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Bardo St James’s Restaurant – a name which reads like a map – is a vast new Italian restaurant in one of the pale imperial palaces off Trafalgar Square, near Pall Mall and The Phantom of the Opera, which goes on because snobbery and sado-masochism are among the many things that never die. You might think Bardo (I am not typing all that again) would fold down and fold up in a night, like Cinderella’s coach – it feels flimsy – but these restaurant palaces by Pall Mall are surprisingly robust. The last time I ate in this district it was at the Imperial Treasure, a gloomy and magnificent Chinese

Posing as a marine biologist and with Soviet agent Anya Amasova posing as his wife, James Bond checked into Hotel Cala di Volpe in the The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). Their mission: to gather intelligence aboard super-villain Karl Stromberg’s secret underwater lair, somewhere in the Tyrrhenian Sea between Sardinia and the Italian mainland. In the meantime, they stay in a spacious suite with exposed wooden beams and open ocean views (where Amasova also vows to kill Bond when the mission is over). When I stayed at Cala di Volpe this year, I saw no villainous marine lair, just Tommy Hilfiger’s super yacht. The hotel has retained its Bond glamour through

No one who has watched the events of the past ten days could doubt the King’s commitment to his late mother – or to his people. But I think another of Charles III’s commitments is also becoming apparent: one to British tailoring. From his black-braided morning suit when he addressed the Houses of Parliament at Westminster Hall to the ceremonial Air Marshal’s uniform he wore to process the Queen’s coffin from Buckingham Palace to her lying-in-state, His Majesty has been nothing less than impeccably attired at every turn. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that we’ve got probably the best-dressed head of state in the world. As Prince of Wales, Charles

Three episodes in I think I’ve worked out the thing that’s most annoying about The Rings of Power. It isn’t the gratuitously diverse casting. It isn’t the saccharine tweeness of the hobbity Harfoots. It isn’t the ‘You go girl!’ tediousness of the relentless female character heroics. It’s that the entire series appears to have been constructed with all the charm, flair, character, originality and artistry of an Ikea wardrobe. Take the scene where Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) and her fellow shipwreck victim Halbrand arrive – looking ludicrously healthy for a duo who till recently spent days clinging desperately to a raft of the Medusa – in the city state of Numenor. It

It was the news we were supposed to be ‘dreading’: the confirmation that Roger Federer was finally hanging up his racket. But when I heard the announcement on Thursday, my feelings were more akin to pained relief. For a long time now, being a Federer fan has felt a bit like being in a relationship which remains officially ‘on’, but which in most meaningful senses has expired. Where once it was replenished by a steady stream of matches (virtually every week, a brand-new tournament, a new opportunity to revel in the powers of the man), it had long since become an expertise in retrospection, a matter of replaying (yet again)

There’s something quite delicious about a deadline. The prospect that if you don’t book now you might never get to try the dish of the moment is enough to pull in queues and queues of customers. But in most cases the attraction of a pop-up eatery is not solely hype. Some of these temporary dining rooms offer the chance to sample the oeuvres of up-and-coming chefs – often those at the cutting edge of cuisine but without the resources for a permanent gig yet. Others give seasoned chefs an opportunity to test new concepts outside the constraints of an established space. Plenty of pop-ups have popped up in London this

There have been few more momentous weeks in British history, or indeed in world history. This commentator must plead guilty. To draw on George Bush Jr, I mis-underestimated Liz Truss and appear to have made the same mistake about Ukraine. That said, we should all be relieved when the war is over on favourable terms, and tactical nukes have remained an item in Russian military doctrine, without becoming part of military practice. Another mis-underestimation has now been corrected, one hopes permanently. Though I was never guilty, the former Prince of Wales had not received the respect that was his due. That is not true of King Charles III. Throughout the

The news that mourners may have to line up for 35 hours to pay their respects to the late Queen has made headlines – and unsurprisingly so. They say we Brits love queueing, but surely that love affair has its limits.  Elizabeth II’s lying-in-state in Westminster Hall is open to the public 24 hours a day, from 5 p.m. today until 6.30 a.m. on Monday. Last night Whitehall released the details of the military-style logistics operation that they hope will see the event run as smoothly as possible – with more than 300,000 mourners expected to form a five-mile human line stretching from SW1 along the South Bank and past

When I lived in north London as a postgraduate student, my flatmates amused themselves by shouting abusive names at the then member for Henley as he cycled past on his way to the Commons from his house in Islington. But judging by the reaction from my old neighbours in Herne Hill, Boris Johnson is likely to receive an even less affable greeting there. The erstwhile prime minister and his wife have reportedly bought a five-bedroom home in Herne Hill, the leafy liberal, left-leaning pocket of south-east London where I lived for almost 20 years before moving to Norfolk last summer. Since news of their move to SE24 became public, the neighbourhood

The grief is still raw and the news has barely sunk in. I feel quite heartbroken. But I know that many the world over feel the same. The death of Queen Elizabeth II has special resonance here in this country, in the Realms and in the Commonwealth. Yet there is barely a corner of the world that her smile did not touch. There is quote in The Great Gatsby I have always liked, and now it makes me think of her. For she ‘had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced,