An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
‘What sort of book might Satan write?’ ‘Why do people watch horror films?’ ‘Should we give up hope?’ These were three of the questions faced earlier this year by candidates seeking admission to All Souls College, Oxford, Britain’s most elite academic institution. Founded by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Chichele, and King Henry VI in
There are many, mutually reinforcing causes of the property crisis: it is too easy to borrow; there are too many people; there aren’t enough houses; what houses do exist are in the wrong place; and many houses have the wrong people living in them. Solutions exist to all of these, some of which involve building
The whirligig of time brings in his… astonishments. Who would have thought it? Even a couple of decades ago, the notion that the Tory party could be led by a black woman would have seemed incredible. I remember 1975, and the doubts that were expressed about Margaret Thatcher: much louder than any adverse comment about
‘Recipes are like magic potions. They promise transformations,’ says Bee Wilson in her introduction to Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake (Faber, £12.99), a collection of classic authors’ recipes. You have to pray that tinned tomato soup will indeed be transformed into something nice-tasting, or that Noel Streatfeild’s filets de boeuf aux bananas will not be
Were The Duke and Duchess of Sussex to leave their mansion in Montecito, California, and head a couple of miles across town, to Toro Canyon, they would soon find themselves at the one-time home of a woman whose story they would find rather relatable. Because the former occupant once drove a wedge between the Prince
As cabin crew for an international airline, I love working in first class. In the briefing room, when all the crew are scrambling to bag their favourite positions before the start of the flight, I make sure to insist I’m the first-class dolly for the day. Usually no one minds, as some people are averse
One of the freedoms of later life, if you’re not Keith Richards, is that you no longer have to worry about being cool. Cool, far more than money, is the currency of youth, and as a teenager I knew who had it and who didn’t. But what was cool, all those decades ago? Who possessed
I can’t remember exactly when I had my first cigarette, but I remember roughly how I started. I was probably 13. I picked up one of my mum’s packets of ten Silk Cut, which was about half full. I slipped one out, put it in my pocket, saving it for later. My friends and I
‘Old soldiers…’ they used to say, ‘never die. They simply fade away.’ What a shame that the same can’t be said of old rock stars. The old codgers can’t be cajoled, shamed or otherwise persuaded to kindly leave the stages they have profitably adorned for half a century or more. My lifelong rock hero, Jim
Dashel Drasher is just the sort of jump horse that I love to watch. A front runner who wears his heart on his sleeve, he will tomorrow embark on his eighth competitive season for his astute Somerset handler Jeremy Scott. Aged 11, Dashel Drasher will make his seasonal debut in the Grade 2 bet365 Hurdle
Let’s get one thing perfectly clear. I’m British, divorced, ginger-haired and I once accidentally called the late Radio 1 DJ Annie Nightingale ‘mum’ during an interview. So there’s very little I can learn about embarrassment. Or so I thought. My perspective changed somewhere around the moment that a male groomer versed in the nascent trend
John Lewis recently returned to its roots, resurrecting its ‘never knowingly undersold’ price-matching promise. But it’s hard to imagine how the company, which opened its first store on London’s Oxford Street in 1864, could apply this undertaking to its latest venture. For, not content with supplying the nation with sofas and curtains, lightbulbs and sewing
I remember, vividly, when working at Raymond Blanc’s Michelin-starred Le Manoir, the moment the truffles were delivered. A frisson went round the kitchen staff as the napkin covering the precious morsels was dramatically whipped off. Physically inspecting the gnarled, knobbly nuggets was a right reserved for head chef alone. As a lowly pot-washer, I was
One of the joys of getting older is the appreciation of the solitary pint. But what to do as you sip your hard-earned beer? Usually after a suitable period of contemplation I’ll start fiddling with my phone. Not Adrian Tierney-Jones; he writes books, and his latest, A Pub for All Seasons (Headline, £20), is a
Bonfire night is more about burning Catholics than haute cuisine and it shows. I’ve always felt for Catholic friends at this time of year, but I am a Jew, and I am told I am oversensitive. It’s also three decades since I made £150 doing ‘Penny for the Guy’ on Hampstead High Street. The last
The Ambassadors Clubhouse is on Heddon Street, close to Savile Row and the fictional HQ of Kingsman, which was a kind of privatised MI6. I wonder if the Kingsmen eat here, being clubmen. Heddon Street needs fiction because its reality is one-dimensional. It is an alleyway behind Regent Street, and it used to be interesting.
I often think of the first time I ate brown bread ice cream. I know how that sounds: it’s the exact sort of pretentious nonsense a food writer would say if they were about to press a recipe for brown bread ice cream on you. But it was long before I became a food bore,
Your starter for ten: who was the last English manager to win the top flight of English football? Treat yourself to a half-time pie and a mug of Bovril if you said Howard Wilkinson, who took the First Division championship with Leeds United in 1992, the final season before the formation of the Premier League.
It was the early evening of 31 October and I was three years old, sitting in the living room with Mum, on the brink of bedtime, when I turned to the corner and a decorative wicker armchair. (It was the 1980s.) ‘Mum,’ I enquired sweetly, ‘who’s that man sitting there?’ Mum, suitably unnerved, asked me
The gardening world is a gentle, friendly place. Rows are rare, with disagreements creeping in softly like moss, not blowing up the way they do in politics. Everyone is quite nice to one another, almost to a fault. Which is why the row over Tom Massey’s AI garden at the Chelsea Flower Show is quite
I’ve been fighting Brent Council over some graves. Paddington Old Cemetery is dilapidated and Victorian and has been classified as a park by Historic England for decades. Only a tiny section of its 24 acres is used for new burials. Without life, cemeteries attract foxes (who mess on graves), and the wrong type of people
Sardinia hasn’t always been the tranquil, picture-perfect paradise of today. The island was once ruled by bandits; its rugged landscape the perfect place for criminals to hide. Things weren’t much better on the coastline: slap bang in the middle of the Mediterranean, the island was an easy target for pirates and was vulnerable to plague.
‘The wines were too various: it was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was the mixture.’ This is the meet-cute at the beginning of Brideshead Revisited. Lord Sebastian Flyte chunders through the window into the ground floor quarters of Charles Ryder. Seduced by these smart shenanigans, Charles proceeds to dump his
Realising that I was one of only two non-Polish women while partying with the youngsters from my local Pizza Express – my home-from-home for a decade now – I had to laugh at myself. How I love my waitress mates; Marta, Polina and Camila have become almost like family, showing up self-funded and shoutily supportive at my
Che Guevara died 57 years ago this month and yet, even now, he remains the epitome of revolutionary cool. You never know when he is going to pop up. I came across him recently in the lobby of a hotel in Kandy in the highlands of Sri Lanka. There he was with that determined, heroic
As Sober October comes to an end and we turn our attention to two months of forced festivities, it might be time to ask ourselves if these month-long periods of sobriety actually do anything. In short, I’ve found the answer is that they do. This year, I attempted Dry January. Why? For one simple reason:
I would normally stay tipping on the flat for a couple more weeks but this weekend’s Newbury and Doncaster cards make no appeal, gambling wise, while the return of a Saturday jump card at Cheltenham is hugely welcome. On balance, I prefer betting on national hunt racing because it’s easier to get attached to the
If cocaine were a perfume, it would be Chanel No.5: a timeless classic impervious to the flux of fashion and taste. It straddles all socio-economic divides, provided you can afford it. When I lived in Spain, cocaine was the recreational drug of choice because it was more widely available than other narcotics, and its grade
Nearly 20 years may have passed, but a good number of people will still recall the exchange between a salt-of-the-earth member of the public, Diana Church, and the then-prime minister, Tony Blair. The year was 2005, the occasion a pre-election edition of BBC Question Time, and the issue at hand? Well, plus ça change –