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The last time I saw Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair for 25 years, he was strolling along Jermyn Street in London. Graydon was a media-land acquaintance from LA and New York where I worked as a journalist in the 1990s. We gossiped affably for a few minutes about mutual British friends before heading back to our different lives (him to a suite at the Connaught, me to a rented flat in Pimlico). It wasn’t until I read his entertaining new memoirs, When the Going Was Good, that I realised quite how very different our lives had become ever since I met him at Vanity Fair’s first Oscar party in

I blame The Spectator. The chain of events that has led me to be christened and confirmed in the Anglican Church began with an article I wrote for Spectator Life in January. I had spent New Year’s Eve with a friend, a former vicar, who had lost his faith and honourably resigned his living as a result. He claimed that most contemporary clergy no longer believe in the basic tenets of Christian doctrine: the divinity and miracles of Christ; the Virgin birth; the resurrection; life after death; even the very existence of God. I wrote an article bemoaning this, and mourning the decline of the Church as an essential element

Lindt has opened a ‘first of its kind’ flagship store at Piccadilly Circus. Roger Federer was wheeled out to cut the ribbon. It features the UK’s largest Lindt truffle pick ’n’ mix counter (a snip at £6.50/100g), a ‘barista-style’ hot chocolate bar and an ice cream station. There’s even jars of chocolate spread for those who consider Nutella lowbrow. Lindt’s CEO for UK and Ireland, in that PR corporatese that sounds like guff to everyone except his marketing department, said: ‘With 2025 marking Lindt & Sprungli’s 180th anniversary, what better way to celebrate this journey and enduring passion for captivating chocolate lovers worldwide.’ It’s enough to make me crave Quality

The weather is going to have a big bearing on the result of the BoyleSports Irish Grand National on Easter Monday. There is plenty of rain forecast between now and the off, and if that prediction is correct, the ground is going to be “soft”, or even “heavy”, by the off. I am loathe to desert Haiti Couleurs after he did this column a favour winning at the Cheltenham Festival: put up at 8-1, Rebecca Curtis’s game gelding won the Princess Royal National Hunt Challenge Cup Novices’ Handicap Chase at 7-2 by a comfortable four and a half lengths. Haiti Couleurs is a magnificent, precise jumper and seems to go

For the first half of the 2010s, any teenage girl in her room had a chance of amassing more political influence than a junior Spad. She could define political terms and concepts, blacklist undesirable elements, and argue for a different kind of society. Thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of other teenage girls would be following her, reading and engaging. These were the days of Tumblr, a youth blogging website that functioned like a dysfunctional think tank. I first found out about Tumblr in 2012, when I was in Year 7; a girl in my year group started a blog about her depression and anxiety and linked it from her public