An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
The long-awaited sequel to the documentary (or ‘rockumentary’) Spinal Tap, which told the story of a failing British rock band’s disastrous American tour, opened this month to decidedly mixed reviews. Robbie Collin in the Daily Telegraph advised us to dial down our expectations to -11 (ho ho) for The End Continues, which sees the band
I used to think I wasn’t attractive enough to drive a Ferrari. I still think that, but you reach an age, like Lester Burnham in American Beauty, when you don’t care any more, and in that despair you can pull off anything. I am now exactly that age: the same age as the man driving
For a long time it was handy dinner party fact that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One (2010) briefly filmed at my late grandparents’ house, and appeared as Hermione Granger’s house in the film. Even this required extensive exposure of my grandparents to Warner Brothers’ lawyers, the film crew and, of course, to
Goodness, isn’t there something a bit hoary about the notion that members of the Metropolitan Police may have to declare if they’re Freemasons? The idea has come up recently in the context of discussion on ‘declarable associations’ – those organisations you’re obliged to admit to belonging to if you’re a London copper. A spokesman for
Recently I’ve been bombarded with emails from people who apparently are keen to promote or market one or other of my children’s books. A few appear to have actually read a book of mine and to know the name of the characters, others clearly haven’t. What they all have in common is that the book
The name can’t help but invite mockery. When Sainsbury’s launched its ‘Taste the Difference’ range 25 years ago this autumn, I wasn’t alone in noting that the phrase almost begged for a question mark at the end. But the British public are (mostly) more concerned with dinner than with sarcasm. The Taste the Difference range
It’s relatively common, I find, when opening a newly purchased second-hand book for the first time, for something to fall from its pages. Most likely this will be a branded bookmark or printed stocklisting paper from the dealer who sold it. But it’s not unusual to find something more interesting, something belonging to the book’s
The thing that really fascinates me about solitude is the need to talk about it. The contradiction seems lost on people. ‘I must tell you about the silent retreat I’ve just been on.’ ‘It was so nice to just sit with my thoughts for a bit.’ Solitude is the new wild swimming: if you don’t talk about it,
I’m driving a dirt road in the wilds of central Sardinia. And I mean what I say by ‘wilds’. This rugged region in the sunburned Supramonte mountains was called ‘Barbagia’ by Cicero – i.e. ‘land of the barbarians’ – as even the Romans never quite managed to subdue it. Centuries later it became famous for
Early in 2020, inquiries for our speech-writing services were arriving in their droves. From Westminster to Washington, weddings to wine tastings, people needed our help. We cancelled our weekends and prepared for life without a mortgage. Covid gave us our weekends back. And all the other days. Yet when parties and events returned, a significant
Trainer Jack Channon knows what it takes to win Newmarket’s bet365 Cambridgeshire (tomorrow, 3.40 p.m.) having been assistant to his father, Mick, when the stable won the race three years ago with Majestic. Majestic, now seven and still in the yard that Channon took over from his dad at the start of last year, was
‘Prizes are for little boys,’ said Charles Ives, the American composer, ‘and I’m a grown-up.’ It’s a pretty sound rule of thumb. The prizes worth having are usually those which reflect a body of work, not a single achievement. Cary Grant, the greatest leading man in the history of cinema, never won an Academy Award.
I’m standing at a bar in a car park on the rooftop of a shopping centre. I ask the bartender if the beer on draught is big or small. ‘That depends on your definition,’ he says. ‘What is big? What is small?’ The oonce-oonce of German trance music makes it hard to hear, and I’m
Wine lists give me the fear. I can still recall the prickle of adrenaline when my father handed me the leather-bound menu when I was in my early twenties because I had started working for a wine merchant after university. Should I play it safe or take a punt on something unusual that some people
There is an immaculate brasserie called 74 Duke at 74 Duke Street, Mayfair: this is postcode etymology. Duke Street runs from Selfridges to what used to be the American embassy in Grosvenor Square but is now (I assume) a paranoid hotel: the Chancery Rosewood, which has kept the monstrous eagle on the roof. If Duke
It’s never been easy to warm to golfers, an overpaid, self-obsessed bunch who rarely fail to ask for more. And it’s even harder to warm to American golfers, who have now insisted on picking up half a million or so for playing for their country in the Ryder Cup. Nice, eh? And this weekend’s Ryder
‘I was born to play Lady Bracknell,’ Stephen Fry swanked recently, in an interview to mark a new production of The Importance of Being Earnest, running until January. I can’t be the only one to greet the idea of another round of Fry interviews with a desire to go to bed and not come out
There have long been Le Creuset fanatics. During lockdown, John Lewis reported that sales of Le Crueset increased by 90 per cent. And last year, a sale at a Hampshire outlet store brought a crush of hundreds of people; police even had to attend. Then there was the affair of Pauline Al Said over the
They have been blowing out candles for Fawlty Towers, and it is meet and right so to do. Fifty years old this month, John Cleese’s portrait of a Torquay hotelier at war with the world remains a masterpiece of British comedy. But there’s another Seventies romp we should not ignore, which was just as funny,
As coats go, it was very nice. A dark blue cashmere Loro Piana number that reeked of quiet luxury. But for a man who once identified as a communist, it was laughable. It was 2016 and I was standing in the atrium of the newly remodelled Design Museum on Kensington High Street. As assistant to
News that the classic children’s TV show Bagpuss is to be given the full film treatment doesn’t bode well for fans of the original series, which ran from February to May 1974. Set in an old-fashioned bric-a-brac shop, each of the 13 episodes featured the eponymous ‘saggy cloth cat’ and his eccentric friends poring over
My partner’s mother, Enid, introduced me to duck with 40 cloves of garlic. She told me it originated from an old Jewish Ashkenazi recipe, although the French claim it’s theirs. It doesn’t matter because it’s delicious, with most of the cloves shoved under the crispy duck skin, permeating the meat, and several pushed into the
There’s much to enjoy about the autumn months in the UK. Teenagers are restricted to school playgrounds rather than the high street between the hours of nine and three. Landlords in rural pubs start remembering that they have a fireplace that might be worth lighting. And provincial airports become populated with polite, cashmere-wearing pensioners on
You might have missed this because it hasn’t exactly been saturated with media coverage, but this week is the 200th birthday of Britain’s railway. In fact, it’s the 200th birthday of all railways, since we invented them. It was on 27 September 1825 that service began on the Stockton and Darlington Railway. Travelling a distance
Most of our politicians themselves are not obedient, kindly and loyal. Similarities between candidates and their faithful cat or dog are few – but as trolls now deter supportive spouses and photogenic children from saccharine election leaflet photos, pets are increasingly becoming familial proxies. When Nigel Farage does a TikTok about his dogs Pebble and Baxter, thousands comment approvingly. But finding
I once asked a 105-year-old woman if she had any advice. What lessons had she learned throughout all those years? She paused and reached for the cup of tea I’d brought her. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said and took a sip. And that was that. I’d half expected my mind to be blown, to
Long Compton is in the Cotswolds, but to the east, where there are no boutique hotels or shops selling artisan candles to tourists. Banburyshire and its surrounds are actual countryside. Fields roll away in the manner Germans call Kulturlandschaft, meaning landscape shaped by centuries of human care. This is the sort of country that makes
The death this week of film legend Robert Redford reminded me of my favourite quotation relating to gambling. It was uttered by his fellow actor Paul Newman, who was Redford’s co-star in two of their greatest films: The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. When Newman played the part of ‘Fast Eddie’ Felson
There’s was so much to loathe and laugh at in Peter Mandelson’s contribution to Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘birthday book’ (which inadvertently has turned into more of a ‘burn book’). But the words ‘yum yum’ were, for me, in a league of their own. Whatever they were referring to – it could have been the peachy posterior of