An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Seeing that photograph of J.K. Rowling, I reflected gleefully that her journey from mousey, play-nice moderate to unapologetically glam and flamboyantly defiant fox is complete. It’s not often that glamour and righteousness come along in one person – but when it occasionally happens, as her caption said, ‘I love it when a plan comes together.’
The last time I saw Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair for 25 years, he was strolling along Jermyn Street in London. Graydon was a media-land acquaintance from LA and New York where I worked as a journalist in the 1990s. We gossiped affably for a few minutes about mutual British friends before heading back
I blame The Spectator. The chain of events that has led me to be christened and confirmed in the Anglican Church began with an article I wrote for Spectator Life in January. I had spent New Year’s Eve with a friend, a former vicar, who had lost his faith and honourably resigned his living as
Lindt has opened a ‘first of its kind’ flagship store at Piccadilly Circus. Roger Federer was wheeled out to cut the ribbon. It features the UK’s largest Lindt truffle pick ’n’ mix counter (a snip at £6.50/100g), a ‘barista-style’ hot chocolate bar and an ice cream station. There’s even jars of chocolate spread for those
The weather is going to have a big bearing on the result of the BoyleSports Irish Grand National on Easter Monday. There is plenty of rain forecast between now and the off, and if that prediction is correct, the ground is going to be “soft”, or even “heavy”, by the off. I am loathe to
While the US continues to use the price of chicken eggs as a political (American) football, closer to home our concern is with eggs of a sweeter kind. This year has seen chocolate prices rise dramatically. The price of cocoa had remained stable for decades, but in November 2023 it rocketed and has remained high
So, you thought the date of Easter, which rambles irritatingly round the spring calendar, was settled by the Synod of Whitby, no? That gathering in 664 AD, which established that Northumbria would celebrate Easter in the Roman calendar, used to be one of the events that Every Schoolboy Knows, though probably not now. There were
Every Easter, the Creme Egg dominates supermarket shelves. It is, Cadbury’s marketing department loves to remind us, ‘the nation’s favourite Easter egg’. Its popularity sometimes verges on cultlike. In 2016, when Cadbury opened a pop-up café in Soho called Crème de la Creme Egg Café, people queued down the street to eat something they could
Roast lamb is as expected on the Easter table as turkey is at Christmas. But as a nation, we are falling out of love with lamb. Meat consumption in Britain is at its lowest level since records began, and according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), lamb has been in particular decline for
In 1999, a relatively unknown American chef wrote an essay in the New Yorker uncovering the secrets of restaurants. ‘Don’t Eat Before Reading This’ lifted the lid on both the underworld of professional kitchens and the mentality of chefs. In it, the writer meticulously took down ordering fish on a Monday (old), eating steak well
China: what next? Around the time of the millennium, I wrote that during this century, many of the world’s great questions would be answered in Chinese characters and that great fortunes would be made, and lost, in the China trade. That is one prophecy which might hold good. No one ever says that they could
For the first half of the 2010s, any teenage girl in her room had a chance of amassing more political influence than a junior Spad. She could define political terms and concepts, blacklist undesirable elements, and argue for a different kind of society. Thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of other teenage girls would be following
Think how many times you’ve seen the ‘Mona Lisa’. You’ve seen her in movies, in books, in cartoons; you’ve seen her as icon of female beauty, as an emblem of feminine mystique, as a commentary on the male gaze, or an amusing face on which to paint a moustache. But in all that time I
Having long been a man whose spirits wilted if meat was not the centre of his meal, I have become almost vegetarian. It’s routinely predictable for age to lead us astray from our youthful socialism, but I find my dietary change more difficult to explain. My younger self would view my politics with horror and
‘She’s overweight! You should weigh her every week and if she puts on so much as 50g, immediately reduce her diet,’ one commenter said. Another castigated me for not using organic shampoo, and someone else told me off for my poor choice of outdoor coat. Under every post were furious debates, judgements and accusations. I
I am bald. Over the past few months, three events have reminded me of this fact. The first was on X (formerly Twitter). I was defending an article I had published in the British Medical Journal, in which I argued that doctors should behave professionally on social media. In response to my post, an irate
Odysseus is back on his eternal journey to Ithaca – and he’s sailing towards your cinema screen. Ralph Fiennes is playing Odysseus in The Return, released last week. And Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, starring Matt Damon as the cleverest of the Greeks at Troy, should be out next year. I criss-crossed the Mediterranean for three years,
Employing a marksman to shoot pigeons inside our wedding barn on the morning of a ceremony was not something included in the venue-owner’s manual. For the animal-loving bride, blood-splattered dead birds were preferable to her guests being splattered later that day – an understandable moral sacrifice on her behalf. The birds had sneaked in via an open owl hole window
There’s a well-known clip from daytime TV show This Morning where celebrity chef Gino D’Acampo is cooking a classic Italian pasta dish. Holly Willoughby, one of the presenters, tastes it and says: ‘Do you know, if it had, like, ham in it, it’s closer to a British carbonara?’ D’Acampo, in his Italian-accented perfect English, looks
It’s already known for whittling down waistlines – and now Ozempic looks set to have the same effect on wine consumption. Research recently published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry found semaglutide, the weight loss medication also sold under the brand name Wegovy, reduced cravings in people with alcohol use disorder. The study by California’s USC
The drift began with the Anglicised version of tapas – a word meaning ‘to cover’, or ‘lid’, that originally described the small pieces of food used to cover and protect drinks. But ‘small plates’, now a mainstay of those fashionable, overpriced restaurants that pride themselves on being the antidote to stuffy and formal, have dominated
Boris Johnson didn’t like Adolescence. In his Daily Mail column last week he acknowledged the fine acting of the most talked-about television programme of the year, but still concluded that it was ‘tosh’. The problem, he felt, was that it wasn’t based on a real-life crime, which somehow lessens its worth as a lesson for
Tomorrow’s Coral Scottish Grand National (3.35 p.m.) has attracted a field of 23 runners with a pot of more than £112,000 to the connections of the winner. Irish trainer Willie Mullins, fresh from his stunning achievements at Aintree last weekend, has six runners in the race as he tries to become champion trainer in Britain
When I was a girl, around 13 or so, my mum started calling me, half-enviously, half-fondly, ‘The Camel’, due to my ability to retain water. Every Saturday morning we’d go shopping at the Bristol city centre department stores; she’d need the toilet maybe three times, but I wouldn’t need it at all. ‘Have you “been”?’
I assumed that the headline in the Mail about ‘pasty wars’ would involve some grievous insult to Cornish pride, including something other than beef, onions, potato and turnip; perhaps pointing out that the turnip was actually a swede. Instead, it was about how a deli in Mousehole, where I live, was charging a tenner for
Josephine is a Lyonnaise bistro on the Fulham Road from Claude Bosi. It is named for Bosi’s grandmother and is that rare, magical thing: a perfect restaurant. Bosi runs Bibendum (two Michelin stars, and in Michelin House) and Brooklands at the top of the appalling Peninsula hotel (two Michelin stars). He opens a second Josephine
‘You wouldn’t steal a car…’ began the early noughties anti-piracy video. ‘You wouldn’t steal a television… You wouldn’t steal a handbag.’ No, but it seems from reports from restaurants, you might slip some silverware into a handbag if you’re out for dinner. In February, Gordon Ramsay revealed that nearly 500 cat figurines had been stolen
Of the 73,738 benighted souls who pitched up at Old Trafford on Sunday for the Manchester derby – presumably even some, mostly City supporters, from Manchester – how many reckoned they’d got value for money? This was a dire game, devoid of energy, skill and flair. The most exciting thing was probably a low-key sit-in
Where would racing be without Willie Mullins? Even for a man who regularly rewrites the record books, who has 17 times been Irish National Hunt Champion Trainer, has collected 113 Cheltenham Festival winners, including four Gold Cups, and who has won the Grand National twice before, his feat in training the first three in this
