performative of money these days. Tom Wolfe would be slack-jawed.  Forty years ago he coined the sadly forgotten term "plutography," to capture the then prevailing trend for the publishing business to offer readers a monthly dose of full-color insight into how the other half lived.

Some years ago, a childhood friend of mine was playing the racing game TOCA on the Xbox. It had, for its time, a decent line in realistic car collisions, allowing an inept driver to ruin the race of a competitor. Such was my friend’s dexterity, an irate Australian man said he hoped my friend would get "nonced."  Character building, as my mom would say, though I doubt she’d be entirely approving of the rambunctious culture of online gaming during my teenage years. Playing online in those days meant exposing yourself to commentary that could at best be called "robust." And luckily for worried mothers, the government is here to help.

I wrote recently about my delight that an excellent second-hand bookshop has opened in my home city of Oxford. Well, karma has come around. In the upmarket district of Jericho, it’s recently been announced that Britain’s first "romantasy bookshop," Bad Girl Books, will open next month. The shop is run by an American expatriate named Starlin Marot and is the permanent manifestation of a series of pop-up events she ran in London that have attracted thousands of readers.  Marot told the Oxford Mail: "The reason I like the romantasy genre so much is because it is so inclusive and empowering. It can be empowering to celebrate stories written by women, which feature women's voices and desires. I'm really looking forward to meeting lots of new customers.

I am sitting in the Ottoman courtyard at Ruin Adalya in the old town of Antalya, drinking a tulip glass of black sweet tea and munching near-perfect baklava, and twenty feet beneath me the Romans are still there. That is to say, the Ottoman courtyard is paved with Lycian limestone but sections of it are now made of glass, and through the glass I can see the old Roman road.  Which, as metaphorical launchpads go, will do very nicely. Yes, Antalya has, as many Brits know, fine beaches, serious resorts, agreeably cheap food and wine, and the odd Roman temple. But the history of this stretch of Mediterranean coast goes back further than that, and deeper, so much deeper. And I want to trace that extraordinary depth.

It's that time of year again. The giddy middle of May. When millions across the English-speaking world gather to find out who has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.  This year's shortlist, drawn – as ever – from a diverse selection of not-European, not-male authors, is particularly enriching and profound. As the committee itself puts it, the stories "bring compelling characters to life in sharply drawn settings, exploring themes of power, family tension, resistance and unheard voices, alongside courage and unexpected connection. Among them are a keenly observant domestic worker, a young woman whose henna art enables silenced women to speak, and a resourceful young sheep farmer.

Once upon a time Frenchmen regarded themselves as the world’s greatest lovers. These days they think of themselves more as fighters. Sexual partners have been replaced by sparring partners. President Felix Faure famously died while being pleasured by his mistress in 1899, but the blows favored by today’s male politicians are administered to punchbags. Emmanuel Macron loves to box. His wife, Brigitte, told Paris Match in 2023 that her husband puts on his gloves twice a week for "45 minutes of training, warm-up and core-strengthening boxing." Macron regularly poses for photos wearing his boxing gloves. In March 2024 he was snapped hitting a punchbag. The more cynical wondered if there hadn’t been some "enhancement" to the President’s bulging biceps.

Here we go again. Every year, with the inevitability of death, taxes and political regicide, the BBC’s Eurovision coverage reminds viewers that most pop music produced in European countries is of a terrible standard, and that the UK’s banal offering is never going to inspire any patriotic fervor. This year, British hopes are pinned on an electropop act called Look Mum No Computer, with a truly terrible sub-Depeche Mode song called "Eins Zwei Drei" that contains the lyrics "Counting in English doesn’t cut the mustard / So sick of munching roly-poly with custard." Don’t call me Cassandra, but I suspect that Look Mum No Computer (real name: Sam Battle) will be receiving rather fewer than drei punkte from many of the international judges.

What does Monte Carlo conjure up? A glamorous casino where fortunes can be won and lost, but mostly lost? Men in evening dress at baccarat tables with beautiful women standing by? A tax haven for the glitzy rich on the Cote d’Azur? Fabulous Belle Epoque buildings? A refuge for Edwardian English invalids to escape the cold? Grace Kelly? The Grand Prix?  It was here that Max de Winter met the girl who became the second Mrs de Winter at the beginning of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. "What do you think of Monte Carlo, or don't  you think of it at all?" he asked her. "I said something  obvious and idiotic about the place being  artificial," she recalled.  Well, she was pretty much correct.

Only the most heartless fantasist would deny the life-saving role that therapy plays in helping people manage mental illness. Some people, of course, find it enjoyable or helpful for their own reasons and fair play to them. "You do you, babe," as they say.   But in the round, there is more wrong than right with the edifice. What else is one to conclude after Meghan "Sussex" née Markle, one of the luckiest and most spoiled women in the world, posted on Instagram last week that that the "hardest seven years" of her life – those that followed her becoming a duchess, having two healthy children and trading a royal residence for a $29 million mansion in California – had come to an end?

There are few things that look sadder than an abandoned sports field. I spent longer than I meant to sitting on a decaying bench looking out over the forest that was once the intended playing surface for the Stroitel Pripyat soccer club. The sky above was cerulean, cloudless and entirely still. The only life came from my hand-held Geiger counter which spluttered and crackled, telling me that I was in a territory that wasn’t fit for a stroll, let alone 90 minutes of lung-bursting athleticism.

Contrary to what we redheads have been led to believe, we are not disappearing. Our numbers have increased in the past 10,000 years, according to a recent Harvard study. What’s more, researchers found, being ginger may actually be desirable as far as natural selection is concerned because "having red hair was beneficial 4,000 years ago." The reason why has yet to be discovered. But it’s good news for the class bully, producers of sunscreen and those – like me – who’ve had a love-hate relationship with the variants in their MC1R gene which leads to red hair and pale skin. I was an extreme redhead as a child growing up in Scotland; not one of the beautiful ones with long, auburn curls and green eyes.