An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
How Rod Stewart kept his hair in place, why the BBC gave its presenters electric shocks and what Paul Gascoigne shot with an air rifle: this month’s London postcode area is N – buckle up for another trivia-packed tour…
There are only so many times I can watch Lord Sugar swivelling in his chair and reusing put-downs from three seasons ago before enough’s enough, so I’ve dropped in and out of the latest series of The Apprentice. But one contestant that has caught my eye is Victoria Goulbourne, the flight attendant turned online sweet
The big race on day two of the Cheltenham Festival tomorrow is the Grade 1 Betway Queen Mother Champion Chase (3.30pm). This will decide which horse in Britain and Ireland is the best chaser over a distance of two miles. The first three home in the Albert Bartlett Clarence House Chase, run at Cheltenham in January,reoppose each other tomorrow. Editeur du Gite caused something of an upset that
Over dinner with a friend last week, halfway through a bottle of Merlot, I noticed her eyes starting to glaze over as I spoke. Normally, I’d be offended – but it’s something I’ve experienced a lot lately, and I’ve only got myself to blame. I was in the middle of telling her a story about my
Almost 30 years ago, my journalistic career began in the faded seaside town of St Leonards-on-Sea, where I spent six months undertaking a crash course in shorthand, typing and all the basic skills of local paper reportage. With no previous experience of just how dismal an out-of-season holiday town could be, my spirits were high on
Of all the accessories one might expect a celebrity with millions in the bank and army of stylists at their disposal to choose, a bargain watch is not the most obvious. Yet Casio timepieces – some of which sell for little as £10, and most of which cost under £50 – appear to have become
Few people enjoy the thrill of a winning punt more than me but there are times when betting becomes (almost) irrelevant. Tomorrow at 3.30 p.m. will be one of them. That’s when seven runners will line up for the Unibet Champion Hurdle, the first championship race of this week’s four-day Cheltenham Festival. I will be
Before the Sussexes – before the Grabdication was a twinkle in Meghan’s crocodile eye – there was Sarah, Duchess of York; greedy, grasping, grubby Fergie. Some see Diana as when the stiff upper lip of heritage royalty became the trembling lower lip of the new breed. But the Princess of Wales was a teenage virgin with
It was the end of May 1983, half term week. I was meant to be revising for my O-levels, which were to begin the following Monday, but instead was mooching around town, a teenager ready to be led astray. And when I bumped into a couple of similarly unfocused classmates, that’s exactly what happened. Instead
‘You’ll see when you get there,’ my friend said. ‘There’s just a different vibe in Montreal.’ He wasn’t wrong. I travelled from Toronto by train – a five-hour journey made infinitely more bearable by the impressive landscapes that flashed past the window – to find that Montreal is a tale of two cities. Still distinctly
The received wisdom that the Oscar for Best Picture always goes to mainstream, generally inoffensive ‘quality’ pictures is only partially true. There have been multiple exceptions to this – and increasingly so over recent years, with an influx of younger Academy voters and a desire to be seen as more progressive than in the past.
With the start of the Cheltenham Festival just four days away, I am pleased to say that this column’s antepost book for the meeting is looking decidedly healthy. It can all go badly wrong, of course, over the space of four days but, for now at least, let’s live in hope. Over the past couple
With the recent news that Kindle and other e-readers are automatically updating Roald Dahl’s books to sanitised versions, an entire era has come to an end for readers like me. Who in future will feel safe buying an electronic copy of anything? Publishers’ plans here may be modest, but the point about the puritan is
In 1969, for my seventh birthday, I was taken – dragged, probably – ‘up west’ to the theatre to see a musical. As I recall, it didn’t fill me with joy to be going, but it turned out to be fantastic. The songs, the acting, the dancing: it was great fun. Then we went for
Many English country houses lay claim to literary legacies. Blo Norton Hall, however, has more right than most. In the summer of 1906, while in her early twenties, Virginia Woolf rented the Elizabethan Norfolk manor house with her older sister, artist Vanessa. The seven-mile journey there from Diss station, through isolated countryside, and their arrival
It is one of those ancient mysteries: why has no Labour government been able to abolish private schools? Harold Wilson didn’t spare grammar schools (and nor did Edward Heath’s government, which followed). New Labour, too, for all its reforming zeal, never dared disembowel the independent sector. When the party did promise to do so –
Someone once said that the two greatest moments you enjoy when owning a yacht are the day you buy it and the day you sell it. You could make a similar case for school fees: nothing feels quite as good as the day you finally stop paying them. Much as we are impressed by the
Thirty years ago, in the days when friendships were sustained not by email but by air mail, a friend of mine was spending time in some exotic faraway place. He would send me beautiful, florid accounts of his travels and I would read out the most hilarious passages to the flatmates I was living with
Angela McAuslan-Kelly is a normal sixth-former at Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen. Her dad is a bus driver and her mum works in a coffee shop. ‘They are not very wealthy,’ explains Holly Cram, a former captain of the Scottish national women’s hockey team. Angela, though, is off to Princeton in September. ‘I completely get
If the success of a new technology can be measured by the speed of uptake, there is no denying the epochal impact of ChatGPT. Within five days of its launch in late November, the artificial intelligence chatbot, which can provide clear, detailed answers to human questions, was being used by a million people. Now it’s
As half-term approaches, the kids at the school gate visibly slow down. They start dragging their feet and purple smudges appear under their eyes. I feel sorry for them. Then I think of my home country, America. No half-terms. Children in the US went back to school on 3 January and they won’t have a
Destroying private schools isn’t just a preoccupation of left-wing activists. The former education secretary Michael Gove said in 2019 that he wanted state schools to be so good that paying fees would be seen as an ‘eccentric choice’. Labour has explained that if it wins power, the party will scrap charitable status for private schools
Whenever I tell people I used to be a maths teacher the most common response is: ‘I absolutely hated maths at school.’ It is an age-old tale, to loathe maths lessons (or indeed your maths teacher). So, what better way to make children loathe maths even more than to make it compulsory until the age
Even though I fly a lot, I retain the notion that air travel should be treated as a special occasion for which one should dress accordingly. I am writing this from Gatwick, accompanied by one of those canvas bags you get for a fiver at Sainsbury’s Back in the day, if you showed up looking
If you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements in the field. To learn how to paint beautifully, visit the National Gallery. If you want to be a great scientist, spend some time in cutting-edge laboratories. If you want to write, read great literature. But this is not what parents usually think
There was an article in this magazine’s last Schools supplement in September that, just for a moment, made me panic. ‘Why I’ve quit teaching’ was the headline. Not great timing. I’d just resigned from my secure civil service job in the Department for Transport to start a Postgraduate Certificate in Education in secondary level history.
Roundhay School, Leeds ‘While we were taught about racism and sexism, there was too little time spent making sure everyone could read and write,’ said Liz Truss of her alma mater three years ago when she was minister for women and equalities. Roundhay School’s record begs to differ – it has been ranked ‘outstanding’ by
‘Come dance with me in Ireland.’ That has always struck me as an enchanting prospect, though a recent Hibernian venture did not involve dancing and took place in London. There was an Irish academic called R.B. McDowell. To call him eccentric would be an understatement. He adorned Trinity College Dublin for decades, starting from the