An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Elizabeth II was a god and a commodity: now she is gone it is time for posthumous exploitation. Lilibet’s is a restaurant named for her childhood nickname at 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair, on the site of the house where she was born. It was inevitable that Elizabeth II would eventually get a personal restaurant. Princess
Usually when my tweenage sons ask about relics from my 1990s adolescence – ‘What’s a landline?’ ‘What’s a phone book?’ – we’ll have a good laugh about these obsolete artefacts of the not-so-distant past. But last year when my ten-year-old asked about ‘Immigrant Song’, which he’d heard on the soundtrack to a Marvel movie, and
It was just a straightforward dinner in the bosom of the House of Lords, talking to members of the Jockey Club. What could possibly go wrong? When I rashly accepted with gay abandon the invitation to speak to them after dinner, I’d forgotten that I’d been quite punchy about the club over the past decade
There’s tetchy, and then there’s Ben Stokes ‘tetchy’ – pulling out his mic and stomping off cursing, or so I’m told, after Jonathan Agnew asked a disobliging question. Admittedly it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Stokes, an inspirational leader on the pitch who had just seen his team skewered in two days in
It is estimated that, sometime in the past few months, the content on the internet produced by AI finally overtook content produced by the human mind. In other words, if you go online these days – from YouTube to X, from Facebook to TikTok to can-that-really-be-a-fetish.com – you are more likely than not to be
It is, England cricket fans must remember, only one match in a five-Test series. They began the Ashes needing to win three Tests and the requirement remains the same despite the humiliation in Perth. There is still a reason to get up at 4 a.m. tomorrow for the next game. Lightning need not strike twice,
If you’re fortunate enough to have been well-lunched at an establishment like the Ritz or 5 Hertford Street, your host may ask if you fancy a cigar. You would be forgiven for declining the opportunity to step out into the December chill. Say as much and a proud gleam may then enter your host’s eyes
Where else would you see anyone wandering around with a plate heaped with such incongruous ingredients as bacon, olives, blueberry waffles and a side order of yoghurt and prunes? Nowhere but at a hotel breakfast, of course. More often than not, the food is inedible, and nothing works properly. The coffee machines always seem to
I was driving my daughter to school recently when we tuned into Heart Breakfast. A caller was attempting to answer five Christmas-related questions that, if successful, would mean that the countdown to the big day could ‘officially begin’. They weren’t hard but when the questions were answered correctly, there was pandemonium in the Heart studios.
Norman Lebrecht, who attends concerts as frequently as falcons swoop over St John’s Wood, has declared 2025 to be a terrible year for music. We are at the mercy of political activists, he thinks, and he has a point. Zealots, particularly those who pursue pro-Palestinian causes, are relentless troublemakers for whom an undefended concert hall
If Christmas is a time for giving then it seems the message isn’t getting through to nearly enough office managers. For the umpteenth year running, I’m getting the annual stream of resigned-sounding complaints from friends who have office-based careers. Office life has its perks, of course; unlike my mostly-bed-and-airport-based freelance life, you actually know what
It may come as surprise to discover that A Room with a View, the celebrated Merchant-Ivory adaption of the E.M. Forster novel, is 40 this month. Yes, as hard as it is to believe, the film starring Helena Bonham Carter and Maggie Smith had its premiere in December 1985 and went on general release in
In search of coffee on my way to work the other day, I stopped short mid-way into a branch of a popular coffee shop when I noticed the digital ordering screens. Nothing will lose my business faster than being asked to queue twice and do the work of someone else for something simple. But these
Winston Churchill and his arch enemy Adolf Hitler didn’t have a lot in common, but one passion they did share was painting: both the heroic wartime prime minister and the genocidal Nazi dictator were keen amateur artists. While auction houses are reluctant to handle or sell Hitler’s landscapes for obvious reasons, Churchill’s pictures have vastly
Last week a Radiohead-head friend offered me a ticket for the last of their run of shows at London’s O2 Arena. The poor, deluded fool had paid several hundred quid and was looking to recoup. I politely declined, saying I would rather suffer from decompression sickness. My friend was not amused – but then that’s
I used to be a Christmas pudding denier. I couldn’t see the attraction of a dense pudding made mostly of currants; frankly, I’d rather have a trifle. Of course, I was wrong: I was judging Christmas pudding by poor examples, those that sat on the edge of a Christmas lunch tray at school or were
Trainers Harry Derham and Emma Lavelle will almost certainly leave their mark at Newbury over the next two days. Whereas Britain’s most successful trainers target the Cheltenham Festival in March with their elite horses, this talented pair are more realistic and aim their best horses at this two-day meeting. For both handlers it is their
All I seem to do these days is stand in the school car park having anguished, if largely pointless chats: the Mansion Tax chat. But let’s call it the Mansion Tax Mumble, since none of us seem willing to disclose the actual sum we paid for our houses. Soon we may not have to, since
There may well be, somewhere in this nation of ours, a long-established succession of sensitive, emotionally aware 14-year-olds who can appreciate and denounce the impact of bullying. But, honestly, none of them went to my school. It doesn’t sound like there were many of this cadre at Dulwich College half a century ago either. At
In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, when Ben Gunn is found by Jim Hawkins, sunburnt and wide-eyed after three years of being marooned on the island, the first thing he asks Hawkins for is cheese: ‘Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese – toasted mostly.’ As a greedy person prone to daydreaming, I’ve often
The world is in an even greater mess than was apparent. I am not referring to Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan or other swamps of mayhem and misery, although they are bad enough. No: the new crisis is in France, and it has two malign and reinforcing aspects. First, large numbers of the younger French have given
My friend Allan Lamb calls me a ‘cricket tragic’, a back-handed compliment from a former English international cricketer. So the prospect of flying out to Australia and watching the first Ashes Test in Perth was too seductive to ignore. I knew pretty early on that the cost was going to be exorbitant. A gruelling 24-hour
‘He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden’. So goes the famous Horace Walpole quote about William Kent, the 18th-century landscape designer who saw the garden and its surrounding views as single and unified. Were he alive today, Kent might very soon leap over the ha-ha he designed at the Grade
I contemplated this piece over a bowl of porridge; not a ready-mix concoction but the raw stuff: porridge oats mixed with milk and water and eaten without any adornment whatsoever. That will win me brownie points among many nutritionists and policymakers because I was not eating an ‘ultra-processed food’ (UPF). I have a gut feeling
I became sick of bakeries when I lived in Berlin. I alternated between a few of them, doing most of my work in a café-bakery in the then-trendy Neukölln district amid other somewhat directionless snackers and typers. After a while, I felt that commercial premises hawking cakes, pastries and cookies were no place for the
When a survey of 10,000 teachers revealed this month that Britain’s primary school pupils are increasingly relying on Americanisms (the Times front page declared ‘Trash-talking children are sounding like Americans’) I realised immediately what we needed. Rex Harrison. And if not Rex Harrison himself, then a dose of arguably his greatest role – that of
Let me introduce you to the performative chef. The performative chef is a man. He is between 23 and 29 years of age. Both of his arms are covered in fine-line tattoos. His favourite tattoo is a quote from Philip Larkin that reads: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean
When Zoë Cave Hawkins bought a run-down townhouse in the heart of the cathedral city of Winchester, she was fully aware that getting permission to update the Grade II-listed property was going to be a bit of a hassle. But the reality was far worse than she could have imagined. As fast as her architects could draw
There’s a saying – the kind seen on ‘inspirational’ posters on the walls of HR departments – that claims: ‘It’s about the journey, not the destination.’ Clearly it was dreamed up by someone who has never flown from Stansted and found themselves jostling through crowds of stag and hen parties, newly arrived Polish workers (there’s
