An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
The greatest movie ever made celebrates its 75th anniversary this year and I’ll be watching it – for the umpteenth time – with appropriately fine fizz at hand. Sorry, what? Oh, come on, I’m talking about The Third Man. There’s no finer film. I thought everyone knew that. You know, written by Graham Greene, directed by Carol
In the dog days of 2021, I spent a grey Sunday afternoon driving around a part of London with a view to an eventual flat move. Why take the car? Because the bus routes didn’t match where I planned to go, I wanted to stay over ground, and I would be able to cover more
As locations go, they don’t get more humdrum than the address ‘Carrera 79B, #45D/94’. It is so anonymous it sounds encrypted. Nor, in reality, does it look like anything special: a flat roof, next to a shuttered language school, above a wall of graffiti, in a lower middle-class suburb of another Spanish speaking city. But
Every year, the world’s greatest watch companies and their biggest fans head to Geneva for an orgy of horological spectacle: Watches & Wonders. Here, companies pull out their latest, newest, most impressive goods, showing off the main products they intend to launch and the fans salivate and loosen their already pummelled wallets. It’s not a cheap
Colombian pop singer Shakira caused quite the stir earlier this month when she revealed that her sons ‘absolutely hated’ the Barbie movie, which had a major cultural moment last year. Hot pink came back in fashion, people were hosting Barbie-themed parties and everyone was obsessing over lead Margot Robbie’s vintage Barbie-inspired clothing on the movie’s press tour. It
My suggested ante-post bets for tomorrow’s Randox Grand National (4 p.m.) have featured prominently in this column for several weeks now. The good news is that these wagers are looking promising. My three long-term tips for the big Aintree spectacle were all put up at juicy prices that are long gone. My fourth Grand National
What do we talk about when we talk about Marilyn Monroe? Sex, death and everything in between. Unlike other legendary film stars from Garbo to Bardot, Monroe has become (to use that awful and over-popular word) ‘iconic’ – which is ‘problematic’ in itself. Being recognisable as a hank of blonde hair and a white dress failing
When you’re playing a word game, don’t you sometimes feel how horribly unfair it is that players who know more words prosper? Wouldn’t it be better to have word games that didn’t rely so heavily on knowledge of the dictionary, that weren’t so, y’know, wordy? And, come to that, wouldn’t a kindler, gentler sort of
I have had three recent conversations, all lively if unrelated – and all well lubricated. The first concerned Anglo-Saxon England around ad 700. Recent discoveries of coin hoards suggested that economic activity during that period of the Dark Ages was more extensive than had been supposed. Without damaging the coins, it had been possible to
In my experience, men offer this infuriating comeback when challenged about the continuing exclusion of women from clubs such as the Garrick (for now at least – the Garrick is voting on 7 May on the admission of women as members). ‘But why don’t you set up your own women-only clubs,’ they sulk, ‘and leave
Every year at the beginning of April, I tell myself I must top up my Isa before the 5 April deadline. And all my friends tell me I must. My financial adviser tells me I must. Articles in the press and adverts on social media tell me I must. And every year on 6 April
Jimmy Donaldson, more commonly known as MrBeast, is the world’s most successful YouTuber. More than 250 million people follow his channel. His videos are mostly absurd challenges involving obscene amounts of cash generated from his YouTube advertising revenue. In one video, he eats $100,000 worth of gold leaf ice cream; in another, he pays a
April is nesting season and with it comes egg collectors, an illegal band of very specialised and, in some ways, very British of criminals. Many would consider themselves wildlife enthusiasts. Most see their crime as a hobby, ignoring the effects of stealing a clutch of eggs and thus accelerating the species decline in a particular
A group of four stagger out of a pub in Britain at around 11.20 on a Thursday night. The search begins for somewhere to have one more drink without a £20 entry fee. Men on doors say no by shaking their heads. Pubs show their appetite for more visitors by turning their lights up a
I suppose there are people who stay in four or five-star hotels all their lives and become a kind of expert in them, turning their noses up at rooms I would regard as the acme of comfort, but since my parents stopped paying, I never have. In adulthood my standards have plummeted and, as a
You might find it a bit rum to open your front door to a stranger and hand over your door keys and alarm code as they head for an upper bedroom. Around a third of erstwhile landlords would now agree with you and have ceased renting, while the call for such affordable room at the
Here’s a question for Spectator football fans: what’s the most memorable match you’ve ever seen? I don’t mean on television. I mean in an actual stadium, the way football should be seen. For me it was in 1996, seeing England play Germany at Wembley, in the semi-finals of the Euros. England were the better team
When an au pair or nanny writes ‘I was wondering if I could talk to you this evening,’ it is rarely good news. At best, it is to ask for a pay rise; at worst, to give notice of a departure. ‘I’d like to go to Madrid,’ said our beloved au pair one evening, confirming
Golf has never been weirder or better. In 2022, the upstart LIV Golf, funded by Saudi Arabia’s $700 billion sovereign wealth fund, took on PGA Tour, poaching stars including Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka. Mohammed bin Salman’s regime lured them by shovelling oil money into their pockets, with Mickelson signing for a reported
London has seen a string of celebrity restaurants, mostly with disappointing results. David Beckham and Guy Ritchie opened a pub in 2018 – the Walmer Castle – but it didn’t last. They handed it on in 2022 and the pub has changed hands three times since its opening. Ed Sheeran set up his grastropub, ‘Bertie
Max McNeill and his family, who own THREEUNDERTHRUFIVE, have been hoping for months that their horse would line up for next weekend’s Randox Grand National. However, they listened to the man who knows the horse best, 14-times champion trainer Paul Nicholls. He persuaded them that their nine-year-old gelding would be better suited to the challenges
The Peaceable Kingdom probably isn’t the first place you would have looked for Kurt Cobain. Of all the ironies and confusions of his brief life, perhaps none was as pointed as his choosing to kill himself in a room overlooking that sign, announcing Seattle’s upscale Leschi neighbourhood, with its views of Lake Washington and the
Whenever I write about AI on The Spectator (which is a lot) I always get comments like ‘Yawn. Wake me up when AI actually does something’. And, to a point, these are fair comments. For all its remarkable feats, its photos of Shakespeare with weird fingers, its videos of dogs typing in spacesuits, the new
There’s a spectre floating inside the head of a certain type of young woman. It’s the fast-talking, sex-realist American academic Camille Paglia. She was big in the 1990s but my parents haven’t heard of her. ‘Did she write Fear of Flying?’ asks my dad. On sections of the internet she has become a folk hero.
The sun was setting on the first day of spring and I felt unusually happy as I fed the donkey. Winter, along with the fog and all the rest of it, had gone at last. But then from somewhere near my right ear I heard a small whining sound that for a moment I did
One parent in our class WhatsApp chat raised a pressing concern: her daughter was coming home every day with a full water bottle. Were other parents faced with the same unsettling discovery? There followed a lengthy discussion of how much water was left in each child’s bottle. Some children, when confronted, testified that they had
My husband is obsessed with pretzels. The joy that a slightly warm, soft baked pretzel brings him is disproportionate. And, unlike in Germany and the States, where soft pretzels are ubiquitous, they are hard to come by here. So, for a while I have been trying to perfect the pretzel. It has not been smooth
Paper Moon is the Italian restaurant inside the Old War Office on Whitehall, now a hotel called Raffles London at the OWO. It has nine restaurants and bars, because it is a Disneyland for the 1 per cent in the fraying centre of the British state, which is enraging and hilarious. I reviewed Saison in
For those of us lucky enough to have been regular contributors to Punch magazine, April is a slightly crueller month than most, since it was on 8 April 32 years ago that the last edition collapsed, exhausted, on to the newspaper stands. By then it was way past its best, but in its day it