An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
It was reported in the Times last week that Hampshire county council has threatened chef Greg Olerjarka with prosecution if he continues to allow his 14-year-old son, Dexter, to help him in his food truck at the weekends and after school. The boy desperately wants to be a chef and hopes one day to work alongside Marco
Did Mariah Carey mime or not when she headlined the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan? That was the main takeaway from last Friday’s jamboree. Organisers have since suggested that the US singer did indeed lip-sync to Domenico Modugno’s ‘Nel Blu, dipinto di Blu’ and the song that followed, her very own, ‘Nothing is Impossible’. ‘The technical, logistical and organisational complexities of an Olympic ceremony
Valentine’s Day is upon us. I’ve never liked it. As an ugly ginger kid with a beautiful – much older – half-Indian sister, it was torture. Helen was a glamorous air stewardess and never short of cards or flowers. While I sat in my room listening to David Bowie and staring at the Starsky &
Halfway through a downward dog, red-faced and breathing a little too hard, a hen stops about 18 inches from my face. It squats, and lifts its a tail a fraction. There is a brief, unmistakable pause. Something warm and biological drops onto the mat beside me. It is not an egg. From the front of the class, the instructor’s
Most of us have had disagreements with friends over politics at some point in our lives. Or worse. One of the constant threats to friendships is that such differences could one day spill over into acrimony or result in a full-blown falling-out. In my youth, the election night parties held by my parents seldom ended without
I didn’t breathe a word of my true reaction while filing into the top-floor bar of the Old Vic theatre last week after the three-hour production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia was over. It would have been mortifying to be overheard muttering any adverse comments, when swaths of intellectual Stoppard-lovers from all over London and the Home Counties were crowding on to the staircase. Stoppard is a national treasure and to say anything rude
There is something inherently embarrassing about watching Bridgerton in Britain. It is so palpably, monstrously, uninhibitedly woke; an American fever dream of England in which an all-English (and the odd Australian) cast cavort as members of the ‘ton’ for money they’d probably never get from the BBC. In front of the great Bridgerton mood board
At first glance, there are few similarities between Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh’s classic 1945 novel – later adapted into an equally classic ITV series – of prelapsarian bliss in Oxford and Industry, the BBC’s adrenaline-fuelled show that exposes the dark iniquity at the heart of the financial industry. The one is a languid examination of (discreetly portrayed) same-sex love and Catholic
Can’t get an appointment with your GP? Nowhere to sit in surgeries crammed with the ill and infirm? Spare a thought for your local auctioneer who is also dealing with the effects of a long winter of discontent. The cost-of-living plague, from which almost nobody is immune, has prompted people to rummage around in their
Eighty years ago this month, in February 1946, the left-wing Tribune magazine published George Orwell’s essay ‘The Decline of the English Murder’ in which the writer identified a certain class of crime as most appealing to the tabloid-reading British public – and contrasted the ‘cosiness’ of this type of early 20th-century domestic murder with the brutal sadism of killings committed in Britain
In a week in which embarrassing and damaging revelations about past misdemeanours are very much in vogue, let me reveal one of my own. When I was seven years old, I wrote in to Jim’ll Fix It. My request was to play a giant Wurlitzer organ, preferably the one in the Blackpool Empress Ballroom. To my retrospective
‘Screenagers’, ‘lonely’, ‘boring’ – all words used to describe Gen Z. Born between 1997 and 2012, we are the first generation to grow up with omnipresent technology and are often maligned as phone addicts and loners. But things are changing. Now the first tech-native generation is actively seeking out the most analogue hobby of all:
Two years ago, I wrote an essay here called ‘In praise of Kemi Badenoch’. To say it was admiring is like saying that Abelard quite fancied Heloise. She sent me a nice message on X; I went mildly berserk one evening when drunk and sent her a poem I’d had ChatGPT write, basically saying that
By the calendar it is winter, but the days are longer and the birds are singing. Snowdrops are scattered around the front door, and crocuses have already broken through on my lawn. Mostly they are slim and pale, but when the sun has shone they have opened their purple cups to its warmth. Virginia Woolf
‘Do you want to stream something?’ my girlfriend asked me. It was 5 p.m. on a Saturday and I’d had a horrendous week. I’d caught one of those mutant viruses that you learn about in nursery rhymes or at the London Dungeon. The cough was the worst part. It was the sort of cough that
If you had been fortunate enough to see the first night of Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin at the Opéra National de Paris last week, then it might have been with a slight jolt of surprise that you saw a familiar face take to the stage as the cast took their bows. Ralph Fiennes, the award-winning actor, was not
Are we all curators now? From the hotel chef offering an artfully curated cheeseboard to the fashion world’s curated capsule collections, the sound curators (DJs) and the luxury tour operators flogging seamlessly curated travel experiences – and don’t forget the curated (actually, algorithm-generated) lists from Substack – nowhere is safe from the scourge of the contemporary curator.
If you make your way to the Design Museum, which occupies the horned modernist structure that was once home to the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, you are in for a surprise. And not just because it’s one of those buildings that is far more inspiring on the inside than its rather Stalinist exterior would have
There are so many ways to mangle brilliance. If you’re a present or former member of Take That, you’ll know what I mean when it comes to taking the sweet essence of the Bee Gees and turning their hits into something as bland and devoid of colour as an Ikea Billy bookcase. And if you’re
When did you last visit the National Portrait Gallery? If, like me, you haven’t darkened its doors since it reopened following a £43 million makeover and expansion in 2023, stand by for a shock. Instead of being just a selection of the famous faces featuring in our island story – the politicians, poets, scientists and
For the first time in almost a century, when Arthur Conan Doyle was buried in a Turkish carpet in his garden, my hometown of Crowborough is in the news. For those fortunate never to have been, Crowborough is a small place in the Weald of about 20,000 souls. The cadet training camp, where my school
When I heard that Robbie Williams had written a song called ‘Morrissey’, I didn’t know whether to be delighted or irate. It’s no secret that I idolise Moz, and the idea of a somewhat seedy showman attempting glory by association made my hackles rise somewhat. But on the other hand, Williams has co-written several songs
There comes a moment, a few weeks after you give birth, when your baby outgrows their Lilliputian clothes and you’re obliged to replace ‘newborn’ with ‘0-3 months’. At which point, usually while still absolutely steaming with hormones, you find yourself sitting on their bedroom floor, staring at these teeny garments, trying to decide if you’re
The biggest rebel in my year at school (a pretty raggedy state comprehensive near Chester) was a guy called Paul. He had very long hair, wore a trench coat and was regularly told to ‘have a bath’ by the more boorish elements of the playground. Paul railed against the system in the way that only teenagers
Amid the distractions of Donald Trump and Davos, France’s state-owned railway operator decided last week was the opportune time to slip out some news. Welcome to ‘Optimum’, the new and exclusive area of the train where kids are not welcome. Business people and misopedists travelling to and from Paris on the weekday high-speed TGV services
Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson is best known for his 1972 narcotics-fuelled fantasia Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In some ways, his is a story of life imitating art. Thompson lived large, once saying: ‘I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.’ He killed himself in
On 15 November 1975, Elizabeth Taylor died. No, not that Elizabeth Taylor – she had many more years, and many more husbands, to get through. I mean Elizabeth Taylor the author, whose 12 novels and four volumes of short stories so piercingly and hilariously chronicle the quietly desperate lives of middle-class women in and around
One of the peachiest moments in a life of unrepentant tavern-dwelling was my introduction to P.J. Clarke’s on Third Avenue. Here was a bar from central casting – Billy Wilder mocked it up, after a fashion, in The Lost Weekend – and the dollop of cream on this peach was the jukebox. P.J. Clarke’s was
I write this piece while listening to an album that I suspect will be widely regarded as one of the best of the year. That it is by Robbie Williams may come as a surprise to many. After all, Williams has often been mocked as a cruise ship entertainer who got lucky, a Butlins redcoat
