An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Last week, if you’d known what to listen for, you might have heard a chorus of miniature whistles in gardens across the UK. Other sounds too: the whirr of pistons, the hissing of steam from valves. Up and down the nation, enthusiasts were fuelling up their model traction engines and steamrollers and raising steam not
We were talking Spain and drinking Spanish. The UK and Spain are very different societies, but we did find points of comparison. As a very broad generalisation, Spaniards can be divided into three political groupings. There is a Europhile elite who take their political identity from a projected European future, and almost none from their
For most parents whose teenage years pre-dated Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, few things are as terrifying as the social media use of their children. What might seem like harmless fun, such as posting memes, sharing photos, or venting frustrations, can have life-changing consequences. As a barrister who represents students, I have seen how a
It could be said that the last thing we need now is an Oasis reunion. I read somewhere that there are 56 conflicts in the world at the moment, and that doesn’t count what would surely happen if you put the Gallagher brothers in the same room. Siblings have a poor history in rock ’n’
The video game Star Wars Outlaws is to be released this week. The game is set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi – so in the universe of the original, still-greatest film trilogy – and has been several years in development. According to its ‘narrative director’ Navid Khavari, ‘We didn’t just
Last week, the London restaurant St John opened reservations for a celebration of its 30th birthday. For much of September, the Smithfield restaurant will bring back its 1994 menu at 1994 prices. Tables were snatched up within minutes, possibly seconds. I sat at my computer refreshing the OpenTable booking site like a monkey at a
On the evening of 10 August 1996, I found myself lost in the grounds of a stately home in Hertfordshire, and very, very drunk. Everywhere I turned, there were men, mostly young men in bucket hats. They were all raucously singing, and they too were very drunk. Everyone was drunk. It always felt like the
The former England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson died today. He had terminal cancer and said he expected to be dead before the year was out. In an age when such grim diagnoses are usually kept private until their morbid predictions have come to pass, it was characteristically candid of the 76-year-old Swede, even though doing
When my son was young, around 8 or 9, we lived in north London. I’d pick him up from school and take him to Lords at tea-time when the entry price for adults was £5 and children were free. We saw all kinds of less popular matches – most memorably, a young Bangladesh Test side,
Many years ago I wrote a book called Dreams and Doorways, a collection of interviews with well-known people – writers, actors, politicians, sports personalities – about their childhood. I wanted to find out how their early experiences helped to turn them into the high-achieving adults they later became. And in almost every case, some kind
In the early 1860s, the teetotal vicar Revd Henry Solly founded the very first working men’s clubs. Like so many middle-class radicals, he failed to understand the true appetites of the working classes. Where Solly had visions of ‘education’ and ‘wholesome recreation’, real working men had different ideas: they wanted booze. Real clubland is not
We’re approaching the home straight at the Proms. There are three weeks to go at the world’s greatest festival of music, and Prommers are counting down the days until the famous orchestras of Berlin, Munich and Prague reach the Royal Albert Hall. The friendly foreign invasion has become the traditional climax to eight weeks of
I don’t trust a lot of what comes out of universities’ gender studies departments – which seem to me to be more political activism dressed up in academic clothing. But I am not quite convinced, either, of the scientific rigour behind the University of Zoopla’s claim that parents are being far more generous in gifting
I was nine. It was Florence, in mid-July. My parents bravely led my younger brother and me through a day of sweaty sight-seeing. We had just been up and down the Duomo and were cooling ourselves with ice cream in an adjacent square when there was a hideous bang. At first, we thought it was
Like most fathers, I occasionally offer words of advice to my children even if they choose not to take them. Over the years, I have often told my two (now grown-up) daughters: ‘judge a person on how he or she accepts bad news’. My thinking is that pretty much anyone can be charming and generous-spirited
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna Was it chance or destiny, I wonder, that caused the eldest of our six children, Caterina, to pull over in the dead of night and park the car where she did? She was on her way back with a young man from a beach party down the coast and had stopped next
The Americans are weird about salad. I’m sorry, but somebody had to say it. Really, their use of the word ‘salad’ needs scare quotes around it. Where we generally mean ‘green leaves, and possibly a tomato if we’re feeling adventurous’, an American ‘salad’ can mean anything from pistachio cream with glacé cherries to tuna in
There is a wonderful cognitive dissonance to Bistro Aix. It thinks it is in Paris but it is really in Crouch End, the flatter twin to Muswell Hill, a district so charismatic it had its own serial killer in Dennis Nilsen. (He killed more people in Willesden, but Willesden doesn’t receive its due: here or
Anew stop has been added to the map of Movie Star Homes and Crime Scenes, on sale at LAX airport: 18038 Blue Sail Drive, Pacific Palisades, the sleek single-storey $6 million ocean-view house where the Friends actor Matthew Perry was found floating in his hot tub last October. His death has revealed something of the
Time to come clean: I really like the Hundred. This is the sort of view that normally makes people look at you as if you had just professed an admiration for Gary Glitter. But come on, this is a crisp little short-form cricket tournament, played out at the height of summer to largely packed houses.
Gary Lineker once summed up football as ‘a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.’ Ascot’s Dubai Duty Free Shergar Cup, a team contest in which four teams of three international jockeys, one of them restricted to female riders, compete for points on randomly
Amina Abakarova, a 40-year-old chess player from Russia, supposedly tried to poison a younger rival at the Dagestan Chess Championship this month. Camera footage seems to show her furtively applying a substance to one side of a chess board before the start of the game. Her opponent later became unwell and a Russian news agency
Scylla and Charybdis are said to have sat off the Sicilian coast, where Mike Lynch’s boat foundered, and where 3,200 years before, Odysseus navigated between the monster and the whirlpool. Many think of the Med as a gentle sea, more like an oversized eternity pool, unbothered by the killer storms and cliff-high waves that rage
Young people have always wanted to leave Britain. Once upon a time, they joined the merchant navy. In the 1970s, they headed to Australia. Leaving seems mysterious and risky. It’s boring to never want to escape. ‘I just got back home after being in England for two days,’ said the former Geordie Shore star Sam
Two photos from the youth of Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance have recently surfaced and are filling his opponents with glee. In one of them, he’s dressed as a woman, with shoulder-length golden hair, a look of yet-to-be-plucked wistfulness, and three days of teenage stubble. The other shows him loitering in a men’s bathroom, a
What’s a guy got to do these days to take a pee in peace? Standing at the urinal in London King’s Cross train station, I was trying to embrace the present, not dwell on the failures of the past or the great trials to come; and for a brief moment, I felt that Zen-like tranquillity
When my mum picks up my WhatsApp video call, she’s on the beach. As we chat, I watch her take small sips from a wet can of lager, dodging the hairy men in budgie smugglers who try to pass behind her. Inevitably, I’ll spend most of our conversation staring at her earlobe, since she’ll press
The new Premiership season kicked off this weekend and, with all the usual hype, will come novelties. There are the gamely optimistic new arrivals and returnees, no doubt a breakout star or two, some eyebrow-raising new hairstyles (Mo Salah) and some ingeniously tweaked – and therefore ‘must-have’ – revenue-gouging strips. As ever, there will be
In a 1962 interview, Alain Delon pushes aside a carafe of red wine and explains that when offered his first cinema role, he didn’t really want it: je n’avais pas envie de faire spécialement ça. Delon, who died over the weekend at the age of 88, may not have been immediately seduced by cinema, but