Spectator Life

Although a historian, until very recently I have been curiously incurious about researching my own slightly peculiar family. How was it, for example, that my grandfather, originally a penniless Welsh peasant, sired a dynasty that in three generations has spread to three continents and includes a squillionaire who founded a multinational club business with 75

Over the years, I’ve made a lot of trips up and down the highway connecting the small Massachusetts town in which I grew up to a strip mall about ten miles away. In this strip mall is a branch of Trader Joe’s, the mid-range American supermarket chain known for its serviceable range of food, decent

‘You can always tell a proper lover of cricket’, Michael Kennedy, the great music critic, liked to say. ‘It’s whether they can appreciate a draw.’ A hit, a palpable hit. By concluding a magnificent Test series at two matches each, after India’s victory in the fifth game at the Oval, even England’s disappointed players may

That it has taken its sweet time getting here cannot be denied, but, at last, it has happened. More than 70 years after the novel by Josephine Tey became an overnight sensation in 1951, a stage adaptation of The Daughter of Time has arrived in the West End. Voted the greatest crime novel of all

Every time I’m in Switzerland, where I grew up, I find myself madly squeezing as much rubbish as I can into a garbage bag. It’s a delicate and messy task. In Switzerland, every bag of non-recyclable waste comes with a price tag – and it’s expensive. You won’t be surprised that the Swiss have perfected

At a time when Britain feels increasingly unstitched – with families queuing at food banks and sewage drifting from rivers to seas – it’s almost impressive that anyone has the emotional energy to be annoyed by vegans. Yet we continue to provoke strong feelings, and Katie Glass gave strong voice to them in these pages

As I sit under the sole tree on a Spanish beach, watching my fellow Brits shudder at the writhing horror show contained in the restaurant’s seafood display, it strikes me the middle classes don’t actually much like the dead-eyed edibles under the waves – we’re just conditioned to pretend to because eating them is supposedly

Stanley Kubrick’s swooningly gorgeous film, Barry Lyndon, has just been re-released in cinemas to mark its 50th anniversary. Much ink has been spilled about its hypnotic beauty, its lavish attention to historical detail, its dreamy, luscious, candlelit photography. Yet William Thackeray’s bitingly satirical novel of the same name is often neglected – as is the

Everyone’s seen stories about the creep of AI into art of all kinds. Recently the people behind the music-fabrication website Suno have been making outrageous statements to the effect that people don’t enjoy learning musical instruments and writing their own songs, so why not let AI do it for them? This is very new, very disturbing

In the western imagination, Yemen exists as a byword for terrorism and death. Its appearances in international headlines are flattened into a trilogy of suffering: Houthis, hunger, hopelessness. The civil war has dragged on for over a decade, leaving much of the nation in ruins. Life is punishing for the millions who navigate daily existence

Rummage through any middle-class pantry or browse the shelves of an artisanal deli and you’ll spot a constellation of stars. One star denotes ‘simply delicious’. Two suggests ‘outstanding’. Three? ‘Exquisite.’ The stars are handed out by the Great Taste Awards, run by the Guild of Fine Food, which was founded by Bob Farrand in 1992.

The greatest living American until this week has died at the age of 97. I refer to Tom Lehrer, the finest satirist of the 20th century. He’s the one who observed that satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was the genius who put the entire periodic table of

You know how this story goes. The cameras are rolling. The audience is cruel. You’re trapped in the game and the game is death and the game is going out live from the heart of the state of nature where empathy is weakness and you kill each other off until there’s only one left. What will you do to survive? Who

When is a journey not a journey? The answer to this pseudo-Zen riddle, at least according to Sadiq Khan’s Transport for London, is: when the journey is one that the passenger intends to make but is unable to complete. Have I lost you? Allow me to explain. Recently I experienced yet again one of the regular