An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
This month’s timely trivia includes a canny England footballer, an endangered Lady Astor and a confused Nicholas Parsons. Oh, and we learn how many cups of coffee Steven Spielberg has drunk in his life … ANSWER: The stations are Heathrow Terminal 5, Heathrow Terminal 4, Heathrow Terminals 2&3, Hatton Cross, Hounslow West, Hounslow Central and
From my desk, as I write this, in a lofty room in a soaring new hotel in Phnom Penh, I can look down at the bustling streets and see the concrete, mosque-meets-spaceship dome of the Cambodian capital’s famous Central Market. Which also happens to be the place where, 20 years ago, I ate the single
A friend was in town, who rebuts two instances of dull conventional wisdom. The first is that although Swiss Germans may have many qualities – they make excellent bankers – they have no joie de vivre. The Calvinist heritage persists. Second, that the Swiss are an implacably martial race. Other armies, especially the British, use
When the Roman Emperor Justinian finished building the Hagia Sophia church in Constantinople in 537 he compared it to the great temple in Jerusalem. ‘Solomon, I have surpassed thee,’ he declared. Some 400 years later, as visiting ambassadors from Kyiv were led into the same ethereal structure, they remarked: ‘We did not know if we
The späti is a Berlin institution. These late-night corner shops began popping up in the former German Democratic Republic for workers clocking off from their evening shifts. Serving as a mixture of mini-supermarket and meeting place, spätis have outdoor seating, often wobbly wooden tables and benches on which locals sit and drink cheap bottles of
I never thought it would be possible to feel such emotion about a lump of hot metal but I am in love and like all new passions it’s threatening to become all-consuming. I find reasons to drop it into conversation, I seek out others and join groups on social media that share the same predilection
The big London restaurant opening of the autumn has been The Devonshire in Denman Street, Soho, close to Piccadilly Circus. There was a run on bookings as soon as the reviews appeared. Giles Coren in the Times wrote: ‘What a place. What. A. Place.’ Jimi Famurewa’s review in the Evening Standard appeared under the headline: ‘Nothing beats a good
A couple of weeks ago, I made the dish I always make at this time of year. It’s a Hungarian gulyás – or more correctly, a pörkölt – a mixture of beef, onions, peppers, tomatoes and paprika, stewed very slowly and served with plenty of sour cream. It’s appropriate this dish should be from Hungary, as
So Debrett’s has really got behind the latest technology by issuing a guide to the appropriate use of the mobile phone, or rather, ten commandments. The oldies are warned that young people take fright at an unexpected call – text first to see if it’s convenient – and the young are told that they should
We’ve all been there, dragged along to the office/company/feminist protest group/a cappella throat-singing-society Christmas meal out. The idea of sitting around a huge table eating bad food with a group of people who either bore you rigid or who you actively dislike doesn’t seem particularly appealing. Why will the food inevitably be terrible, wherever you
You didn’t have to like football to feel some sort of affinity with Terry Venables. He had bags of East London charm, oodles of enthusiasm and glossy good looks (as long as you didn’t mind the gold medallion around his permanently tanned neck). As it happens, I like football very much – so it was
Self-pity and Deliveroo go hand in hand. You can’t have the latter without the former. It’s impossible to watch a rain-drenched driver fight with his moped’s side stand – while you sit torpidly in your pants by the window – without the heavy feeling of self-loathing. There’s something shameful about it, something pathetic. If Dante
I like ice hockey, 7-Eleven Big Gulps and the choice of six lanes on the Interstate. I like almost everything about America except the guns, which is why I decided to challenge my prejudices at a pistol range in Fresno, California. Walking in, I was welcomed by ‘Don’t tread on me!’ stickers and signs in
Hard to imagine now but I was once a hot club DJ. I now need to go to bed on the same day I got up but once upon a time – in fact, hundreds of times upon a time – I dropped big tunes at famous clubs including Le Beat Route, the Camden Palace
Polpo, Russell Norman’s celebrated and original Italian restaurant in Soho, was in full flow when I visited for the first time: busy, loud, glasses full and meatballs rolling. I had returned to London after some years away in my early twenties, and had little money. Polpo welcomed diners with its buoyancy and affordability. It was
I don’t know about you, but I love a bit of topical reading when I go abroad. That’s why, in my last week of travelling between lush, green, untouched Cambodian islands, I’ve been immersed in apposite books like Julia Lovell’s Maoism: a Global History, and Frank Dikotter’s The Cultural Revolution. So far, I’ve been pleased
There are two high-class chases taking place tomorrow – one at Haydock and the other at Ascot. They will have a bearing on the betting markets for the Ladbrokes King George VI at Kempton on Boxing Day and the Cheltenham Festival. However, neither race this weekend is now an attractive betting proposition because each has
It is a truth universally acknowledged – at least by anyone with a developed frontal lobe – that seasonal enjoyment and growing up are inversely proportional. As the stranglehold of middle age tightens, I am incapable of conjuring the Christmas excitement I felt as a child. And it seems to have been replaced with intense
The North Hertfordshire Museum in Hitchin has made the remarkable discovery, known to historians only since the 9th century AD, that the Roman emperor Elagabalus was a sexual pervert who liked to be called ‘she’ and offered vast sums to any doctor who could kit him out with female sex organs. In celebration of such a visionary, the
When is it acceptable to consider dating a widower? How do you know if they are still grieving and not ready to move on? According to statistics, men die earlier than women, so I was surprised this year to meet several whose wives had died before them. Divorced since the early 1990s, I had no
I am lazy and nosy, and so I spend a lot of time on the GWR service from Penzance to London Paddington. Each journey is a play with a unique atmosphere. Some are seething, particularly in summer when an eight-carriage train cannot fit everyone who wants to swim in the ocean but dine in west
Anyone know the Hindi for schadenfreude? Who could have seen that coming: certainly not your correspondent, who had invested some time ago in India to win the Cricket World Cup. Not to be, sadly, and the red-hot favourites were given an absolute pasting in their own backyard by a team of unfancied Aussies who had
Everyone has a guilty pleasure. Some have several. One of mine is David Cassidy who died six years ago from liver failure at the age of 67, an event that barely made more than a back-of-the-book page lead in many newspapers. Which is a shame. For at his peak, he had a fanbase on a
Dream Scenario is a film about modern celebrity culture and the terror of losing yourself to the internet’s virtual mob. It’s the story of evolutionary biology professor Paul Matthews, a balding, befuddled, bespectacled everyman who is the walking embodiment of anonymity – played by Nicholas Cage, the face that launched a thousand memes. At the start
It has become a commonplace to observe that, 60 years ago, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, America lost its innocence – or at least the myth of its innocence. Certainly, the event has left a stubborn impression on history and culture; something to do with the power, grandeur and
Anybody who has been a teenage girl will know how dark and swampy the sexual imagination of that demographic can be. At 14 and 15, after watching Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet (1996), and then James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), I became so obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio that I’d lie for hours on my bed hatching
The film director Ridley Scott says that those who worry about the historical inaccuracies in his new biopic of Napoleon should ‘get a life’. Or as the told The Sunday Times last week: ‘When I have issues with historians, I ask: “Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up, then.’ If
‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’. Nowhere is this so true as in the streets of Calcutta, departing point of our cruise. The legacy of Mother Teresa has placed a stigma on the ancient capital of the British Raj, now forever considered a city of the dying and destitute. Unsurprisingly, Calcutta does not
Have you taken the pickle pill? Pickles and the liquid in which they often come are proliferating across western cuisine. They have been praised for their health qualities, with gut-pleasing, sodium-rich pickle juice becoming a post-workout favourite in Britain and America. It’s even being incorporated into cocktails and beer. ‘Putting a pickle in cheap beer
