Camilla Swift is the supplements editor of The Spectator.
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First things first. Yes, Val d’Isère does have a reputation for being expensive — and it is, especially if you’re planning on eating out and embracing the après ski every night. But no matter what anyone says, you can’t argue with the fact that the skiing is fantastic. Combined with its neighbour, Tignes, there’s a
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The latest adaptation of one of Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh’s books is Filth – a film so filthy that Deborah Ross had to ‘endure’ the film ‘from behind her hands’. But, somewhere amongst the ‘enduring’, she became ‘strangely hooked’, as Bruce Robertson (aka James McAvoy) led her through Edinburgh’s ‘dark underbelly of general horridness’. Filth
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When you hear the words ‘English art’, there are very few people who would immediately think of embroidery. As Dan Jones said when he was asked if he would like to present a programme about ‘the golden age’ of English embroidery, ‘Embroidery? What, like sewing?’ But accept the offer he did, and found that there’s
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Yorkshire, says William Cook, is the sculpture capital of Britain. It was the birthplace of ‘Britain’s greatest sculptors, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore’ – but is this just coincidence, or ‘is there something about Yorkshire that makes great sculpture happen here?’ In this week’s lead Arts feature, he visits the ‘stunning, 500 acre’ Yorkshire Sculpture
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Just 9 months after the horsemeat scandal revealed that products labelled as beef did, in fact, contain horsemeat, one might have expected the food standards authority to have cracked down on food labelling – particularly when it comes to meat. But in an investigation broadcast earlier this week by the BBC’s Farming Today programme, a
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Are the Tories right to see Ed Miliband as a joke? On this week’s Spectator cover, Peter Brookes has drawn Miliband as Wallace, with Ed Balls as his ‘Gromit’ sidekick. And on this week’s View from 22 podcast, presented by Fraser Nelson, he and The Telegraph’s Dan Hodges discuss whether people are right to dismiss
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As the new artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Gregory Doran might be expected to lie low as he settles into his new role. But on the contrary – Doran is full of ideas about how to develop the company, as Robert Gore-Langton finds when he interviews him in this week’s Spectator. As well
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The Great British Bake Off – or ‘GBBO’, as it’s known to the more dedicated fans – is one of the breakthrough television programmes of the past few years. It started off as ‘just another’ cookery show – albeit with a reality twist. But now, as Season 4 kicks off, it has attracted a loyal
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For many people, stories and story-telling formed the basis of their childhood. But there are others whose childhood is devoid of books, and it’s these children that Oxford’s new Story Museum aims to help. As Robert Gore-Langton puts it, ‘beyond [Oxford’s] dreaming spires is an urban hellhole of burning cars, despair and unemployment’, and, he
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Normally, August is a rubbish time of year for films, as this week’s cinematic offerings prove. But, says Deborah Ross, there’s one release this week which is worth seeing, and that’s Kuma. An Austrian-Turkish project, it focuses on the life of Ayse, who is married off and moved to Vienna, where she finds that she’s
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The simplest and best way to get straight to the heart of the Highlands from London is by sleeper. Board in Euston, have a plate of haggis and tatties (and perhaps a nip of whisky to knock you out) and before you know it, you’ll wake up the next morning as the train crosses Rannoch
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In January of this year, Melissa Kite wrote our cover story about how the RSPCA has morphed from being an animal welfare charity into an animal rights group. She wrote of the ‘culture of fear at their headquarters’, and explained ‘how deeply suspicious some animal experts have become of this once-respected body’. Since then, the problems have
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‘Shakespeare’s Globe’, as the theatre has been called since it was founded in 1997, is unusual for a theatre in that it makes a large annual profit, without receiving public funding. How? Its unique angle means it has no need to market itself – what’s more attractive to an American audience than Shakespeare, in London,
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The Tate Britain has recently undergone a ‘sorely needed’ rehang, which Andrew Lambirth explores in this week’s Spectator. As a ‘welcome return to the great tradition of the chronological hang’ might have its detractors, but the BP Walk Through British Art is, overall, a fantastic display. Here’s the director of Tate Britain, Penelope Curtis (who was
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Wadjda is the first feature-length film to come out of Saudi Arabia, and was shot by the country’s first female director – but those aren’t the only things that are great about it, says Deborah Ross. It’s also ‘fascinating, involving, moving, and an entirely excellent film in its own right’. The story might be simple,
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Has the British establishment been taken over by men from the Commonwealth? What with a Canadian in charge of the Bank of England, an Aussie strategy advisor for the Tories, a South African advising the Lib Dems, and — let’s not forget — a Zimbabwean coaching our cricket team, it does seem as if alpha
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This May, David Goodhart’s latest book, The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration, earned him the title of ‘too hot for Hay’ when he was ‘shunned’ by the literary festival. The festival director, Peter Florence, went on to describe the book as ‘sensationalist’ and ‘not very good’. But all was not lost. As
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Deborah Ross reviews two films for us this week. The first is Pacific Rim, a ‘giant monsters v. giant robots’ film, and to be perfectly honest, that’s about all she has to say on the matter. If you do want to find out more, here’s the trailer: Her second film this week is ‘The Moo
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The BBC’s Proms kick off today, with the First Night of the Proms from the Royal Albert Hall delivering what they describe as ‘a surge of natural energy in sea-inspired works by Britten and Vaughan Williams’. In this week’s magazine, Kate Chisholm speaks to the director of the event, Roger Wright, about the challenges of what
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The buzzword of the moment seems to be ‘rewilding’. George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and environmentalist has a new vision for the countryside, which he wrote about in the magazine two weeks ago. Instead of covering our green and pleasant land with sheep, what we ought to be doing, he argues, is re-introducing all of
