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I do not yet have any children of my own, but a large extended family means plenty of young nieces and nephews to buy presents for come birthdays and Christmas. Those moments provide an opportunity to indulge in some pedagogic guidance: I’ll be damned if you’re getting the latest Fifa game for the PlayStation 5 – you can have a real football to kick around outside. Ditto the inevitable requests for Nintendo virtual reality headsets and Frozen merchandise. Happily, I’ve got at least one Christmas present this year sorted already – and I’m quietly confident my nephew is going to enjoy reading it as much as I just have. Lord

She’s got all the trappings of superstardom: killer looks, a clutch of awards and £4.5 million in the bank. But mention ‘Jodie Comer’ to your friends and you’re bound to get a few blank stares. The British actress, best known for playing super-stylish assassin Villanelle in the BBC series Killing Eve, has yet to become a household name. And, like many in her growing legion of fans, I want to know why. This month I saw Jodie, 29, in Prima Facie, her debut West End play. It’s a masterpiece of a monologue in which she confronts gruelling issues including sexual assault, misogyny and bias in the criminal justice system –

In the early 2000s my husband, a diplomat for the EU, was posted to Kazakhstan, a vast empty steppeland next to Siberia. It was winter and the place was covered with thick snow. My family were in England, my husband was mostly in the office; I was 61 and I didn’t know a soul. Our previous posting had been to Damascus and I had occupied myself by writing a book about the old palaces there, but here there were no old buildings as the Kazakhs had been nomads. I had nothing to do. Everyone spoke Russian – I didn’t. As my husband was a senior diplomat we qualified for a

‘Bang! Bang! …Thud.’ It’s Friday 12 August, better known to tweedy types as the Glorious Twelfth, and the inaugural grouse on the West Allenheads estate in Northumberland has met its maker. The 26°c temperature yields a slow morning, with the moorland birds reluctant to come out of the shade and the beaters and guns mopping their brows, yearning for elevenses. After the first drive, the bagged game is slung in the back of a Defender and divvied up in the gun room. And now the real challenge begins. Imagine a sort of Beaujolais Run, except instead of getting Gamay wine from France to Fleet Street, our mission is to dispatch

Even in recent heat, the English summer can be magical. As long as there is shade, a pool and a steady supply of cooling wine, there is so much to enjoy. Trees, flowers, songbirds, butterflies: dolce far niente works here too. But thinking can be the snake which insinuates itself into Eden. Susan Hill’s Simon Serrailler books are always excellent train reading and the latest was no exception, even if the principal character always puts one in mind of Turner’s supposed reply to someone who said that they had never seen a sunset like the one which he had painted. ‘But don’t you wish you could?’ It is hard to

London’s architectural landscape is changing at such a pace that it’s hard to remember what’s been lost beneath the acres of tarpaulin. Buildings I must have walked past a thousand times and that I could have sworn were important landmarks have been disappearing at an alarming rate. Despite the devastation there appears to be little in the way of pushback from harried, post-pandemic Londoners. How quickly we forget what our eyes once took for granted; the familiar razed without a second glance. The area known as St Giles, just east of Charing Cross Road and south of New Oxford Street, has suffered more ignominy than most. Once a bohemian enclave

Earlier this year, quite unexpectedly (and for personal reasons too tedious to share), I was forced to be outside the UK for ‘a while’. At the outset, I had no idea how long my exile might be: maybe weeks, maybe months. To add to the ambiguity, I had no particular place to go, except two already arranged travel writing trips of a week each (in the USA and Greece). So I decided: why not make a pleasing virtue of necessity? Why not, at the age of 58, do a geriatric version of a gap year, wandering freely about the globe? And that is exactly what I did. I packed my suitcase,

Sitting in a posh office overlooking the Royal Academy, the comedian Harry Hill is deploying one of his lesser known modes: introspection. ‘I suppose I’m one of a growing number of celebrities who do art,’ he says, one hand fiddling with his trademark oversized shirt-cuff. His point – which he returns to several times – is one of definition: as much as he enjoys making art, and as much art as he makes, he can never quite see himself as an artist. In his defence, he isn’t alone. After more than a decade as the face of one of the most-loved comedy shows this century, Hill can probably count himself

The restoration of any run-down English country mansion is likely to involve extensive re-roofing, re-plumbing and re-wiring. Only one, however, is likely to uncover microphone wires hidden deep within walls by MI6, or involve the polishing of a grand, three-storey oak staircase over which Hitler’s top henchman, dressed in full Nazi regalia, tried to throw himself (failing when he got his leg stuck in the balustrade). Mytchett Place, between Ash Vale and Frimley Green in Surrey, is a sprawling 23,000 sq ft Victorian house that has just hit the sales market for £15 million. In recent years used as commercial premises, it’s in need of complete renovation, but comes with

Well alleluia, English cricket doesn’t seem able to put a foot wrong these days. After hitting three cherries with Rob Key, Brendon McCullum and Ben ‘Bazball’ Stokes, they may well have struck the jackpot with the appointment of Richard Thompson, the Surrey chairman, to take over as head of the English Cricket Board, something this column has long advocated. Thompson has plenty going for him: uniquely perhaps among the game’s administrators he is both traditional and forward thinking. Traditional enough to have realised the Texan conman ‘Sir’ Allen Stanford, with his million-quid pile of money on the Lord’s outfield, was a wrong-un. And forward thinking enough to have championed the

My first reaction to anyone buying even a bog standard two-up-two-down terrace in London is a fake congratulations through gritted teeth. So when it was reported last week that the Duchess of York, ex-wife of disgraced Prince Andrew, had bought a £5 million mews house in Mayfair, I was surprised that I didn’t share the outrage of the general public. Sure, she does very little, spending her days lounging around in Royal Lodge, the Grade II-listed Windsor property she shares with her ex. But there’s a part of Sarah Ferguson that is totally relatable, and as she has tried – and often failed – to navigate the inner workings of the