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Monday

Brigid Keenan

What happened to Jonathan Aitken’s young meteors?

I am not bragging when I say that 56 years ago I was a young meteor. No: it is official. In 1967, Jonathan Aitken, then a young journalist on the Evening Standard (his uncle, Lord Beaverbrook, owned it at the time) wrote a book about the upcoming young movers and shakers in London – the stars of the Sixties (to mix celestial bodies). The Young Meteors it was called, and I was one of them.  At that time, I was 27 years old and the fashion editor of the Sunday Times and Aitken put me in as one of the three powerful influencers in that world. (The others were Marit Allen of Vogue and Georgina Howell of the Observer –

Sunday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The never-ending appeal of Tetris

I can remember exactly where I was when I first fell in love with Tetris. It was the student bar of Oriel College, Oxford, in the very early 1990s. I’d gone to visit my friend Ed, and we bunged a few 10ps into the sticky arcade cabinet in the corner of the bar while we chatted and drank our beer. The first game was moreish. By halfway through the second my goose was cooked. That summer I visited the Oriel Bar a lot. I wasn’t visiting Ed. I was visiting the Tetris machine.  Against modern video games – with their complex narratives, orchestral music, photorealistic 3D graphics and vast worlds to explore – Tetris looks like a pushbike racing

Friday

Penworthy

A 12-1 tip for the bet365 Gold Cup

The bet365 Gold Cup, that’s the former Whitbread Gold Cup, remains one of my favourite big race handicaps of the jumps season and I am pleased to say that I have a good tipping record in the race. A quick, slick jumper who stays well is required as the fences come thick and fast on this right-handed track with an uphill finish. I have already put up one horse in the race and that is Annsam each way at 16-1. I think Evan Williams’ talented gelding will be perfectly suited to this track given his tendency to jump right at several fences and I will be very disappointed if he

Esther Watson

Thank you Jerry Springer, pioneer of reality TV

Those of us who worship at the altar of reality television have Jerry Springer to thank (or to blame).  Springer was an early pioneer of reality TV. His show was the beginning of the end of television as the world once knew it. You didn’t need to be talented or interesting or rich or even beautiful to garner attention. He brought a new kind of intrigue and voyeurism on to our screens – he showed people to people as entertainment.  He made ordinary humanity extraordinary: shouting, screaming, even, on occasion, violence featured on his show Despite beginning his career in politics, working for Bobby Kennedy before becoming the mayor of

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

What makes a proper Dracula film?

If Dracula is about anything, he’s about sex. Renfield, in theatres now, is the latest revamp of the Transylvanian bloodsucker mythos, and it is not about sex. In fact, it is a thoroughly sexless movie which might be why, despite some gusto performances and gloriously icky make-up effects, Renfield is a flaccid, directionless affair.  There is an early red flag that signals where the movie is going. Nicholas Hoult as the titular minion and Nicolas Cage, playing fiction’s most feared set of fangs, are laying low in an abandoned hospital in New Orleans, having fled there after a nasty run-in with some vampire hunters in the old country. Famished for fresh blood, Dracula

John Sturgis

Why I’ll never be a disappointed West Ham fan

It was one of the most visually striking events of the interwar years and one of the first times that moving footage captured a major news event clearly. A vast crowd poured onto a football pitch, only restrained from covering it completely by a single mounted policeman and his white horse holding them at bay. In fact, the horse, Billie, wasn’t white, he was grey, it just looked that way in the newsreel. And he wasn’t alone – he just stood out more than the other horses, bays and chestnuts. But a myth was born. The ‘White Horse Cup Final’ was the inaugural match at the newly-built Wembley Stadium. While it was

Wednesday

Alex Barton

Where to get your Lapsang (now Twinings has ruined theirs)

Tea drinkers erupted in a fit of caffeinated rage on Monday; kettle cosies were dashed across the kitchen, bone china was placed down hastily and many people were all very cross. Twinings sparked the uproar after axing its Lapsang Souchong tea and replacing it with something called ‘Distinctively Smoky’. It has been met with near universal disapproval and branded a stain on the company’s 300 year history. Famously Winston Churchill’s brew of choice, Lapsang Souchong is a centuries-old tea thought to have originated in the Wuyi Mountains in the Fujian Province of China, with the first record of it in 1646. Legend has it Wuyi locals fleeing Qing soldiers dried

Zoe Strimpel

The joy of India’s heritage hotels

As the pandemic roared through India, I wondered when tourists like me would be able to return to a country so central to the traveller’s imagination. When we did return, would it show the scars of the hideous death toll and extreme burden of suffering? Would we feel safe? Finally, nearly three years since I first wondered this, I went to find out. I flew not long after India relaxed all Covid paperwork late last year. A sadistically bureaucratic nation at the best of times, India had scrapped British e-Visas in retaliation for something that no one can quite work out, making the visa application process somewhat Kafka-esque. The e-Visa

Fred Garratt-Stanley

Inside London’s first community-owned pub

When Enterprise Inns closed the Ivy House in April 2012 – with plans to sell it to a property developer – things looked bleak for the south London pub. Its well-established status as a community and live music venue, which has hosted artists like Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello, and Ian Dury, was under threat. What followed is a story of civic triumph.  Nestled in the residential backstreets of Peckham Rye, The Ivy House has the proud title of being London’s first cooperatively-owned pub. When its existence was threatened, members of the local community stepped forward, campaigning successfully for a Grade II listing and raising £1 million to buy the freehold