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If the brimming hedgerows were not enough to sate your taste buds this autumn, then it’s time to turn your attention to game season. As I’ve written, game is not only delicious but sustainable and healthy too. Indeed, venison is higher in protein and lower in fat than any other meat. It’s not for nothing that the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) are in conversations with NHS leadership to explore getting ‘boil in the bag’ game to rural hospitals to nourish inpatients. Game is also extremely varied. Poultry can sometimes get boring: chicken is too ubiquitous, duck too fatty to eat often, and no-one really likes turkey except once a

For most little boys of my generation, and several before, the only man who could conceivably have beaten up their father was Superman. Which is why now discovering that Superman is sexually attracted to men is so brilliantly subversive. It’s like discovering Mount Everest is gay. Back in August, DC Comics artist Ethan van Sciver first broke the news that Superman was coming out, although then it sounded as if the plan was for him to be fully gay, and not just bi, during a YouTube livestream. ‘I guess Clark Kent is going bye bye,’ he said. ‘Superman is effectively gay everyone. He is gay.’ Now the first images have

It’s not so long ago that old watches used to turn-up at car boot fairs, charity shops and jumble sales (remember those?), usually in the form of unremarkable models set aside to be ‘got rid of’ after the grim reaper had called time on their original owners. Back then ‘watch collecting’ had yet to benefit from the turbo-boost of the internet and remained an esoteric hobby enjoyed by scholarly types who had put the work in to discover the varied histories of all the best brands in the old-fashioned way: by reading books. To everyone else, one second-hand watch was very much like another, regardless of the signature on the

The mist starts circling in, just dusting the hills with a soft, downy quilt. You can see for miles from my balcony, the tracks of the vineyards, the clusters of trees, the rooftops in the distance. This is Piedmont, laid out below me, all its undulating splendour, rich with wine, truffles and winding roads leading to endless villages and towns spilling over with hospitality and, yes, undoubtedly more truffles. Autumn is the perfect time to visit this criminally overlooked region in Northern Italy. This is largely because of the area’s local celebrity, the aforementioned truffle. Truffle season takes place from late September through October and gastronomy tourism is this region’s

Even a few seconds can feel like an eternity when your favourite Spectator TV debate is interrupted by a sweaty bloke in a bedsit flogging digital currency. YouTube understands how painful its ludicrous advertising interludes have become which is presumably why they invented the five-second skip button. Regular ads are bad enough but it’s those twenty-minute infomercials that somehow manage to catch us off guard that really grate. How does YouTube know when I am least able to reach for the skip button? It happened again the other day during my morning shower; midway through a favourite song a perky female voice barged in to ask whether it was ‘ok to call

Sprawled out across the kerb, exhausted and inebriated as we split boxes of 20 McDonalds chicken nuggets with old friends and new drinking partners, our faces dancing with the coloured florescent lights of the strip and hair streaked with sickly-sweet flecks of alcohol. That’s how I remember my first time in Magaluf, celebrating my A-level results at 18. Almost a decade on, I found myself back there ­– except this time, I was chatting to Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh at a rooftop bar during a literary festival. So far, so highbrow. We were both in Mallorca for the inaugural Festival Literatura Expandida a Magaluf, which took over INNSiDE Calvià Beach

With the recent Netflix release of Jake Gyllenhaal’s nordic-inspired The Guilty, as the nights draw in, what better time for a smorgasbord of films from the land of the midnight sun?  The Guilty is a remake of the 2018 Danish film of the same name about a troubled 911 operator who attempts to come to the rescue of a distressed caller.  Since the literary, TV and movie phenomenon of Nordic Noir first broke out from its Scandinavian confines in the 2000s, the genre has become an established part of UK culture, along with cosy lifestyle cousins hygge, lagom and lykke. To an extent, Nordic Noir has become a victim of its success, with its familiar ingredients

So, is it farewell to the Friends Cat Grooming Car playset with Kitten, and the Disney Princess Ariel, Belle and Cinderella set? And what about Olivia’s Electric Car toy, Eco Education Playset? Or the Ninjago Legacy Fire Dragon Attack? Or the City Great Vehicles Refuse Truck? Lego, you may have gathered, is to eliminate gender stereotypes from its products, including labelling that marks toys for boys or girls. Look up Lego for boys or girls on Argos or similar, and you’ll see the full horror of what that entails. The girls’ stuff has a pink or mauve element plus a kitten or a princess or a castle or a hairdresser

As soon as he had beaten Deontay Wilder last weekend, Tyson Fury gave thanks “to my Lord and savior Jesus Christ”. He said that he was going to pray for his fallen opponent. He has said that when he was recovering from depression and mental illness he “couldn’t do it on [his] own” and got down on his knees to ask God for help: I went down as a four hundred pound fat guy but when I got up off the floor after praying for like twenty minutes…I felt like the weight of the world was lifted off me shoulders. Most media reports glossed over these (admittedly eccentric) expressions of Christian

Getting a takeaway doesn’t quite mean what it used to. The choice used to be between a pizza, ‘an Indian’ or ‘a Chinese’, and was reserved as a Friday night treat, to be eaten out the box while flopped on the sofa watching Cilla Black’s Blind Date. Nowadays one is as likely to order a truffle risotto as a Pizza Hut combo deal. Furthermore, many millennials and Gen Z-ers seem to have no qualms ordering takeaway several times a week, carefully transposing the slow-cooked beef Massaman curry onto bone china so they can pretend (to themselves or their Instagram followers) that it’s home-cooked – honest. But all these new trends

If No Time to Die and the inevitable 007 re-runs on ITV haven’t already sated your appetite for Bond-style espionage thrills, there’s a veritable smorgasbord of spy movies available to assuage your hunger. Some of the actors who portrayed Bond also essayed secret agents of a different stripe, with Sean Connery (The Russia House), Pierce Brosnan (The Tailor of Panama), Daniel Craig (Munich, Archangel) and Timothy Dalton (Permission to Kill, The Rocketeer) all dabbling in non-007 cloak and dagger roles. For such a long-lasting and successful franchise, it’s perhaps odd that the producers (Eon) haven’t yet contrived to release any 007 film spin-offs. To my knowledge, the closest the series