An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Modern irritations seem to come in threes. No sooner do you trip over a Lime bike ‘parked’ on its side in the middle of the pavement than you discover that the self-checkout in the Co-op has a handwritten note stating ‘out of order’ taped to it and the man in front of you in the
My own episode of Long Lost Family doesn’t involve a hug from Davina McCall or a visit from Nicky Campbell, armed with a box of tissues and the kind of tight smile that tells you that you’re about to cry your eyes out. It begins with an unexpected call from my brother who lives in the United
In the depths of winter last year, an ice cream and wine bar opened in Islington. The Dreamery serves ice creams and sorbets in silver goblets with tiny vintage spoons. On the ceiling is a glowing mural of happy cows and a sun with a face, resembling a child’s finger-painting (the artist is Lucy Stein,
As we approach the final countdown to the school summer holidays and I am faced with the prospect of lots more quality time with my almost-five-year-old, and absolutely no idea what I will fill the days with, it seems a good moment to evaluate my style of parenting and seek out some advice to help
There is nothing more glorious than an art gallery selfie. In the same way that hearing someone mispronounce Van Gogh lets you know you’re dealing with an autodidact (the best!), so a gallery selfie suggests someone who doesn’t quite belong in that space: someone who is ignorant of the etiquette of the art world and
It is so-called ‘Super Saturday’ tomorrow with a host of great racing from Newmarket, York and Ascot. The fast ground, which follows yet another week of fine weather, has reduced the anticipated size of some of the handicap fields but there is still a host of competitive racing at the three tracks. Before I turn
The Irish problem has existed for centuries, though the nature of that problem is not always easy to define. It used to be political, though relations between English and Irish people on a personal level have usually been harmonious. There are still political problems, because identity – the question of to whom we owe our
Strangely, it was the Sunday Telegraph, not the red tops, that in 2002 coined the acronym Wags after staff in a Dubai hotel used it to describe the wives and girlfriends of England football players. Little did they know that the term would have the traction that it still does nearly 25 years later. Of
Early on Monday mornings, in service stations across the country, armies of the elderly are mustering. These are the OAPs about to embark on motor coach tours to the Norfolk Broads, Cornish fishing villages, the Yorkshire Moors and Welsh ghost towns, organised by men in blazers consulting clipboards, like Kenneth Williams in Carry On Abroad.
Salad cream makes me feel oddly patriotic. It’s one of those products that is so distinctively British that it has not travelled. Elsewhere, it is eschewed as a poor man’s mayonnaise. Its chief ingredients are hardboiled egg yolks, English mustard, vinegar and thick cream, and it was, in fact, the first product that Heinz produced
What to drink while watching cricket? Beer or even Pimm’s for the village green, but I think that a Test match on television demands wine. What a series we are having: likely to go down in the record books as a great example of the greatest of games. Cricket incites memories. The current Indian side
The evidence was clear, the official had dropped a clanger. At 4-4 in the first set of the women’s match at Wimbledon last Sunday, the British player Sonay Kartal should have had her serve broken when she hit a backhand long. Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova saw the ball land well out of court, as did those watching
The news that Raynor Winn’s bestselling memoir The Salt Path may not have been the whole truth has been met with a mixture of outrage, hilarity and ‘I told you so’. Many readers have smugly informed the world that Winn’s journey along the Salt Path with her husband Moth (Moth!) was so obviously a work
As a kid growing up in the Bronx and afterwards in the suburbs to the north, I loved New York. To me it was like the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz – vast, glittering and full of promise. It was where my family settled after escaping the nightmare of communist dictatorship, in the
My younger daughter finished prep school last week. These years are often billed as the best of one’s life. Indeed, I know the most charming 18-year-old whose pleasingly unfashionable dream is to teach at his old prep school – such were the halcyon times he enjoyed there. At my daughter’s leavers’ assembly, I shed a
In my first ‘proper’ job after university, selling advertising space for a well-known motoring magazine in the early 1990s, one of the few things that alleviated the utter tedium was the banter. Some of the quickfire repartee was ingenious. We were nearly all graduates, intelligent and articulate. Someone would occasionally overstep the mark, but we
Like millions of others, I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Salt Path, an account of how a penniless and homeless middle-aged couple found their souls by walking the entire length of the rugged 630-mile South West Coastal Path around the Cornish peninsula. I also enjoyed watching the recent film of the book starring Gillian Anderson and
We Jews make up 0.2 per cent of the world’s population but have won 22 per cent of all the Nobel prizes ever awarded. And we have not done this with a tailwind. Mark Twain thought the reason Jews tended to do so well in business was above-average honesty. Jewish success has been so extravagantly
I can’t say I was gobsmacked to read that Miley Cyrus and Naomi Campbell seemed more interested in each other’s company than in their fans when they held a ‘meet and greet’ in London to sign copies of their new single. Some fans complained, accusing Cyrus of ignoring them in favour of chatting with Campbell.
Ávila, Spain At school I wasn’t much good at anything – until, that is, I had the good fortune to land in Mr Hodges’s French set. It wasn’t just the ten words of vocabulary and the irregular verb we learnt every day, it was the whole structured Hodges approach which gave me confidence, showing how
Tashkent, Uzbekistan I am in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. I am standing in a historic complex of madrasas and mosques, courtyards and dusty roses, and I am staring at the ‘oldest Quran in the world’. It is a strange and enormous thing: written in bold Kufic script on deerskin parchment; it was supposedly compiled
When my father passed away suddenly in April, I committed to wearing only black until after the funeral. I’m still struggling to properly articulate my feelings, but wearing black seems like a mark – albeit a feeble one – of respect to the memory of the best man I will ever know, and a small
As a child, superhero comics felt like a guilty secret – their devotees part of a secret society who found refuge in the musty, cardboard-scented havens of comics conventions. Back then, girls were absent, dressing up was unheard of, and even children weren’t especially welcome. So when a gang of teenage girls not only turned
A woman crying elicits sympathy – even if, à la Rachel from Accounts, she is some kind of nightmare soap-opera figure from the suburbs of south London. When a woman we do not know bursts into tears in public our gut reaction is to assume she must have a good reason for doing so. She
I am pretty sure that MINSTREL KNIGHT is a well-handicapped horse off an official rating of 87. However, there is no doubt that he is a better horse with cut in the ground: he won at Haydock on heavy ground and at York on soft ground at the end of last season. With very little
Those of us of a certain vintage will remember the National Record of Achievement, a brown, crummy-looking folder, sent (personally, I like to think) by Tony Blair to every schoolchild in the country. We were encouraged to keep our certificates within its corporate leaves, from Swimming Level 1 Goldfish to Duke of Edinburgh. Presumably, before
Town – well-named, it has vitality – is on the ragged part of Drury Lane WC2 near the Majestic Wine Warehouse and Travelodge. Like musical theatre, whose home this district still is, it is so ebullient and desirous of being loved that it is impossible not to love it back, because it seethes with that
A state-school cricket competition announced last week with a final at Lord’s is such a good idea you wonder why it has taken until now for someone to come up with it. Ever since Lord (George) Byron convinced the authorities to allow the first Eton vs Harrow match to be played at Lord’s in 1805,
I have always enjoyed Royal Windsor Racecourse, as it styles itself. It may not have quite so many dignitaries popping in from the castle up the road as Royal Ascot does, but it has long been famed for its friendliness and approachability. Jockeys moving from the weighing room to join their mounts under the parade