An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
My home city of Oxford has been ravaged by shop closures over the past decade but there is still one outstanding second-hand bookshop (the estimable antiquarian department at Blackwell’s apart) and it’s the Oxfam bookshop on St Giles. Thanks to a regular donations from dons and writers, there are invariably high-quality and interesting items on
Once at my old local paper, the Grimsby Evening Telegraph, a trainee made the mistake of sniggering when asked to cover the allotments sub-committee. ‘Don’t ever fuck with allotment holders,’ the news editor warned. ‘It may not matter to you, but they take those little patches of land very seriously indeed.’ Like most of the
The French claim authorship of April Fool’s Day, dating it to the late Middle Ages. Back then, those who celebrated the year’s beginning on 1 January under the new Julian Calendar made fun of those who still went by the old one. A paper fish was attached to the unsuspecting backs of Gregorian diehards and
How do you walk away from greatness? How do you vacate the position of being literally the best person in the world at something? Most of us never have to face this challenge, but at some point Ronnie O’Sullivan will. In Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry he has contrasting examples of how to tackle it.
It is the evening of Monday 23 September 1985. A band called the June Brides are playing a free gig in the bar of Manchester Polytechnic’s Students Union, the Mandela Building (of course) on Oxford Road. I find myself among the audience of freshers’ week first-year undergraduates. I am 18, a small-town boy who’s been
I like to think of myself as good at making friends. I tend to rank them. There are kindred spirits (rare), very good friends (perhaps five at the most), and good (ten or more). Friendships, like plants, need looking after; they require time and attention. One rank below friends are acquaintances. Acquaintances add warmth and
Is nothing sacred? Not quite, as it turns out. There remains one last object of piety in these, the early days of the third Christian millennium (don’t laugh). Surprisingly, it is a fictional bear from darkest Peru. Yes, Paddington is back in the news. Because he hath been desecrated. There is, or was, a sedentary
I’ve been to a few underwhelming Unesco World Heritage Sites. Take the Struve Geodetic Arc, which curves almost invisibly across Eastern Europe. I visited without even realising. As for the Fray Bentos corned beef factory, in Uruguay, I’m writing this about 20 minutes from the Fray Bentos corned beef factory and I’m still reluctant to
The Carnegies are a long-running award for children’s writing and illustration, established by the Library Association in honour of Scottish philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and first awarded in 1936 to Arthur Ransome’s Pigeon Post. This year’s shortlist of 16 for fiction and illustration, chosen by a dozen librarians, is out now and billed thus: ‘Marginalised Male
I don’t intend to start a feud. Most of Sean Thomas’s essay on The Spectator’s website last week, titled ‘Good riddance to literary fiction’, I agree with. It’s true that the high-flown heavy hitters of the book biz get far less attention than in yesteryear – though ‘litfic’ has never been a big money-maker in
Years ago, newly triumphant from getting my first book published, I went to my parents’ house for a celebration dinner. Having duly toasted their son’s modest literary success, they then revealed that I wasn’t the new author in their social circle. An old university friend of theirs from Holland – we’ll call him Jörg –
According to MailOnline, Kate Moss ‘sparked fan concern as she’s spotted looking “fraught” and “on edge” at Paris Fashion Week’. Good. Kate Moss is one of the very rare celebrities who I’m interested in – because she’s one of the very few celebrities who’s interesting – but in recent years she has become a bit
Time was, you knew where you were with the patron saint of Ireland whose feast is 17 March. He was a Briton and he tells us in his Confessions that, when he was a teenager, he was captured by Irish slave traders and taken to Ireland, where he herded sheep. He turned to God and
With more than 250 million subscribers, Spotify is by far the biggest audio streaming platform in the world – and for countless families like mine, it’s the first port of call for music, audiobooks and podcasts for children as well as adults. In common with many apps, it has a children’s version which blocks inappropriate
I’m now officially Irish – the proud recipient of a shiny red passport. It arrived, with the luck of the Irish, in time for St Patrick’s Day. But as I gaze fondly at the words ‘European Union’ and ‘Ireland’ embossed in gold on the front, I do feel the awkward guilt of the hypocrite. I
I’m hiding from something I used to love: the news. It’s a common tendency these days – Loyd Grossman noted it in his Spectator diary recently, calling himself a ‘nonewsnik… unable to deal with a daily diet of misery and despair’. I understand the need to escape the depressing effects of war and economic turmoil.
I recently made a programme about the British jazz pioneer Arthur Briggs. Yes, I know. Arthur who? The much-missed Jeremy Clarke told me: ‘If only he’d been called Arthur “Big-Boy” Briggs or “Honeydripper” Briggs, maybe things would have turned out differently.’ As it was, his name always suggested a painter-decorator from Edwardian Brixton rather than
In case you hadn’t noticed, the London Book Fair has been gracing our nation’s capital this week, down in Earl’s Court. There, the publishers, agents and buyers of the literary globe (London is second only to Frankfurt in ‘book fair importance’) have been feverishly buying and selling the rights to hot new titles, hot new
Nowadays whenever an elderly celebrity dies – consider the death last month of Gene Hackman as a case in point – one of the first things that happens is that a chunky clip of them appearing on a talk show such as Wogan or Parkinson gets shared on social media. Before you know it, you’ve
Experts warn that doctors like me risk a condition known as ‘compassion fatigue’ – an emotional numbness that comes from too much caring for too long. But aren’t we all on the edge? Distant hardships are now visible as they happen, and the sense that victims are everywhere becomes vividly real. Newsreaders, documentary makers, editorialists,
The decline of Radio 3 makes a sad story. Established in 1967 to reflect the world of classical music, and high culture in general, it has become a swamp of mediocrity, peopled by presenters who might feel more comfortable on a pick ’n’ mix stall. Every day, in almost every way, it seems determined to
Any old fossil like me keen on harrumphing that popular music isn’t what it used to be will have taken a certain snarky pleasure on reading that, last year, no British act figured in the world’s top ten singles or albums for the first time since 2003. To be fair, 2003 wasn’t the best year
There was a time when the word ‘toxic’ was applied in only a handful of circumstances. There was the stuff that occasionally oozed out of a power station into the North Sea and made the fish go funny. Or there was the substance that Christopher Lloyd would stick in the gull-wing doored DeLorean to make
What began in 1998 with Tony Blair standing in the Globe Theatre to announce a new celebration of books has morphed into something much bigger. Along with Black History Month or World History Day, tomorrow’s World Book Day is now a full member of the woke calendar. This calendar has grown – largely thanks to
The BBC celebrated one of its own on Monday night. Armando Iannucci was treated to a fawning retrospective by Alan Yentob, and it opened with a crass piece of TV trickery. ‘Armando Iannucci is not an easy man to pin down,’ said Yentob, as if his quarry were a master criminal or an international terrorist.
The death of the painter Jack Vettriano at the age of 73 is sure to delight at least one art critic: the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones. Jones has consistently attacked the creator of The Singing Butler, Britain’s best-selling single image, as ‘brainless’ and ‘not even an artist’. He derided his work as ‘a crass male fantasy
The news that the Imperial War Museum is closing Lord Ashcroft’s Victoria Cross and George Cross gallery is sadly not a great surprise. It’s the latest act in the ‘wokeification’ of this once outstanding museum. Writing in the Daily Telegraph last week, Lord Ashcroft said that the IWM didn’t even have the ‘courtesy to inform’
Chiselled out of stone in around the 1st century AD, the scene in this image gives a powerful snapshot of the excitement of gladiatorial combat. In this carving found in Turkey – once a key part of the Roman empire – the opponents face each other head-on, with a look of grim determination. From behind their curved
The comic writer George Mikes, who died nearly 40 years ago, knew he had made it when he received a fan letter one day from Albert Einstein. Mikes, the scientist said to him, was blessed with ‘radiant humour… Everyone must laugh with you, even those who are hit with your little arrows.’ Chief among Mikes’s
