An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
The phone rang, and on the other end of it was my father. ‘We’ve been thinking,’ he announced before we’d even exchanged pleasantries, ‘you need to get an air fryer. It’s the solution to these energy hikes.’ As a chef and writer with a couple of bestselling cookbooks under my belt, I was of course
It’s not in Whitehall nor Westminster; not on the central London tourist trail. Instead it’s ten miles away, on the wrong side of the North Circular, an obscurity in the suburbs, rarely visited for its own sake. But Arnos Grove Tube station is one of the masterpieces of 20th century British architecture – and this
Posing as a marine biologist and with Soviet agent Anya Amasova posing as his wife, James Bond checked into Hotel Cala di Volpe in the The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). Their mission: to gather intelligence aboard super-villain Karl Stromberg’s secret underwater lair, somewhere in the Tyrrhenian Sea between Sardinia and the Italian mainland. In the
If you’re looking for a bellwether for the world economy, you could do worse than consider what’s happening at the very highest end of London’s property market. Over several decades, Prime Central London – or PCL – had become a repository for cash from wealthy foreigners, whether they actually wanted to live there or not.
No one who has watched the events of the past ten days could doubt the King’s commitment to his late mother – or to his people. But I think another of Charles III’s commitments is also becoming apparent: one to British tailoring. From his black-braided morning suit when he addressed the Houses of Parliament at
For the finale of the #FreeBritney franchise, it seems that the 2000s Queen of Pop is to return to music. Recent reports have claimed that Britney Spears will be collaborating with Elton John on a song titled ‘Hold Me Closer’. As exciting as this is, I can’t help but think that – seeing as her
Three episodes in I think I’ve worked out the thing that’s most annoying about The Rings of Power. It isn’t the gratuitously diverse casting. It isn’t the saccharine tweeness of the hobbity Harfoots. It isn’t the ‘You go girl!’ tediousness of the relentless female character heroics. It’s that the entire series appears to have been constructed
It was the news we were supposed to be ‘dreading’: the confirmation that Roger Federer was finally hanging up his racket. But when I heard the announcement on Thursday, my feelings were more akin to pained relief. For a long time now, being a Federer fan has felt a bit like being in a relationship
There’s something quite delicious about a deadline. The prospect that if you don’t book now you might never get to try the dish of the moment is enough to pull in queues and queues of customers. But in most cases the attraction of a pop-up eatery is not solely hype. Some of these temporary dining
If you were one of the many millions who watched Top Gun: Maverick this year, it may have been a pleasant surprise to see Jon Hamm in the (admittedly thankless) role of Vice Admiral Simpson, who has to look stern and angry at the various transgressions committed by Tom Cruise’s protagonist. Hamm has been cornering
In this period of national mourning, it may seem frivolous to comment on the late Queen’s handbag. After seven decades of selfless service to the nation, fashion is but a footnote to Her Majesty’s glorious reign. And yet her style is something that helped to create the powerful majestic image of Queen Elizabeth II, and
Having returned from a fortnight’s break, I wonder if we get holidays all wrong. In northern Europe, the custom is that you head south to spend time on the beach. But equally, there is such a thing as too damned hot, especially if, like me, you have a healthy dose of Celtic ancestry. To avoid
Laurie Colwin wrote: ‘No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.’ It is one of my favourite quotes about cooking, mainly because it feels true: everything you cook
There have been few more momentous weeks in British history, or indeed in world history. This commentator must plead guilty. To draw on George Bush Jr, I mis-underestimated Liz Truss and appear to have made the same mistake about Ukraine. That said, we should all be relieved when the war is over on favourable terms,
The news that mourners may have to line up for 35 hours to pay their respects to the late Queen has made headlines – and unsurprisingly so. They say we Brits love queueing, but surely that love affair has its limits. Elizabeth II’s lying-in-state in Westminster Hall is open to the public 24 hours a
Q. I plan to travel up from Gloucestershire to pay my respects to Queen Elizabeth, and I’m happy to stand in the queue for however long it takes. My husband is only free from work a little later, but is it OK for him to join me in the queue? Or will his cutting in
A short train journey from London, in the outer reaches of suburbia in Kent, sits the house that saved the world. Or rather: it’s the house that saved the man who saved the world. The property in question, of course, is Chartwell, which 100 years ago this month was bought by a certain Winston Churchill,
In March 1995, I entered the Royal Society of Portrait Painters annual exhibition with a portrait of the Right Revd Michael Adie CBE, Bishop of Guildford. A new prize had been created that year to be awarded to the best portrait in the show. Unusually, the reward was in the form of a commission to
When I lived in north London as a postgraduate student, my flatmates amused themselves by shouting abusive names at the then member for Henley as he cycled past on his way to the Commons from his house in Islington. But judging by the reaction from my old neighbours in Herne Hill, Boris Johnson is likely
It was starting to feel rather spooky on the pathway to Finisterre. Only two days before I’d been in the celebratory environs of Santiago de Compostela with its endless arrivals of jubilant pilgrims. Now dark clouds were scudding across the Galician hills in the distance and the only sound I could hear was the wind
The first sign that something was awry was what sounded like an electrical crackling noise coming from the corner of our downstairs hallway and growing louder every day. Having ruled out our dodgy wifi (for once), I eventually turned my attention outside, where I found the cause. Wasps – hundreds of them – were swarming
The grief is still raw and the news has barely sunk in. I feel quite heartbroken. But I know that many the world over feel the same. The death of Queen Elizabeth II has special resonance here in this country, in the Realms and in the Commonwealth. Yet there is barely a corner of the
Should we pay more attention to our dreams? Are they signs from our subconscious, guiding and pointing us in certain directions? Perhaps that would explain why we often feel the need to describe them to others: to help make sense of them. Since being pregnant my dreams have got wilder. They are vivid and often
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the new Tolkien-inspired TV series on Amazon Prime is already the most expensive television series in history. Amazon paid $250 million up-front for the rights, and has reportedly committed a billion dollars to future production. The fact a business as canny as Amazon would commit that
Having taken the Queen’s remarkable longevity, good health and work ethic for granted right until the end, might her subjects now appreciate her approach to life? Because through her combination of sheer graft – she received Liz Truss to kiss hands two days before she died – and her attitudes towards health, leisure and emotional
I used to be a baked cheesecake sceptic: I didn’t feel they were worth the effort when other cheesecakes required you simply to stir together some ingredients and bung them in the fridge. My thinking was: why waste your time? Was the result really worth the extra effort? In turns out that yes, it was.
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ The surveyor shook his head. It would take me longer to boil the kettle than for him to do a valuation of my 400 sq ft, one-bedroom flat. I paced awkwardly around. A minute later, he gave me the thumbs-up. Valuation complete, he left. I boiled the kettle
Electric Diner is from the Soho House group, which has done terrible things to private clubs, luckless farmhouses, domestic interior design and even its own restaurants. The Ned, its City hotel with ten restaurants, is genuinely insane, like Thorpe Park for people who are scared of roller-coasters; and no restaurant for adults should sell fishfinger
Farmer, restaurateur, critic, foodie activist, traveller (he’s worked in Zimbabwe as well as South Africa), cookery book writer, longtime TV presenter of New Scandinavian Cooking, food columnist for a couple of Norwegian papers as well as formerly for the Washington Post, Andreas Viestad’s belt has many notches. He lives between Oslo and Cape Town and