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Asked if he actually believed in ghosts, M.R. James, author of the greatest ghost stories in the English language, answered equivocally that he was prepared to consider anything for which there was sufficient evidence. It’s the time of year when Monty James used to invite students to his rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, and turn down the lights. The students would listen to him read the terrifyingly chilly tales that he created every winter, set in the sedate surroundings of cathedral cloisters, country houses and East Anglian seaside towns. Now that I too live in an ancient cathedral city, I also want to see a ghost. It’s a desire that

Nearly everywhere you go in Nymburk, a small Bohemian town an hour or so from Prague, there are reminders of its most famous son, the novelist Bohumil Hrabal. The Czech writer, who died nearly 30 years ago, grew up here, amid the coopers and maltsters at the local Postřižinské brewery, where his stepfather was manager. Beer accompanied Hrabal throughout his life – much of his adulthood was spent sinking mug after mug at the Prague tavern U Zlatého tygra (‘At the Golden Tiger’). Terror stalked him too. He lived through Hitler’s occupation, grilled and harried by the Nazis who came very close to killing him. Four grinding decades of communism

I’m 11 years old, and I’m crouched inside the broken shell of a former London bus. It’s my friend’s birthday party. He turns 12 today, and he has just been shot. Not by a real bullet, of course, but by a paintball. I look over at his father, who is busy reloading his gun’s hopper. ‘This is my paintball gun,’ he murmurs. ‘There are many like it, but this one is mine. My paintball gun is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it…’ Without warning, his father springs up like a sleeper agent given their activation trigger and unleashes a barrage of bullets (paintballs) on a

No matter how much the cost of convenience food rises, the idea that it’s still cheaper than cooking fresh food at home somehow refuses to go away. People can fool themselves as much as they like. But it’s (overpriced) pie in the sky.  To be economical, choose chicken thighs over breast; lamb shoulder over leg. Veg offcuts such as broccoli stalk (for soups) and ginger peel (to flavour Asian stock). Leftovers for egg fried rice. Stale bread for croutons. The freezer is your friend: not just for peas and berries, but spinach and an ice cube tray of leftover wine for cooking too. Oxo over refrigerated supermarket stock; Bird’s over fresh

The winner of this year’s Booker Prize will be announced tonight. Of the six shortlisted novels, Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter looks like a good bet for the £50,000 award. It might even be a contender for best Booker novel ever. The prize’s judges have been known to make strange calls – and always bet responsibly! – but the odds on Miller are good. The story takes place against the backdrop of snowbound Britain’s ‘Big Freeze’ between December 1962 and February 1963. ‘For a mile from the Kent coast,’ Miller writes, ‘the sea had turned to pack ice.’ This was the time of Beeching, Babycham, Benny Hill, Acker Bilk, Dr Kildare, the Daily Herald, the

You won’t find it in any of the ‘best pub’ guides that seem to appear every other week, but our local is the best pub simply because it’s, well, our local. And that is why our village has come together to save it from permanent closure. The White Horse Inn in Westleton – one of around a dozen pubs in Suffolk with that name – was put up for sale last year by the county’s foremost brewery, Adnams, as they looked to slim down their estate. It was hoped that, as with other pubs in the area, some enterprising new owners would come and take it over, tart it up

I have arrived in Naples, Italy, after an arduous flight from a chaotic London Gatwick Airport. I’m settled in a glamorous top-floor apartment in the Quartieri Spagnoli – the romantic old ‘Spanish Quarter’ – where Vespas fizz over cobbles and laundry hangs across alleys like flags of endless surrender. Most importantly, I’m clutching my Apple AirPods 3 in their shiny new capsule. Because I’ve come here to do a grand, futuristic experiment using their much-heralded ‘live translate’ function. Does it really work as smoothly as Apple says? Can I actually slot them in my ears and have them translate the Italian speaker in front of me, in real time? Is

There’s no shortage of catastrophic predictions for New York under Zohran Mamdani’s leadership. While the city probably won’t see breadlines, the wildly expensive, exhaustingly derivative restaurants that dominate its food scene are likely to become more dominant. Mamdani’s big pledge on food is to ‘make halal eight bucks again’. But it’s a ‘false promise’ of street-food affordability according to Heritage Foundation economist Nicole Huyer. She says Mamdani’s economic programme, which includes higher taxes, steeper leasing regulations and a pledge to raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030, will effectively make restaurants even more expensive. ‘All of these great socialist policies that [Mamdani’s] planning to implement – he’s