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More proof, if it were needed, of the gastronomic generation gap. It seems one in ten young persons has never had a full English/Irish/whatever cooked breakfast and one in five only has it once a year. They are, of course, missing out on one of the pleasures of life. The cooked breakfast and afternoon tea are, with pudding, the great contribution of these islands to food. As to what constitutes a good breakfast, I refer you to what I consider the perfect cookery book: The Cookery Year, published by the Reader’s Digest in the 1970s. There, Theodora Fitzgibbon, a wonderful Irish food writer, briskly summarises it thus: Porridge or cornflakes

To understand Sadiq Khan’s tenure as Mayor of London, you need only ride one of his buses. Eight years of repeating that he is the ‘proud son of a bus driver’ have not yielded a single improvement to the experience of travelling by the famous red bus. In fact, many things are worse.  she suggested I couldn’t have lived in London for very long and then burst into tears Tap your card and find your way to one of few seats unsullied by chicken bones, unfinished soft drinks and disposed of vapes. Sit down and endure the tinny sounds your fellow passengers deem acceptable to broadcast from their handheld portals

Not everyone likes The Beatles. That said, trashing cultural icons is a modern phenomenon amplified by social media and done, largely, to attract attention. Yet whether you hate them or love them (yeah, yeah, yeah), their influence on pretty much everything pop music has offered since is, surely, undeniable. Sixty years ago they left an indelible imprint on both music and film that continues to this day. In April 1964, John Lennon and Paul McCartney sat down in a hotel room and wrote a song to accompany the title of the band’s first (and best) feature film, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. The song itself is typical of their early output. A sugary

An exhibition dedicated to 20th century British crime fiction has opened at Cambridge University Library. The artefacts on show range widely through the history of the genre, from items associated Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle right up to modern exponents of the form, Val McDermid and Ian Rankin.  Lurking somewhere in many of us is the awful capacity to commit the worst of crimes What’s surprising about the exhibition in a way is that it’s so relatively unusual – when, after all, was the last time you heard of a show dedicated to crime fiction? It remains the biggest seller by genre and continues to inspire some of