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A beginner’s guide to finding a good nanny

When an au pair or nanny writes ‘I was wondering if I could talk to you this evening,’ it is rarely good news. At best, it is to ask for a pay rise; at worst, to give notice of a departure. ‘I’d like to go to Madrid,’ said our beloved au pair one evening, confirming our worst fears, and so began the quest for a new live-in nanny. We decided not to confront her with this discovery, and she proved a superb au pair Finding a good au pair or nanny is so fraught with peril that specialist agencies exist to reduce the burden, with some charging thousands of pounds

Golf keeps getting weirder

Golf has never been weirder or better. In 2022, the upstart LIV Golf, funded by Saudi Arabia’s $700 billion sovereign wealth fund, took on PGA Tour, poaching stars including Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka. Mohammed bin Salman’s regime lured them by shovelling oil money into their pockets, with Mickelson signing for a reported $200 million. A graying, 42-year-old Sergio Garcia, with PGA Tour earnings of $54 million in his 23 years as a pro, got an instant $40 million to lose LIV tournaments to younger, better players. Sure enough, the suits in the PGA Tour’s executive suites soon brokered a secret deal with the Saudis Golf pundits like

Why celebrity restaurants so often fail

London has seen a string of celebrity restaurants, mostly with disappointing results. David Beckham and Guy Ritchie opened a pub in 2018 – the Walmer Castle – but it didn’t last. They handed it on in 2022 and the pub has changed hands three times since its opening. Ed Sheeran set up his grastropub, ‘Bertie Blossoms’ just two months before the pandemic, and while it is still open, Sheeran has admitted that it’s not gone smoothly. He’s learned that unless you have a large chain, making money off a restaurant is very difficult. Lewis Hamilton and Leonardo DiCaprio have tried the chain business model, opening eight locations of their plant-based

Three big priced ante-post bets for April

Max McNeill and his family, who own THREEUNDERTHRUFIVE, have been hoping for months that their horse would line up for next weekend’s Randox Grand National. However, they listened to the man who knows the horse best, 14-times champion trainer Paul Nicholls. He persuaded them that their nine-year-old gelding would be better suited to the challenges of the bet365 Gold Cup instead. This advice led to Threeunderthrufive swerving Aintree and instead being on target for Sandown on 27 April where he will have a really good chance of landing the £95,000-plus first prize. Threeunderthrufive ticks a lot of boxes for this race: he stays well, he jumps well, he goes on

Kurt Cobain’s life was an American morality tale

The Peaceable Kingdom probably isn’t the first place you would have looked for Kurt Cobain. Of all the ironies and confusions of his brief life, perhaps none was as pointed as his choosing to kill himself in a room overlooking that sign, announcing Seattle’s upscale Leschi neighbourhood, with its views of Lake Washington and the snow-capped mountains beyond. It was here that, one morning in April 1994, Cobain – then in the third year of his marriage to his fellow musician Courtney Love – first injected himself with heroin and then took a shotgun and blew his brains out. Had he lived, he could have gone on to become a

The person who edited this will soon be redundant

Whenever I write about AI on The Spectator (which is a lot) I always get comments like ‘Yawn. Wake me up when AI actually does something’. And, to a point, these are fair comments. For all its remarkable feats, its photos of Shakespeare with weird fingers, its videos of dogs typing in spacesuits, the new wave of AI hasn’t really done something simultaneously concrete and astonishing, something where you can draw breath and say ‘Wow, that is definitely replacing this particular job’. In my experience, these AI chatbots respond better if you are polite, an uncanny fact Well, now I can address that. Because I am so obsessive about AI,

The cult of Camille Paglia

There’s a spectre floating inside the head of a certain type of young woman. It’s the fast-talking, sex-realist American academic Camille Paglia. She was big in the 1990s but my parents haven’t heard of her. ‘Did she write Fear of Flying?’ asks my dad. On sections of the internet she has become a folk hero. She’s an ideological guiding force for the female hosts of Red Scare, an influential left-ish podcast which was described by the Cut as ‘a critique of feminism, and capitalism, from deep inside the culture they’ve spawned’. Paglia is equally popular among some conservative factions: a 2017 debate between Paglia and Jordan Peterson has amassed 3.5