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Saturday

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

How Cowes found the secret of a successful seaside resort

These days, most English seaside towns are sites of national mourning. You pay your respects by walking up some deathtrap pier, dropping two pence in an arcade coin pusher and whispering, your flower now on the grave: ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ But Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, has managed to stave off this sorry end. Its secret is Cowes Week. Cowes Week, which starts today, is an annual sailing regatta. It has earned its place as a respected event in Britain’s sporting calendar – always in August, between Glorious Goodwood and the Glorious Twelfth – but its beginnings were unambitious. On 10 August 1826, following an advertisement

Friday

Penworthy

Four bets for Glorious Goodwood

Day four at Glorious Goodwood is always my favourite of the meeting but, with such competitive racing, it is hard to pick winners at the best of times. However, yesterday’s downpour – which changed the ground from the fast side of good to ‘heavy’ in just an hour – has complicated things still further. Ed Arkell, the clerk of the course, predicted last night that the ground could be back to ‘good to soft’ by the start of racing today but that’s by no means certain. The Coral Goodwood Handicap (1.20 p.m.) is a real favourite race of mine and, other than looking for a well handicapped horse, I work

Phil Rhys Thomas

Admit it: no one really likes eating fish

As I sit under the sole tree on a Spanish beach, watching my fellow Brits shudder at the writhing horror show contained in the restaurant’s seafood display, it strikes me the middle classes don’t actually much like the dead-eyed edibles under the waves – we’re just conditioned to pretend to because eating them is supposedly chic. Sure, we extol fish as a sustainable and sophisticated source of high-quality protein, vitamin D and what sounds like K-pop’s next girlband, omega-3. It’s the well-informed, thinking man’s dinner, akin to choosing a Tesla before Elon Musk’s meltdown phase. But let’s be honest: the glassy stare (I’m still talking about the fish), the slimy

Philip Womack

The harrowing true story behind Barry Lyndon

Stanley Kubrick’s swooningly gorgeous film, Barry Lyndon, has just been re-released in cinemas to mark its 50th anniversary. Much ink has been spilled about its hypnotic beauty, its lavish attention to historical detail, its dreamy, luscious, candlelit photography. Yet William Thackeray’s bitingly satirical novel of the same name is often neglected – as is the true, harrowing story that inspired it. The book Barry Lyndon (first published in 1844) bore its genesis from the story of a real adventurer, Andrew Robinson Bowes, whose cruelty to his wife, the Countess of Strathmore, was notorious. Born Andrew Robinson Stoney, he rose to the rank of a lieutenant before marrying an heiress; after

Wednesday

Rob Crossan

Make teenage summer jobs compulsory

I’m of an age where a summer’s evening often means a few gin and tonics on my balcony along with cheese, olives and an Etta James soundtrack. But it wasn’t that long ago that the slow descent of the amber orb meant trekking into Chester city centre to catch a minibus that would take me to a shampoo factory on the outskirts of Flint. There, from 9 p.m. until 7 a.m., my job was to screw the tops on to bottles of shampoo and conditioner to a soundtrack of scatological invective from my workmates, broken only by a 2 a.m. canteen break for cigarettes and a semi-melted KitKat. I endured

Gary Dexter

I’m writing a novel without using AI – and I can prove it

Everyone’s seen stories about the creep of AI into art of all kinds. Recently the people behind the music-fabrication website Suno have been making outrageous statements to the effect that people don’t enjoy learning musical instruments and writing their own songs, so why not let AI do it for them? This is very new, very disturbing and very consequential. I could talk about graphic art and video and film-making, but you’ll know what’s been going on there. I’ll just cut to the chase and get to how AI tools are impacting and will continue to impact the writing of fiction.  I anticipate a future in which human authorship will need to be proven. A

Marcus Ray

The other side of Yemen

In the western imagination, Yemen exists as a byword for terrorism and death. Its appearances in international headlines are flattened into a trilogy of suffering: Houthis, hunger, hopelessness. The civil war has dragged on for over a decade, leaving much of the nation in ruins. Life is punishing for the millions who navigate daily existence amid chronic instability. The Houthis – entrenched in the capital, Sana’a – continue to tighten their grip on power in the northwest. Their attacks on Red Sea shipping have drawn international reprisals and fuelled regional tensions. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office still advises British nationals against travelling to the country. Yemen is not therefore

Tuesday

Arabella Byrne

The competitive cult of the summer camp

‘Before you ask, Mummy, the answer is no.’ While this could be any number of conversations that I have with my seven-year-old daughter, this one has a particular tang. It is the thrice-annual bargaining round that I do in the run-up to any school holiday in which I try to get her to go to a kids’ camp. An executive at Goldman Sachs in equity sales does not work as hard as I do to seal the deal – but I fail every time.  For a brief, prelapsarian period when she was five and more biddable, I had some success. I managed to get her into all manner of summer holiday camps in Oxfordshire: activity camp, Shakespeare camp, tennis camp, even God camp. You name it, I signed