An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
As a city-dweller for 34 years, I am used to the hustle and bustle of other people. Cars, sirens, strangers chatting in the street: it’s the background noise of everyday life, a comforting reminder that you’re never alone. So when I moved to the Suffolk countryside in April last year, I found it a bit
In a corner of St Pancras station, Tracey Emin is always turned on. ‘I want my time with you’, a neon sculpture by the artist, has been on show here since 2018. It was part of the ‘annual’ Terrace Wires public arts programme, in which a new work is commissioned every year to hang from
There on my television screen, in a somewhat surreal sequence, was Boris Johnson contemplating the women in his life. And suddenly before me appeared the famous Wyatt features: first eyes, then a nose and then a mouth, right into camera. Medium-range shot and then a close-up. Ah, we had faces then. And then I looked harder,
There is, of course, no endeavour, no craft, no profession, no trade that neglects to ‘reflect society’. This is a commonplace. The collective narcissism of considerate builders, for instance, claims that hod carriers and brickwork reflect society. The contention of Menu Design in Europe is kindred. Graphic artists, restaurateurs, decorators and chefs have, through two
You almost have to feel sorry for Sky. After spending 18 months building up to their big Boris Johnson drama, they end up releasing it at exactly the same time that British politics enters its own cliffhanger mode with drama that could rival any season finale. This England – which tells the story of the start
How would you describe Kate Moss? Supermodel, bad girl, party animal, everybody’s favourite plus-one? Well, after her latest announcement, you’d better add ‘wellness guru’ to that list. The 48-year-old has just unveiled her health and lifestyle brand, Cosmoss, which she has positioned as ‘self-care created for life’s modern journeys’. The woman who once said her
The good news – apparently; I haven’t seen it yet so this may just be a false rumour – is that House of the Dragon episode 6 is really exciting, full of incident and drama and intriguing, well-drawn characters. But the bad news, as I can personally testify, is that in order to reach that
Bankers and other assorted finance bros are an inescapable presence on the London nightlife scene. Industry, the British-made TV drama that follows a group of graduates on (and off) a City trading floor, begins its second series on BBC1 tonight and spares no detail of the drug-fuelled hedonism of its young bankers. One plot arc
Men do not come to see James Bond movies for the sensitive brooding of an ageing spy. They come for the car, the bikini and the volcano. This is apparently lost on some people in Hollywood – the same people who occupy the unfortunate position of actually making James Bond movies. The Daily Telegraph reports: ‘The next
It’s a well-known fact that Michael Palin is a ‘national treasure’. Or so you are told just about every single time the travel presenter and writer appears on television or features in a newspaper interview. So it was with grim inevitably that a few days before the first instalment of his latest expedition, Michael Palin: Into
Our new King isn’t the only royal to have lost his rag over a leaky pen, as happened when he was signing a visitors’ book at Hillsborough Castle near Belfast. ‘Oh God, I hate this,’ King Charles said, before handing the pen to his wife, Camilla, Queen Consort. ‘I can’t bear this bloody thing… every
It’s not in Whitehall nor Westminster; not on the central London tourist trail. Instead it’s ten miles away, on the wrong side of the North Circular, an obscurity in the suburbs, rarely visited for its own sake. But Arnos Grove Tube station is one of the masterpieces of 20th century British architecture – and this
For the finale of the #FreeBritney franchise, it seems that the 2000s Queen of Pop is to return to music. Recent reports have claimed that Britney Spears will be collaborating with Elton John on a song titled ‘Hold Me Closer’. As exciting as this is, I can’t help but think that – seeing as her
Three episodes in I think I’ve worked out the thing that’s most annoying about The Rings of Power. It isn’t the gratuitously diverse casting. It isn’t the saccharine tweeness of the hobbity Harfoots. It isn’t the ‘You go girl!’ tediousness of the relentless female character heroics. It’s that the entire series appears to have been constructed
The news that mourners may have to line up for 35 hours to pay their respects to the late Queen has made headlines – and unsurprisingly so. They say we Brits love queueing, but surely that love affair has its limits. Elizabeth II’s lying-in-state in Westminster Hall is open to the public 24 hours a
Q. I plan to travel up from Gloucestershire to pay my respects to Queen Elizabeth, and I’m happy to stand in the queue for however long it takes. My husband is only free from work a little later, but is it OK for him to join me in the queue? Or will his cutting in
In March 1995, I entered the Royal Society of Portrait Painters annual exhibition with a portrait of the Right Revd Michael Adie CBE, Bishop of Guildford. A new prize had been created that year to be awarded to the best portrait in the show. Unusually, the reward was in the form of a commission to
The first sign that something was awry was what sounded like an electrical crackling noise coming from the corner of our downstairs hallway and growing louder every day. Having ruled out our dodgy wifi (for once), I eventually turned my attention outside, where I found the cause. Wasps – hundreds of them – were swarming
The grief is still raw and the news has barely sunk in. I feel quite heartbroken. But I know that many the world over feel the same. The death of Queen Elizabeth II has special resonance here in this country, in the Realms and in the Commonwealth. Yet there is barely a corner of the
Should we pay more attention to our dreams? Are they signs from our subconscious, guiding and pointing us in certain directions? Perhaps that would explain why we often feel the need to describe them to others: to help make sense of them. Since being pregnant my dreams have got wilder. They are vivid and often
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the new Tolkien-inspired TV series on Amazon Prime is already the most expensive television series in history. Amazon paid $250 million up-front for the rights, and has reportedly committed a billion dollars to future production. The fact a business as canny as Amazon would commit that
Having taken the Queen’s remarkable longevity, good health and work ethic for granted right until the end, might her subjects now appreciate her approach to life? Because through her combination of sheer graft – she received Liz Truss to kiss hands two days before she died – and her attitudes towards health, leisure and emotional
Farmer, restaurateur, critic, foodie activist, traveller (he’s worked in Zimbabwe as well as South Africa), cookery book writer, longtime TV presenter of New Scandinavian Cooking, food columnist for a couple of Norwegian papers as well as formerly for the Washington Post, Andreas Viestad’s belt has many notches. He lives between Oslo and Cape Town and
Hunter Biden is a great cinematic character: the loser son of an elite career politician who bounces between semi-powerful jobs on the strengths of his contacts and his name while inhaling mountains of drugs and banging prostitutes. How can you make a bad film about that? Well, somehow the creators of My Son Hunter have
I had been so looking forward to seeing The Rings of Power. For all the wrong reasons, of course. In the months leading up to its release on Amazon, it had been hailed – largely on the basis of rumours and trailers – as an epic disaster, perhaps the most cherishably dreadful travesty in the
‘What did the rampant chimp have to do with any of it?’ I squawked in bewildered disappointment to a friend at the end of Nope, the long-awaited third film from Oscar-winning writer-director Jordan Peele. I had hastened in great excitement to see Nope on the first day of its cinema release, hoping for a work
When the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, they found a file titled ‘Info re: President of France’. Many have speculated (with no little encouragement from Trump himself) that it contains illicit details of Emmanuel Macron’s sex life. Whatever the truth about this particular cache, political kompromat has long been a source of great drama
On a recent trip from London to New Delhi, I found out that an acquaintance I see once or twice a year had pulled out of her wedding just 24 hours before the ceremony. An almighty row? Infidelity? Good old-fashioned cold feet? No – her family had simply decided they weren’t happy with the groom
A few months back I wrote a Spectator piece about a phenomenal new ‘neural network’ – a subspecies of artificial intelligence – which promises to revolutionise art and how humans interact with art. The network is called Dall-e 2, and it remains a remarkable chunk of not-quite-sentient tech. However, such is the astonishing, accelerating speed of
