An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Ask my friends and family and they’ll tell you: I am an electric car bore. I’m not a gushing enthusiast. I’m more the negative kind of EV dullard. I can’t stop telling people about the horror of driving these wretched things. I’m really not like this about other subjects, or indeed about life. I’m generally
Béziers, France The most significant application to date of artificial intelligence and unmanned aerial aircraft has been unveiled: the Poopcopter. It does what it says on the tin. It scoops poop. No more plastic bags. No more furtive glances while out walking to see if Fido’s emissions have been observed by truculent neighbours. According to
Way back in the noughties, Charles Moore observed that the Conservatives could learn a lot from the Boden story. ‘An individualistic, non-hierarchical, girly, aspirational, southern, 40 per cent internet-based, middle-class business, laid back but hard-headed. Yet, at the same time, it is quite traditional […] the way of life he is promoting is instinctively conservative’,
When it comes to traditional recipes, there are few things we love more than an unlikely origin story, ideally one born out of clumsiness or forgetfulness. The bigger the kitchen pratfall, the more delicious the product. Setting pancakes on fire? Accidental crêpe Suzette! Nothing in the restaurant apart from lettuce and some pantry ingredients? The
At Julie’s at the fag end of Saturday lunchtime, Notting Hill beauties are defiantly not eating, and the table is covered with crumbs. Restaurant Ozymandias, I think to myself. This is no longer a district for the perennially wracked, or unrich. The Black Cross – Martin Amis’s ideal pub in London Fields – is now
The other day, clearing out boxes, I stumbled on a sheaf of invitations from childhood. Decorated with trains and fairies, they are very similar to those my children still (just about) receive today, except there’s usually a Thelwell pony instead of Elsa from Frozen. The handwritten addresses, the names of the houses and streets (Bluebell
There may still be some poor benighted souls who regard the Springboks as the bane of rugby union. If you meet one, get ready to dispense a proper mauling. South Africa, for so long the Millwall of rugby, are playing an all-round game that is so breathtakingly attractive you have to love them. It may
There’s no shrewder punter than J.P. McManus who likes to say: ‘There’d be many more fish in the sea if they could only learn to keep their mouths shut.’ Last year, clever young Emmet Mullins won the Cesarewitch with J.P.’s The Shunter but when Emmet let it be known that he was aiming for the
They were loud, vivacious and gloriously un-PC. Sometimes they seemed to be learning how to cook as they went, barely one step ahead of the viewer. It didn’t matter. If anything, it only made the BBC’s Two Fat Ladies more watchable. And 25 years on – the last of the two dozen episodes pairing Jennifer
As a Brit who has lived in Spain for almost a decade, I must take issue with Zoe Strimpel’s recent article arguing that it’s the ‘worst country […] in western Europe’, at least as a holiday destination. My four years in Granada and almost five in Malaga have shown me that it’s the best place
It’s Wednesday, which means my evening is booked up for Slow Horses. The usual protracted regime of children’s tea-bath-bed will be compressed into about 10 minutes (packet of crisps, cursory going-over with a wet wipe, withholding of bedtime story on thoroughly spurious grounds) before my husband and I leap onto the sofa like The Simpsons
In the weeks since the Labour government came to power, we’ve gone from debating compulsory teaching of maths until age 18 to entertaining the idea that the times tables may be too stressful for children to memorise. My resilience, my determination and my empathy are largely products of being bad at maths When I was
Sitting in a gigantic marquee on the green edge of Munich, surrounded by thousands of boozy Germans singing along to a Bavarian oompah band, I wonder how I got talked into coming to another Oktoberfest. Last time I came, ten years ago, I hated it and swore I’d never come again, but this time feels
Pull those ripped tartan trews on lads, the Sex Pistols are back! Well, kind of. Lead singer John Joseph Lydon, aka ‘Rotten’, is livid that the other three surviving members have decided to perform a couple of charity gigs without his consent. Really? Punks doing charity gigs? Sid Vicious must be turning in his Pennsylvanian
Hollywood has been good to war photographers this year. First came the dystopian blockbuster Civil War, with Kirsten Dunst as a veteran photojournalist touring America at war with itself. Now comes Lee, starring Kate Winslet as second world war legend Lee Miller, who captured the liberation of Paris and the horrors of Dachau. Both demonstrate
When Sven-Göran Eriksson’s coffin was being paraded through the streets of his home town, ahead of his funeral, it was followed by a marching jazz band playing ‘The Bare Necessities’. The song, from Disney’s The Jungle Book, was intended to honour the former England manager’s request that his send-off should be celebratory rather than mournful.
Up and down they go, criss-crossing the country, cars packed full of stuff. Duvets, pillows, vapes, cuddly toys, packs of cheap pasta and rice, Aldi-brand vodka, clothes horses and apprehension. There are around 1.7 million undergraduates and a third of them, the freshers, are most probably leaving home for the first time. Some are already
After a week of rain, the official ground conditions for tomorrow’s cards at Newmarket and Haydock both have ‘heavy’ in the description, with a little more of the wet stuff forecast too. If I have learnt only one thing from my decades as a punter, it is to bet with caution when the ground turns
A few weeks ago I felt it was my civic duty to draw attention to the many grammatical mistakes and spelling errors in the National Trust’s pronouncements. The abundance of howlers seemed to constitute something of an educational hazard: ‘How many impressionable schoolchildren will assume that the phrase “It’s [sic] location is unknown”, published by
Early in the first episode of Holding, an adaptation of Graham Norton’s novel of the same name, a young, ambitious, foul-tempered detective is called to a village in west Cork where human remains have been found. Before handing the investigation over and returning to the city, she spits out her contempt: ‘I’m not spending weeks down
Iona, Angola East of the gulps of cormorants along the Skeleton Coast by the Ilha da Baia dos Tigres, Atlantic mists are rolling in across the Angolan desert. A red, alien sun dips towards the horizon and I’m crouching down on the sand, with my face close to the oldest living thing on our planet.
The English language has immense resources, but the odd weakness. What, for instance, is the translation for ‘Auld lang syne’? We were discussing that profound topic while telling stories about absent friends, recalling the occasional bottle and thinking about Britain. Nick Elliott’s response to grim news was to open a bottle of Mouton Rothschild ’82
Spain is busy with an image update. Thanks to a host of savvy media stories, we’re now supposed to think of Spain not just in terms of package holidays, sangria, and Catholicism but also as chic, romantic, stylishly left-wing – the macho anti-fascism of Hemingway’s Spain updated for the #MeToo age – and devastatingly cutesy.
Snus is a smokeless nicotine product that you insert between your gum and your upper lip. Your saliva soaks into the pouch which in turn releases nicotine, entering the bloodstream without a million tiny pesky tar particulates. In the UK, it is illegal to sell tobacco-based snus, though the non-tobacco variant, also known as nicotine
Before the op, I was going to write a jaunty piece about how getting yourself ready to go into hospital is like getting ready to go to a wedding. Both require new clothes – that is unless you feel confident that your jimjams – dressing gown, slippers and, for goodness’ sake, knickers – are all
I am a procrastinator: a time-waster, a faffer-about, an idler, a vacillator. A self-loathing, self-sabotaging masochist grappling with that mad parody of perfectionism, which leads, instead of efficiency, to neglect, apathy, inertia, distraction, and great pain. It is irrational but irresistible. It is to time-keeping the greatest false economy since the finances of the Weimar
As I leant over to speak to one of my dining companions in a busy restaurant, I felt something shuffle on my knee. I briefly wondered if it was a rat. But it was just a busybody waiter, who had taken my napkin from the table and folded it upon my lap. It was a
How many Spectator readers are aware that tiny Montenegro, that silver sixpence of south-east Europe, so long lost in the jumbled purse of geopolitics, has some of the deepest canyons in the world? Not many, I’d bet – we know the luscious Montenegrin Mediterranean coast, if we know anything. And I’d wager even fewer know
Why do we decide something is not for us? This is a question I’ve been pondering as I’ve got older, and started to take a liking to various cultural products that I’d previously marked down – in some cases, for decades – as absolutely unpalatable. Is this a sign of a maturing, more tolerant palate?
