An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
I’m 11 years old, and I’m crouched inside the broken shell of a former London bus. It’s my friend’s birthday party. He turns 12 today, and he has just been shot. Not by a real bullet, of course, but by a paintball. I look over at his father, who is busy reloading his gun’s hopper.
No matter how much the cost of convenience food rises, the idea that it’s still cheaper than cooking fresh food at home somehow refuses to go away. People can fool themselves as much as they like. But it’s (overpriced) pie in the sky. To be economical, choose chicken thighs over breast; lamb shoulder over leg.
There was a time when, whenever the gossip mags wrote about Jennifer Aniston, they’d always preface her name with ‘Sad’. Sad Jen Aniston – it became one of those three-part names, like Sarah Jessica Parker or Sarah Michelle Gellar, only condescending rather than smug. For someone who was allegedly one of the most desirable women
The winner of this year’s Booker Prize will be announced tonight. Of the six shortlisted novels, Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter looks like a good bet for the £50,000 award. It might even be a contender for best Booker novel ever. The prize’s judges have been known to make strange calls – and always bet responsibly! – but the
You won’t find it in any of the ‘best pub’ guides that seem to appear every other week, but our local is the best pub simply because it’s, well, our local. And that is why our village has come together to save it from permanent closure. The White Horse Inn in Westleton – one of
This afternoon, just shy of 75,000 fans of American football will flood in to watch the Atlanta Falcons take on the Indianapolis Colts, in what is set to be the Colts’ largest attendance for a home game this season. A few weeks ago, more than 86,000 turned out to watch the Jacksonville Jaguars face the
The headline smacked me between the eyes. ‘I can’t afford to turn my Aga on this winter,’ a nice writer called Flora Watkins whinged in the Telegraph last weekend (she once wrote a Spectator piece about the sublime awfulness of cockapoos that I wished I’d written myself). The sub-head continued: ‘Our writer’s once cosy Norfolk home is feeling the
The first race of the season over the Grand National fences at Aintree takes place tomorrow when 17 runners are due to line up for the William Hill Grand Sefton Handicap Chase (2.40 p.m.). A good case can be made for the first three in the betting: King Turgeon, White Rhino and Johnnywho. The former
I have arrived in Naples, Italy, after an arduous flight from a chaotic London Gatwick Airport. I’m settled in a glamorous top-floor apartment in the Quartieri Spagnoli – the romantic old ‘Spanish Quarter’ – where Vespas fizz over cobbles and laundry hangs across alleys like flags of endless surrender. Most importantly, I’m clutching my Apple
There’s no shortage of catastrophic predictions for New York under Zohran Mamdani’s leadership. While the city probably won’t see breadlines, the wildly expensive, exhaustingly derivative restaurants that dominate its food scene are likely to become more dominant. Mamdani’s big pledge on food is to ‘make halal eight bucks again’. But it’s a ‘false promise’ of
On a grey autumn morning, the apples in the National Fruit Collection look vivid. They pile up in pyramids of carmine, salmon and golden-orange around dwarf trees, which have been bred to human proportions. Their branches are well within reach but picking fruit is forbidden. These trees are part of the world’s largest fruit gene
For the first time in decades, King Charles has a new pet dog, a lagotto Romagnolo called Snuff. Queen Camilla is said to have given him the puppy, perhaps more for her benefit than his. She is thought to be mad about foraging for fungi, especially in the area surrounding her home in Wiltshire, where
That Panzer’s Delicatessen in St John’s Wood is called Panzer’s – for the instrument of Blitzkrieg – is mad, until you remember that Jews love to eat near catastrophe, and then it is merely funny. I love Panzer’s so much I am reluctant to share it, but we need all the friends we can get.
It was Frank Johnson who as The Spectator’s editor asked me to mix my then day job as the BBC’s political editor with writing this column. For someone starstruck by racing as a 12-year-old, bicycle propped against the old Hurst Park racecourse wall to watch the jousting jockeys in their myriad colours flash by, the
Anyone who has allowed themselves to spend time on TikTok – to say nothing of those who have ever looked at porn on the internet – will have an inkling of the vortex that lurks. Even for those of us who have so far resisted full-blown internet addiction, the ever growing appetite can never be
One of the first articles I wrote for The Spectator back in 2011 described the explosive celebration of Bonfire Night in Lewes, the ancient county town of East Sussex where I then lived. Today, such is the relentless march of purse-lipped Wokedom, it is necessary – in writing about this eccentric folk festival – to
As the S-Bahn tram slid along Bernauer Straße, through its windows I could see tourists posing for photos beside the remains of the Berlin Wall. Everyone fixates on the border that cut through West and East Berlin. We forget that Berlin itself was deep in the GDR and that hundreds of kilometres to the west
Poor Tom Daley. The cherubic diver, who dazzled as a 14-year-old at the Peking Olympics, turning the heads of Chinese girls like spinning jennies, seems to have banged his head on the board once too often. He won friends everywhere with his easy manner and Colgate smile. The boy next door, people thought, who ran
Economy fliers everywhere, rejoice! After a long stint of what can only be described as tight-fisted meanness, British Airways and other short-haul carriers including Virgin Atlantic have started to compete on service again. The trolley-dolly is officially back. Now, once you are (semi) comfortably seated in economy and cruising at altitude, you will be offered tea
Now that the clocks have gone back and the evenings draw in, those of us lucky enough to own a log burner start thinking about cranking it up. One of the few benefits of returning to GMT, as far as I’m concerned, is the chance to get primal – and have a real fire. Yet,
The leaves on the oak tree in the park are three-quarters brown and bring to mind the two-tone hair of a model in the ‘before’ picture of a dye advert. The tiny leaves on the apple tree over the garden wall look as though they have been individually removed and stuck in an air fryer
You saw Homicide: Life on the Street, right? You know, that gritty TV police drama set in Baltimore. What? Ah, no, you’re thinking of The Wire, that other gritty TV police drama set in Baltimore, the one with Idris Elba and Dominic West. Homicide predates The Wire and was filmed largely around Fells Point and along Baltimore’s historic waterfront. The former City Recreation
Hungary, the country of my birth, takes a lot of flak these days – and with good reason. How nauseating that the nation which suffered Soviet oppression for nearly half a century – and whose 1956 Revolution was so savagely crushed by the Soviet army – now cosies up to a Russian president who reveres
As a historian who studies and writes about Nazi Germany, I have occasionally met the descendants of the criminals who ruled the Third Reich. I’ve always wondered how they can possibly bear the burden of carrying the genes that wrought so much evil. The answer is curious and reminds me of the saying of German
Grey rain slants down over the brown heather of the Lochaber hills, falling relentlessly into Loch Linnhe, and drenching the Caledonian Sleeper idling beneath my window on the platform at Fort William. November is technically still autumn, but already the long evenings of British Summer Time seem to belong to a different world. Pleasant as
The results of last weekend’s races provided a reminder that it is impossible to know which horses are fit enough to do themselves justice on their first runs of the season. Several trainers sent their horses to Cheltenham thinking they would run well on their seasonal debut only to be disappointed. Three horses tipped in
I first got a door slammed in my face in 1987. Looking back, I can’t help but feel that moment, at the age of eight, was my first bit of training as a journalist. I wasn’t seeking a scoop back then, of course. For eight-year-olds a scoop is something you get two of with your
I was recently in a café that promoted its salads as being served with ‘low-fat dressing’. I couldn’t possibly imagine what that might be: no olive oil? That stuff you spray on the pan when on some god-awful calorie-controlled diet? It turned out to be bottled – bought in from a supermarket – and contained
There is a fellow called Anthony Newman who is fascinated by drink, as a consumer, a producer and an intellectual. That said, he spent some years supplying Australians with craft beer, which does not sound very intellectual. But he insists he paid for his own passage and was able to return without a ticket of
