An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
And so it begins, as Donald Trump likes to say, though not usually about cricket. He was offering his thoughts on the New York mayoral elections, which is not as much fun as the Ashes. Pleasingly, the goading is reaching volcanic levels as the Perth Test gets ever closer. Who needs Trump? The West Australian
For the past 30 years Robin Oakley has taken you through the front door of the horse-racing world and kept you in the best of company. There’s not a chance of me lasting that long, and more often than not when I try to shine a light on the sport’s brilliant mix of heroes, narcissists
There are few culinary experiences like the first bite of a Domino’s pizza. The finest N25 caviar or a perfectly seared lobe of foie gras surely can’t compare to the ecstasy that comes from that mouth-cutting cornmeal that they sprinkle all over the base, or that sweet, cloying ‘cheese’, or those tart, dancing cups of
If you saw the Edgar Wright–Stephen King adaptation The Running Man in the cinema last weekend, with Glen Powell as the eponymous fugitive in a dystopian future, then you were one of the relatively few. The film has flopped at the box office, with audiences resistant to Powell’s charms and Wright’s visual pizzazz, and in
Earlier this month, the best rock band to have come out of America in decades played London’s Roundhouse in front of 3,000 very excited British fans, all of whom sang along to every song the Alabamans played. It was the best gig I’ve been to in years, mainly because the Red Clay Strays are musically
People always divine themselves through material goods: hence the obsession with the Aga, recently detailed by my friend Rachel Johnson in these pages. Rachel loves her Aga – well, her Agas, she has two – because it needs to be defended from bourgeois socialists who don’t have Agas: they just want them, because self-deception is
Gone are the days when I always had a pen in my pocket. Gone are the days when I needed a pen to go to work. The NHS does not now always require a pen, and the NHS is not quick to abandon old technology. Ten years ago I worked in a hospital where a
It began when one of the care home residents I look after asked me to take her picture for her Facebook account. Harmless enough – until I noticed the photo had been requested by Michael Bublé. The messages were affectionate and convincing and before long she was being asked for personal information. I had to
The past few weeks has seen the pleasing spectacle of beautiful female film stars (Sydney Sweeney, Keira Knightley – even the previous Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Jennifer Lawrence, who once said that an orange victory would be ‘the end of the world’) refusing to toe the accepted Hollywood line on politics, be it by not kowtowing
In the mid-1990s, ecstasy was a drug of the suburbs. My friends and I, all A-level students and shortly to become beneficiaries of the final years of higher education that didn’t come with tuition fees, did not fit the model of ‘drug users’ that the media, still in thrall to 1980s heroin hyperbole, fixated on.
The Ashes start this week. If, as an England supporter, you were given the following two choices, which would you pick? First: England win the series 5-0. Second: the series ebbs and flows, the teams arrive in Sydney locked at 2-2, the match goes down to the final hour of the final day, and England
Nobody Wants This, the Netflix romcom that brought us the ‘hot rabbi’, recently returned for its second season. For the uninitiated, the first series introduced us to sex and relationships podcaster Joanne, played by Kristen Bell, who meets Noah, played by Adam Brody (of The O.C. millennial crush fame), a reform rabbi who has just broken up
I’m owed around $680 billion. Some 77 acres of downtown Manhattan belong to the Carter family, according to a letter written in 1894. Wall Street, Broadway and One World Trade Center – they all sit on a plot that is, by rights, mine. Yet here I am, grumbling about what ought to be in the
Fairly heavy rain fell at Cheltenham overnight and there is a lot more to come today. If there is anything near the predicted 30mm of the wet stuff over 24 hours, the ground could easily turn to heavy which, whether racing is over jumps or the flat, tends to make the results something of a
I was sitting in a hotel restaurant in Cheshire a while back: one of those rambling country manors, full of mock Jacobean wood panelling and fake Tiffany lamps, beloved of football-and-property enriched couples with gravy hued fake tans, sports cars parked outside and more signet rings than GCSEs. I was hungry and alone, aside from,
There are several class actions going on against developers of Large Language Models. Jodi Picoult, George R.R. Martin, John Grisham and several other well-known authors are among those engaging in long-drawn-out lawsuits with tech companies such as Meta (who developed the chatbot LLaMA), OpenAI (who developed ChatGPT) and Google DeepMind (who developed Gemini). These companies,
There’s not much point pretending to be an expert on Elgar (or so The Bluffer’s Guide to Music assures us) because everyone already thinks they are. And there’s definitely no point getting hung up on the historical accuracy (or otherwise) of Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner’s new film The Choral. It’s set in a West
Another week, another government offensive against childhood obesity. This time it’s a fresh round of pleas for new levies on junk food. And right on cue, out come the sympathetic pundits with a familiar lament: the poor simply can’t afford to eat well. Carrots are unaffordable and broccoli is a luxury that only the middle
A pecan pie has been on my kitchen table for the past few days, due to circumstances rendering every other surface or shelf unusable, thanks to badly timed building work and an absent fridge. A mixing bowl sits over it, protecting it from dust and sticky fingers. I’ll tell you what I’ve learned: everybody loves
Solemn, moving, serious: British. As silence fell and the wreaths were lain, even teenagers joined in the mood of reverence. Suddenly it did not matter what the gossip columns were saying about Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, or what latest mischief might arise from the Duchess of Sussex. The great ship of state and of history sailed
Last month, the founder of the Browns restaurant chain was charged with killing his mother. Shocking news, but it feels somehow appropriate. Browns is the traditional lunch spot for families looking to feed their student child, the place where 2.2s are revealed and doomed university girlfriends introduced. Many parents have found themselves spending hundreds on
A new drinks-party-shirking method has taken hold in British society. I call it ‘Lastminute.non’. Previously, the way of not going to someone’s party was to write a polite message of refusal at least a week in advance, giving the host or hostess ample time to absorb the sad but inevitable fact that various friends would
Teen Vogue published ‘9 Climate Activists of Colour You Should Know’ in January 2020. The article already seems like it belongs to a lost world, which is perhaps why Teen Vogue ceased publishing this month. It is an artefact of those frantic Metternichian years from 2020 to about the end of 2023, when Donald Trump
Asked if he actually believed in ghosts, M.R. James, author of the greatest ghost stories in the English language, answered equivocally that he was prepared to consider anything for which there was sufficient evidence. It’s the time of year when Monty James used to invite students to his rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, and turn
Nearly everywhere you go in Nymburk, a small Bohemian town an hour or so from Prague, there are reminders of its most famous son, the novelist Bohumil Hrabal. The Czech writer, who died nearly 30 years ago, grew up here, amid the coopers and maltsters at the local Postřižinské brewery, where his stepfather was manager.
Remember when history cost a few shillings? We wandered through romantic ruins, wondered who painted that dusty landscape above the fireplace, brushed lichen off carved stone and got shoes muddy spotting weeds in herbaceous borders. Visiting was about letting the quiet authority of age do its work; the place spoke for itself. After a financially
I’m 11 years old, and I’m crouched inside the broken shell of a former London bus. It’s my friend’s birthday party. He turns 12 today, and he has just been shot. Not by a real bullet, of course, but by a paintball. I look over at his father, who is busy reloading his gun’s hopper.
No matter how much the cost of convenience food rises, the idea that it’s still cheaper than cooking fresh food at home somehow refuses to go away. People can fool themselves as much as they like. But it’s (overpriced) pie in the sky. To be economical, choose chicken thighs over breast; lamb shoulder over leg.
There was a time when, whenever the gossip mags wrote about Jennifer Aniston, they’d always preface her name with ‘Sad’. Sad Jen Aniston – it became one of those three-part names, like Sarah Jessica Parker or Sarah Michelle Gellar, only condescending rather than smug. For someone who was allegedly one of the most desirable women
