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Only Princess Diana could carry off Wimbledon white-rimmed aviators with such style. Pictured in the Royal Box at The Championships in 1986, The Princess of Wales brought an edge to her natural elegance in these striking shades. White sunglasses scream summer so are a great addition to a holiday wardrobe, pairing well with colourful fabrics.  If you find white too stark then opt for ivory as a softer alternative. Coloured shades You can’t go wrong with a classic Audrey Hepburn style black shade paired with monochrome outfits, but they can sometimes look too harsh with the softer colour palette and floaty frocks of summer. A tinted lens and tortoiseshell frame

Brompton is one of those brands that has Britishness baked into it; it’s the reason why the bike has become a status symbol amongst China’s metropolitan elites and why 75 per cent of Bromptons are exported. But it was always hard to tell whether riders loved the idea of the bike more than its reality. On paper, a folding bike is a no-brainer for city commuters short on space, but packing in so many mechanisms while keeping the bike light has proved more than a little challenging. If you’ve ridden a standard Brompton then – say it quietly – you’ll know that despite their massive success they do have a tiny bit of

Let civilisation fall apart if it must. I no longer care. The England men’s cricket team is suddenly playing with such swaggering magnificence that everything else – endless culture wars, inflation, even the threat of hypersonically delivered nuclear annihilation from Russia – pales into insignificance. I just want to watch my heroes – Ben Stokes, Joe Root and the rest – play the game I love like deities. If Putin is going to press the big red button then so be it. As the temperature rises to a million degrees celsius here in Putney, I will console myself that at least I witnessed Jonny Bairstow’s transcendentally perfect innings at Trent

The George, Fitzrovia, was Saki’s local, and a pub for men talking about cars when Great Portland Street was called Motor Row. I imagine them sucking down gin and weeping for early Jaguars; a ghostly Max de Winter rising to leave for Manderley; Mr Rolls and Mr Royce squabbling over ale. Felix Mendelssohn and Dylan Thomas came here too. Nowadays they would be called local creatives by marketing literature, so I suspect they are pleased to be dead. Many pubs have failed, which is an incremental tragedy, though it’s pleasing for women seeking men who are not always drunk. It’s true that if you want to see a fantastical neo-Tudor

I just stuck £15 on Emma Raducanu to win Wimbledon at 22/1 — and I think you should too. I’m no tennis expert, far from it, but I’ve a reasonable sports betting record and like many others I’ve watched Emma with patriotic enthusiasm over the last two years. It’s quite easy to see when she’s hitting form. And, in her victory last night over Alison van Uytvanck, we saw that raw and ridiculous talent that propelled her towards the US Open title last year coming back. Raducanu is a hot streak player — and her hottest streak yet came in America last year, when she just started blasting her way

Brace yourself for the unmistakable sound of a tennis ball thwacking away in the background of your living room for two weeks – Wimbledon is finally upon us. As skilled as the players on the court are, it’s the delightful spectacle of my family’s amateur commentary that I enjoy the most. ‘Who on earth is that?’ my grandmother used to ask, unfailingly, when anyone unseeded dared to play against her beloved Steffi Graff. ‘The Spaniard is touching his bum again’ is the refrain in our house when Nadal prepares to serve. For the casual spectator, it’s our lack of true tennis expertise that makes the tournament such a delight to

As this year’s Wimbledon Championships will demonstrate, tennis has moved on a bit in the past half-century: rackets are no longer wooden, ‘Hawkeye’ settles the ‘You cannot be serious’ moments and the winner of the ‘gentlemen’s singles’ competition will trouser £1.7m (compared with the measly £5,000 Stan Smith took home in 1972). But what happened to those great outfits from the days of Smith, Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors? The striped shirts, the short shorts, the groovy track tops. Where did all the style go? The answer dates back to the late 1990s when the organising committee tightened-up the dress code, side-lining the previous protocol requiring clothing worn on

For anyone with any interest in the story of Mumbai, or the modern history of Indian food in the UK, Britannia & Co. is a worthy lunch destination when on the subcontinent. An institution in the city, it is one of a clutch of surviving Irani cafes that once filled Bombay. Their fame has peaked in recent years, in no small part because they were the inspiration behind one of London’s biggest restaurant successes of the last decade –Dishoom. These Irani cafes were places where sweaty taxiwallahs mingled with suited and booted business execs, while eating eggs akuri or lamb keema, under wooden fans whirling overhead. The proprietor of Britannia