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For the past decade I have suffered from noisy neighbours in the flat below mine. First it was the stream of student tenants, thundering up and down the communal staircase day and night, banging doors, shouting to each other, playing their guitars. Then at last the flat was bought by a middle-aged owner-occupier, who completely gutted and refurbished the place; the deafening noise and pervasive dust from the months-long building works was almost unbearable. Now that his works are over, I have to put up with the day-to-day clatter and clamour of a neighbour with a lot of Gen Z house guests and a penetrating voice. Noisy neighbours are a

I love Roquefort, having been introduced to it when I was 16 by our French exchange student Geneviève, whose father was a producer of the cheese. She brought some in her luggage, wrapped in many layers of brown paper so that the unique, pungent smell wouldn’t invade her clothes. My parents, gourmet cooks and gourmands, immediately started incorporating Roquefort into their menus. Back then it was difficult to find a blue cheese on the US east coast (although Wisconsin had been making one for centuries). When a food shop called Amanda’s opened in Westport, Connecticut, my Swedish mother would drive the seven miles from where we lived to buy Roquefort

When Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, musician and satirist Tom Lehrer famously quipped that political satire had become obsolete. Today, many people under 50 would be hard-pressed to say who Kissinger was – let alone why the award was controversial. So perhaps, given recent events, it’s time to update the epigram: satire became obsolete the day an Irish comedy writer was arrested by five armed police officers and questioned for hours over a few offhand remarks he made on X. Personally, I never post anything on X. I don’t have the time or energy. And while I’m an implacable supporter of free speech, I also

Given that almost 1.7 billion litres of beer were poured in British venues in the past year, you’d think we’d be able to keep the country’s biggest beer festival afloat. It is therefore sad to hear that the Great British Beer Festival will be taken off tap next year, its organisers claiming it can no longer afford to get its round in. ‘In the simplest of terms, we did not get enough people through the doors to cover costs,’ according to Ash Corbett-Collins, the chair of the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra), who may well be ruing the decision to move the festival to Birmingham, cited by more sceptical beer

The Duchess of Sussex has achieved something quite remarkable. After the brickbats hurled at the first season of her Netflix show With Love, Meghan – the furious pro-monarchy outrage, the eye-rolling from critics, the memes that lampooned her syrupy anecdotes – many TV personalities would have flinched. They would have called consultants, tweaked the format, apologised by going in a ‘new direction’. Meghan Markle (or should I say Sussex) has done the opposite. Season two arrived last month: unchanged, unrepentant and every bit as twee as the first.  Like her homemade ‘jam’, that’s not to say it’s gone down well. ‘Painfully contrived’, ‘irrelevant meets intolerable’ and ‘tone-deaf’ were just some of the

The recent commemorations surrounding the 150th anniversary of John Buchan’s birth – not least in The Spectator – have stirred up literary memories for me. Not of Buchan or his work particularly, I was a little too old for the glaring coincidences of The Thirty-Nine Steps when I read it in my twenties, but of a lifelong Buchan-admirer I knew slightly, the late author Peter Vansittart. Unlike many, Vansittart, a historical novelist among other things, took Buchan seriously, extolling ‘the romantic… the novelist, the adventurer… tolerant and humane.’ Buchan’s The Three Hostages he read every year, he said, as a kind of ritual: ‘curtains drawn, telephone unhooked, the fireside, the

A thought hit me when bingeing the first series of The Paper on Sky’s Now streaming service this week: how on earth did it take this long for someone to make a sequel to The Office? Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a glowing verdict on the comic merit of The Paper – an Office-style mockumentary set in a struggling regional newspaper in Toledo, Ohio. Rather it was a reflection on the usually mercenary economics of big television. During the pandemic, the American version of The Office racked up an astonishing 57 billion streaming minutes, despite its final episode having aired in 2013. The show premiered in 2005, inspired by the

There are many destinations which spring to mind when considering the options for a weekend away with a young family. There are beaches by the dozen, theme parks and glamping opportunities galore. But there is only one Florence. And I cannot say this strongly enough: when it comes to the kids, the Center Parcs of the Renaissance will not let you down. It begins with Tuscany itself, a place so beautiful that you can get Stendhal syndrome on the bus on the way from the airport. And even if your children are glued to their screens, eventually motion sickness will force them to look up and they may glimpse its