London

Monday

Arabella Byrne

The Sloane Ranger is in dire straits

Every few years, an obituary for the Sloane Ranger appears. In 2015, the Telegraph proclaimed their death. In 2022, Peter York himself, co-author of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, wrote a devastating piece in the Oldie on the ‘End of the Sloane Age’. In it, he cast existential doubt on the species altogether: ‘By 2021, there seemed to be every possible shade of Sloane around in London. But were they really Sloanes at all? It looked as if the only way for a Sloane to succeed was to UnSloane themselves.’  You might think that if York himself had called time, then the death knell must have well and truly sounded. But no.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

A right royal travesty: Lilibet’s reviewed

Elizabeth II was a god and a commodity: now she is gone it is time for posthumous exploitation. Lilibet’s is a restaurant named for her childhood nickname at 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair, on the site of the house where she was born. It was inevitable that Elizabeth II would eventually get a personal restaurant. Princess Diana ate in the Café Diana – English breakfasts and kebabs – on the Bayswater Road and George VI is the inspiration for the superb Guinea Grill – mostly sausages, or rather it is the sausages I remember – near Lilibet’s. Because that is what the British do to our monarchs and their intimates. We eat them and call it love.

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Are America’s women heading for the exit?

From our US edition

Life is apparently so disagreeable in Donald Trump’s America that 40 percent of women aged between 15 and 44 want to leave. That is four times higher than the 10 percent who wanted to quit the US in 2014. According to Gallup, which conducted the poll, nearly half the nation’s younger women have “lost faith in America’s institutions.” This disenchantment accelerated after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which enshrined the constitutional right to abortion. Younger American men are bearing up better. Only 19 percent share women’s distaste for the Donald, a 21 percent differential which is the largest recorded by Gallup since it began asking the question in 2007.

Women
Orson Fry

A transatlantic party route

From our US edition

Breaker Media, which has established itself as one of New York City’s foremost bean-spillers, hosted its first shindig at the West Village’s Super Burrito. Exuberant Aussie founder Lachlan Cartwright, an unashamedly old-school hack with a business card wedged in the brim of his fedora, mounted the bar and gave an impassioned speech: “I might as well have called this Broken Media because it’s almost broken me! But I’m having the time of my life.” So too were the guests as they guzzled martinis and snagged cigarettes from bowls on the tables. During one cig break, I had my fortune read by one of the party’s hired psychics. She said all the right things – “born under a lucky star, many children etc.

transatlantic
Christopher Sandford

Sir Anthony Hopkins, outsider actor

From our US edition

Yes, Sir Anthony Hopkins did have a life before The Silence of the Lambs. And after it, too. But most casual moviegoers would be hard pressed to add too many other entries to his filmography. Like his most famous screen creation, the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter, Hopkins has always been something of a study in contrasts. As an actor, he sits in the middle of the Venn diagram where the mainstream and the fringe overlap, seemingly as happy to mug his way through the Transformers franchise as to direct and star in a project like 1996’s August, a drily worthy adaptation of Uncle Vanya that barely registered on the sordidly commercial level.

Anthony Hopkins
Diane Cole

Monet’s Venetian moment

From our US edition

If you crave art that will envelop you, book a ticket, pronto, to Monet and Venice at the Brooklyn Museum. Enveloppe was the term the French impressionist artist Claude Monet (1840-1926) used to describe the “beauty of the air around” the objects and landscapes he painted. “Other painters paint a bridge, a house, a boat… I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house, and the boat are to be found – the beauty of the air around them, and that is nothing less than the impossible,” he said.

Monet

Thursday

Tucker Carlson

The strange death of England

Whatever happened to Britain, or the UK, or England, or whatever they're calling it? We can't even agree on what it's called. But what happened to England, the England that, if you're over 50, you grew up learning about, the England that controlled the world, the England that ran the largest empire in human history at the end of World War One?  Britain, which is an island in a pretty inhospitable climate, controlled literally a quarter of the Earth's surface – and not controlled in the way the United States controls the rest of the world with an implied threat or with economic ties through trade, but with administrators and people sitting at desks with eyeshades, counting things.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

‘The food is not the point here’: Carbone reviewed

People say that Carbone is Jay Gatsby’s restaurant – Gatsby being the metaphor for moneyed doomed youth – but it is something more awful and, because people are asleep, no London restaurant has been this fashionable since the Chiltern Firehouse a decade ago. It lives in the basement of the former American embassy in Grosvenor Square, which is now the Chancery Rosewood Hotel. I thought this building would smell of fear, of why-can’t-I-have-a-visa-please? The truth is that it does, but that fear is now a commodity: you can be the person saying no-visa-for-you. (‘Uniquely yours,’ says the advertising copy. It means it.

Tuesday

Bertie Shah

How America fell in love with the G&T

From our US edition

The gin and tonic has had quite the journey. From humble beginnings protecting British explorers against malaria, it has become the country’s favorite cocktail. Abroad, Italians grown tired of spritzes now opt for it come aperitivo hour. The Japanese bow before it. The world stumbles after it. Yet there is one land the G&T has been slow to conquer: America, the land of vodka sodas and zero-calorie seltzers. In recent years that has begun to change. While overall consumption of spirits is down, sales of gin in the US are on the rise and expected to grow some 6.5 percent a year for the rest of this decade. Craft distilleries are in the vanguard: in California, gin is infused with citrus and coastal herbs. In the South, it might be perfumed with watermelon rind or magnolia blossoms.

g&t

Thursday

John Power

Britain’s cities are descending into a San Francisco-style nightmare

One morning a few months ago I was walking past St James’s Park station when a dishevelled man with his fists clenched stepped into my path without warning. He stared at me furiously and blocked my path, body almost shaking. For a few tense seconds he stood there before I crossed the road to get away from him. ‘Most rough sleepers are harmless and vulnerable, but a small minority are violent’ When I told friends who work in central London about this incident, I was shocked at how typical my experience was. For people who commute into Westminster, it is becoming commonplace to be spat at, lunged at and screamed at to ‘fuck off’ by individuals who appear to be high on illegal drugs.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Bagels that even New York can’t beat: Panzer’s Delicatessen reviewed

That Panzer’s Delicatessen in St John’s Wood is called Panzer’s – for the instrument of Blitzkrieg – is mad, until you remember that Jews love to eat near catastrophe, and then it is merely funny. I love Panzer’s so much I am reluctant to share it, but we need all the friends we can get. I keep telling non-Jewish friends: when we burn, you will burn with us. Though I mean it as consolation, they tend to run. St John’s Wood has always existed on the edge of hysteria. Edwardian psychopaths put their mistresses here, and I once went to a children’s birthday party where Peppa Pig couldn’t park, and there was a fight with recriminations. The high street sells corsetry and facial reconstruction.

Mary Wakefield

We have to stop looking away

I learnt not to intervene on a late summer’s afternoon nine years ago. My son was still a baby and I was pushing him in his pram across a busy road in a responsible way, only after the green ‘walk’ man had lit up. I was about halfway over when a boy of about 14 on a moped scorched through the lights and past us, nearly hitting the pram. I yelled at him, and as I yelled felt the spirit of civic duty rise within me. If we middle-aged mothers don’t set the kids straight, who will? The boy skidded to a stop and turned to face me. I can’t now remember what he said, but the gist of it was that I’d radically misjudged the situation and that if I didn’t show him some respect, he’d have to hurt me.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

New York is not the city that Mamdani pretends it is

There is an unhappy history of left-wing Britons getting involved in US elections. Back in 2004, the Guardian – the flagship organ of the British left – organized a letter-writing campaign, urging voters in the swing state of Ohio not to re-elect George W. Bush. The good people of Ohio didn’t take kindly to a bunch of North Londoners telling them how to vote, and although the Guardian’s campaign probably can’t be given all the credit, the voters of Ohio duly went to the polls and swung firmly behind Bush. One wishes that London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s intervention in this week’s election in New York might have had a similar result.

New York
cicoria
Loyd Grossman

Go to Cicoria for the food, stay for the opera

From our US edition

Smart Italian restaurants in cultural destinations are like buses: you wait ages for one and suddenly two come along at once. I recently praised Locatelli at London’s National Gallery. Returning to the city, it is the turn of Cicoria at the Royal Ballet and Opera, Covent Garden; a joint under the aegis of Angela Hartnett, well-known for her upscale restaurant Murano in Mayfair, her casual chain Cafe Murano and her frequent appearances on the box. Surprisingly few of the world’s great opera houses have given much thought to catering, although things are improving. I ate very well recently at Madrid’s Teatro Real and you can push the boat out with caviar at the Met in New York.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Almost too interesting for Notting Hill: Speedboat Bar reviewed

When you are old enough, you can measure your life in restaurants. I remember, for instance, when the Electric Diner on Portobello Road (named for a long ago and far away war) was a place to eat brunch, a meal that shouldn’t exist and doesn’t really, though if it belongs anywhere it belongs here. It was fine but glib – Notting Hill is either a place with no imagination or too much of it, I’m still not sure. How it can tolerate the truth of Grenfell Tower across the way I don’t know either, but I don’t live here. The diner is gone, replaced by a Thai restaurant that is too interesting for Notting Hill The diner is gone, replaced by a Thai restaurant – the Speedboat Bar, twin to a branch in Soho – that is almost too interesting for Notting Hill.

Lawrence Osborne

The bliss of un-fame

In July, astronomers at the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System discovered an interstellar object racing through the solar system at a velocity never before seen in a purported comet. Only the third interstellar object ever observed, and now named 3I/ATLAS, it has become the subject of inevitably extravagant internet theories. This possibly ten-billion-year-old visitor has now ‘disappeared’ behind the sun, though not before the European Space Agency photographed it from Mars as it passed by. It looks like a luminous cylinder. Optical illusion, says Nasa. Interstellar objects enter our unconscious just as phases of the moon do. Who knows if they also, like the moon, exert mysterious influences on terrestrial minds?

Tuesday

Rob Crossan

Let the Hard Rock Café die

‘Live fast, die old’ ran the strapline to the David Brent: Life On The Road film a decade ago. The movie itself was a textbook example of how unwise it is to attempt to cash in on the earlier (read: much funnier) successes of your career. Not that Ricky Gervais gives a damn while residing in his Hampstead mansion, of course. As increasingly pompous as his persona now is, I’ve finally reached a place where I know I’d rather have a night out with Brent than with his creator. There would be pathos. But there would at least be lager. Although I’m certain that a 2025 London ‘big’ night out with Slough’s finest former paper salesman would almost certainly take place at the Hard Rock Café.

Thursday

Amy Rose Everett

Loud luxury in London

From our US edition

If you count among the Anglophiles emerging from Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale misty-eyed, you might be interested to hear that London's cultural calendar is having a maximalist moment. Harking back to eras of pomp, excess and pouffy outfits, two exhibitions showcase icons who made extravagance an art form: David Bowie and Marie Antoinette. In South Kensington, the Victoria and Albert Museum is hosting Marie Antoinette Style, dedicated to the most fashionable teen queen in history. Across town, the David Bowie Centre in the brand-new V&A East Storehouse space (bigger than 30 basketball courts) reveals over 90,000 items from the singer’s archive.

london luxury

Monday

John Sturgis

‘Lazarus pubs’ are a cause for celebration

The mood music around pubs lately has felt as if it were being played by the band on RMS Titanic while the industry goes down with the loss of all hands. Even before the body blow of the pandemic, people were generally drinking less, and more of what they did drink was from supermarkets. Then the spike in energy costs was particularly grave for publicans, who need to heat large rooms for 12 hours a day. Most recently, in the last Budget, they faced a hike in employer national insurance contributions, a parallel minimum wage rise and cuts in business rates discounts – with all of this offset by an insulting single ‘penny off a pint’ reduction in draught beer duty.

Saturday

Gareth Roberts

So long, G-A-Y

The G-A-Y Bar in Soho’s Old Compton Street is to close for good this weekend. It opened in the mid-1990s, spinning off from the Saturday club night of the same name at the nearby Astoria (itself long gone, thanks to Crossrail). Entrepreneur Jeremy Joseph, who has run the ‘brand’ since its inception, posted the news on Instagram: ‘Old Compton Street has been my home and my work. When I opened G-A-Y Bar, it was to be one of the safest and most proudly LGBT streets – a place where you could be who you are and feel safe. For me, Old Compton Street has lost that LGBT identity. Old Compton Street wasn’t just a street, it was a community together as one. But sadly that’s not Old Compton Street anymore.