An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Lucinda Russell is a trainer that I love to have on my side for the Cheltenham Festival. It’s not simply that she has got to be one of the nicest people in racing but, more importantly from the viewpoint of a gambler, she knows exactly how to prime one of her best horses for a
Do you remember those far off misty days of yore, when shocking, startling, amazing, disquieting revelations from the world of Artificial Intelligence only arrived every year or two, or even longer? It was about, ooh, a fortnight ago: a wistful, innocent time of smiling boy scouts, and honey for tea, and vicars in bicycle clips,
It’s a long time since I took a powerful drug that wasn’t dispensed by a pharmacist. Last winter, during what has become the annual post-Christmas Covid collapse, I searched in vain for the codeine cough linctus I’d been prescribed when the virus first struck four years ago. Why must we suffer because a few scrotes
There should be a salacious German word for the blissful relief one feels at not being in another’s uncomfortable situation. Not pleasure at their misfortune, as in schadenfreude, just toe-stretching- and-dancing joy that you are safely under a blanket on the sofa while others are undergoing intense public scrutiny. First impressions suggested earnest, caring individuals
Podcast fever continues to dominate the political airwaves. The rewards for success are enormous and popular podcasters are able to fill concert halls around the county by delivering a couple of hours of chitchat to willing punters. Since the running costs are minimal, the profits are vast. This explains the gold-rush of media darlings and
The words ‘immersive experience’ have always suggested, to me, a rather strained hour or two smiling patiently at unemployed actors pretending to be ghosts or personages from the olden days or, if I’m really lucky, chocolatiers who are not called Willy Wonka for legal reasons. In fact, all the publicity for the ‘Fish and Feast
For as long as anyone can remember, Tottenham Hotspur have offered half price season tickets for pensioners. No longer. This has been scrapped from the beginning of next season. Those already enjoying the 50 per cent concession in the vain hope they will live long enough to see the team win a trophy again will see
It may come as a surprise that, even though we are just four days away from a certain major racing Festival in the Cotswolds, today’s betting column will be a no go area when it comes to putting up tips for Cheltenham next week. There are three reasons, all hopefully logical, for this approach. First,
Last month, the BBC offered an apology of sorts after a red-carpet reporter at the Baftas asked Andrew Scott, star of the film All of Us Strangers, about fellow Irish actor Barry Keoghan’s appendage. This had been the subject of conversation thanks to Keoghan’s naked dancing in the film, Saltburn, in which Keoghan’s floppy bishop
They’re everywhere, it seems: in the oceans, the fish, the soil, our drinking water, our vegetables, our grains and cereals, our meat – even in us. Microplastics and smaller nanoplastics are tiny particles of plastic flubbage measuring half a centimetre or less that result from the degradation of plastic refuse, and according to recent news coverage
In the end, it was the sports kit that persuaded us to pull the plug: two technical training tops at a cost of £90. A directive had come down from the senior school that all pupils must be in new gear from Kukri (official supplier to county cricket clubs and Commonwealth Games England) by the
Desert Island Discs is 80 years old and to celebrate this milestone the BBC has planned an event unprecedented in the show’s long history. It is also one that will surely have its creator and original presenter, Roy Plomley, spinning in his grave. Desert Island Discs Live will take place at London’s Palladium over three nights
Yay! Boobs are back! Sydney Sweeney made engagement farming easy with her cleavage-revealing curtain call this past weekend as the host of Saturday Night Live. If you spend any time online at all, I’m sure you’ve seen the video. Wrapped in a revealing little black dress, Sydney thanks the cast, the crew, Lorne Michaels and giggles
Yeah, I know, ridiculous. Cambodia? How can that be the best country in the entire world? For a start, most people can’t place it on a map. This includes close relatives of mine who are studying geography at A Level. They know all about the Marxist topography of urbanism, but Cambodia, err, um, is that
One of the perks – a perilous one – of visiting the Former Soviet Union in the 1990s was the cheapness of the vodka. I was used to paying London prices for it but in Estonia (where I lived for two years) you could find bunker-bars where they’d serve you a generous tumbler – enough
I’m sleeping with the actor Richard E. Grant at the minute and can highly recommend the experience. He’s reading Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage to me and has the perfect voice for it, faintly lascivious but not disturbingly so. As for the content, it’s just what’s wanted – engaging but not too stimulating.
Each time I return to Hamburg (about once a year, on average) I pay a sentimental visit to my grandmother’s magnificent old house, where she spent her cosseted, idyllic youth, during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. It’s a robust Teutonic villa, a bombastic relic of the Gründerzeit – that flamboyant building boom which followed
It’s difficult to remember a time before climate change – a time when our daily discourse, our newspaper front pages, endless movies and TV documentaries, and Al Gore, Greta Thunberg and Sir David Attenborough (Peace Be Upon Him), were not lecturing us, sternly and constantly, about the threat to our planet from the ‘climate emergency’,
After spending over $10 billion, screwing over corporate partners, hiring and firing talent and a decade of work trying to develop a flagship product for a new, massive market, Apple has killed what could have been its most ambitious product yet: an electric car. The failure of the electric vehicle project singularly reflects the culture
Marvel is at death’s door. What’s next? Some say we can track an incoming recession by the length of women’s skirts, others by the popularity of dance music. Film, as the composite of a million images, comes out as a more sophisticated forecaster – and not just of the economy, but of lifestyles and mentalities.
BENSON did this column a massive favour a year ago when landing the bet365 Morebattle Hurdle after being put up at 16-1 (he went off at a starting price of 11/1). In truth, he faces a stiffer task in the same race tomorrow because he is both one year older and running off the top
It’s no surprise that Britain’s night economy is in dire straight given a quarter of people told pollsters they would like to see nightclubs permanently closed even after the pandemic. Yet nobody embodies modern society’s contempt for club culture quite like Amy Lamé, Sadiq Khan’s embattled ‘Night Czar’. Places that ought to be the capital’s dedicated nightlife
Managing other people’s expectations takes the joy out of pretty much any excursion. Most things are better enjoyed alone. This hit me many years ago when I decided to risk a bullfight in Las Ventas in Madrid. My grandfather wasn’t long dead, and had been a fan of la corrida; I felt that this was something I wanted
One Monday morning about 30 years ago, I drove to work, parked my car in the village car park, and started hauling my bags of files out of the boot. In my new role with a firm of solicitors, the weekend had been a chance to familiarise myself with my pressing caseload. I initially paid
Last week’s news that a mature magnolia tree had been felled in a suburb of Poole, Dorset, because wood decay made it a threat to nearby houses, will have touched the hearts of gardeners everywhere. For, in the words of the plant collector E.H. Wilson, after whom Magnolia wilsonii is named, magnolias are ‘aristocrats of
Our national malaise arises in part from the poor state of many of Britain’s private services. No, not a misprint. I mean private services. Many on the political right berate public services, implying that were they only to be privatised everything would be sweetness and light. Yet modern technology now makes it all too easy
Gloom. Relentless rain out of a sullen sky enhanced an already pessimistic mood. We were talking geopolitics and agreeing that the West ought to brace itself for a hard landing. Try as we might, we could find no good news, anywhere. Where is the self-belief of the Reagan/Thatcher years? Instead, a culture war is taking
Back in November, 20 horses went to post in the Troytown Chase at Navan. Fourteen were trained in Co. Meath by Gordon Elliott, who provided the winner Coko Beach and four of the first five home. He broke no rules. To those who objected to his mass entry, Elliott retorted that he hadn’t stopped any
War has had its apologians ever since history began,From the times of the Greeks and Trojans when they sang of Arms and the Man,(But if you ask me to name the best, sir, I’ll tell you the one I mean,Head and shoulders above the rest, sir, was the War of 14-18) If you’ve never heard
