An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
In Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson bemoaned the ‘wilfully unhelpful’ ticket machines in car parks: ‘You go hunting for some distant pay-and-display machine, which doesn’t make change or accept any coin introduced since 1976, and wait on an old guy who likes to read all the instructions before committing himself and then tries
Last month in a Swiss hotel, I came across an idea so beautifully simple that I felt it would be immoral of me not to share it. The bed in our room, rather than having one king-sized duvet, was covered by two double-size duvets overlapping in the middle. Eureka! Given that the Swiss are world
Though I’m not the most avid fan of her oeuvre, I was cheered recently to see that Ellie Goulding wanted her new album to be less personal: ‘It was such a relief and really refreshing to not be sitting in the studio going through all the things that happened to me and affected me… it’s
Do you think the luxury soap-maker Aesop would have been valued at £2 billion pre-pandemic? I don’t. Sure, the botanical Aussie cosmetics brand, famously seen in the prettiest restaurants and lining the bathrooms of the fashionable, has been valuable for some time, but ‘hands, face, space’ propelled its growing stardom into a multi-billion pound lather.
How Walford in EastEnders got its name, why Isaac Newton visited bars in disguise and what happened when the IRA parked on a double yellow line. Our tour of London’s postcode areas has reached its penultimate stop – who fancies an E?
The American comedian Bill Maher is an intelligent man with a good sense of humour. When he’s right, he tends to be very right. However, when he’s wrong, he tends to be so wrong it leaves a person scratching their head in disbelief. He has a tendency to sometimes misrepresent the facts. This is true
As I’ve got on in years I’ve been fairly successful in eliminating vices – most of the debauchery of my teens and twenties is a distant, hazy memory. But as I reached my fifties I found I had fallen into the grip of a compulsion that was as powerful and unshakeable as any drug. My
As spring (finally) arrives, it’s time to turn our attention back to what’s outside the back door. Helpfully, garden designer Isabel Bannerman (Highgrove, Houghton Hall, Arundel Castle) has written a memoir, Husbandry, in which she declares there is no such thing as ‘U and non-U’ in gardening. She then undermines her argument by immediately setting out
Where is Melania? This was the question on many people’s lips after the former First Lady was absent from the after-party at the Mar-a-Lago estate on Tuesday night following her husband’s quick trip to New York City. Trolls took to social media to ridicule Mrs Trump for ‘not standing by her man’ during his indictment;
It’s a nasty moment when you receive a letter informing you that a fortnight ago, at a specific number of minutes past an hour, your car was photographed turning into a side road which, at the time, you had no idea you weren’t allowed to turn into. You vaguely recall the junction. There was no
The alchemy wrought by a young man’s ability to gyrate and croon at the same time is notorious, turning shy mama’s boys from Presley to Rotten into love/hate machines. Something magical happens when someone – however unsightly – sings a song well, allowing him access to a quantity and quality of women undreamt of when
There aren’t many mathematicians who can claim to have bowled out Australia’s number one batsman. But then John Venn, who died 100 years ago today, was no ordinary scholar. Born in Hull and brought up in Highgate, he was also an Anglican priest – the ninth consecutive one in his family – with a magnificent Victorian
So you’re going to be arrested imminently: how do you prepare? I’ve dwelled on this question often since my arrest at 16, the ugliest age you can be. You draw on thick eyeliner and have even thicker acne, which you think you can cover with even thicker layers of makeup and a back-combed barnet. The
Is it a stage of life thing? Recently I’ve got a hankering to join a gentlemen’s club. It might be the creeping realisation that having put it off for so long – drifting in and out of London’s clubs over the years as a guest thinking ‘This is rather nice…’ – as I near 50,
The chanteuse is back. Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, Lana Del Rey’s ninth album, arrived ten days ago. It’s a lush, dreamy voyage through said tunnel, one best listened to on vinyl, but not one that doesn’t pose questions about life, love and how Del Rey found said tunnel. Del Rey
Prince Harry’s endorsement of therapy will likely turn some of us off ever seeking it out. Insisting that therapy has changed him for the better, he is urging his family to partake so that they too can ‘speak his language’ of simultaneously loaded and empty terms – such as ‘authenticity’. ‘If I didn’t know myself, how
You can always rely on theatreland to serve up drama off stage as well as on. Hopefully the spat between Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber and Sir David Hare over whether musicals are ‘killing’ theatre will run and run. Writing in The Spectator last week, Hare moaned: ‘Musicals have become the leylandii of theatre, strangling everything
Decades are happening in weeks in the world of artificial intelligence. A fortnight ago, OpenAI released GPT-4, the latest model of its chatbot. It passed the bar exam in the 90th percentile, whereas the previous model only managed the tenth. Last week, Google introduced its own chatbot, Bard. Now, the British government is announcing plans to regulate
A recently published novel, Becky by Sarah May, is the latest in a long tradition of fiction based on journalism – and a good excuse to think again about the great books from that sub-genre. May’s is a curious hybrid of the life story of News UK CEO Rebekah Brooks and a repurposing of Vanity Fair. George Cochrane,
From bucket hats to Britney Spears, the 1990s and 2000s are back in vogue. Who could have predicted that the cringe-inducing baggy trousers and All Saints-esque crop tops that filled teenage wardrobes 20 years ago would be resurrected with such gusto by Gen Z? But there’s one part of turn-of-the-century culture that remains firmly consigned to
Some excellent thinking this month from the Italian complexity theorist Luca Dellanna: Two days ago, the EU parliament approved a ban on new fossil fuel cars starting in 2035. While I like the idea of greener cars, I’m not too fond of a fast and complete transition. Let me use the metaphor of the
During a recent family trip to South Africa, there was one book from my holiday reading pile that I simply couldn’t put down. It had everything: suspense, mystery, humour, fantasy, plot twists, heroes, villains and, ultimately, a happy ending. It also contained talking animals, unicorns and fauns. Because this wasn’t the latest bestselling crime or
Are you familiar with the child-focused phenomenon generally known as soft play? Often located in the windowless recesses of garden centres with an innocent-sounding name like ‘Snakes and Ladders’, these are compounds dedicated to the frenetic, ergonomic joy of children – assault courses for mites, with slides, chutes, ball baths and various dangling hazards all
The last manual typewriter, after 150 years of commercial production, was manufactured in the UK in 2012. Yet like all design classics, it refuses to lie down and die. There is a roaring trade in old models on eBay, and dealers such as the Typewriter Man in the UK and Mytypewriter.com in the US sell
Wow, can I just begin by saying how incredibly excited I am to be given this opportunity to write about such an awesomely exciting subject. Don’t worry, this isn’t the start of some interminable Oscars-worthy speech. In truth, I’m not remotely ‘excited’ at the prospect of writing this article about the overuse of the word
If it feels like this column is appearing far more regularly than usual, that’s because it is. Normally a Friday-only offering, there have been four daily previews for the Cheltenham Festival and now this one to make it five columns in as many days. It’s been tough going finding winners this week but we got
Russell Brand’s hero status among a prominent section of the British left began on Friday 13 September 2013 and officially came to an end one week ago. On both occasions the medium was the Guardian. The 2013 moment came when he wrote for the paper giving ‘his side of the story’ after being kicked out
Boodles Cheltenham Gold Cup day is almost upon us and the rain-softened ground means the distance of 3 miles 2 furlongs plus will not be for the faint of heart or for those horses whose stamina is in doubt. In the Grade 1 feature race tomorrow (3.30pm), the favourite Galopin Des Champs oozes class but
The rain continues to fall at Cheltenham and so it is vital to look for horses that like soft ground on day three of the Festival tomorrow. Equine talent that needs the ground similar to the terrain of the M25 to show their best form might as well stay in their stables. One horse that
