Spectator Life

Spectator Life

An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.

The delicious joy of cooking for one

I like to think of myself as the hostess with the mostest. A combination of my Type A personality, Jewish feeder tendencies and coming of age at the peak of Nigella’s Domestic Goddess era means I can’t resist pulling out all the stops if I’m having people over. (A theme! Welcome cocktails! Ingredients sourced from

Why Antwerp should be your next city break

In a sleepy side street around the corner from Centraal Station, there’s a restaurant I return to whenever I’m in Antwerp. From the outside it doesn’t look like much – a perfunctory shopfront, more like a takeaway café – but inside it’s charming, like eating in someone’s home. Welcome to Hoffy’s, a cosy Yiddish enclave

How the coffee subscription ruined Pret

I have a deep-seated hatred of the hospitality QR code. It ripped through the industry as part of questionable social-distancing initiatives during the pandemic, taking the place of menus and human interaction – and has stubbornly refused to disappear, making my heart sink when I find one sellotaped to the table of a bar or

Is Will Smith too toxic to be taken seriously?

After 9/11, American comedians found themselves in a tricky situation. Make fun of any of the usual standbys of their trade – politicians, authority figures, Rudy Giuliani, anyone who wore a badge for a living – and they were liable to be shouted down in an angry chorus of: ‘Too soon!’ Yet if all the

James Delingpole

Does House of the Dragon hate its male viewers?

Mark Millar, creator of series including Netflix’s forthcoming American Jesus, has a theory that movie and TV fashions work in 11-year cycles and that we’re just starting a new one now. If he’s right – and I think he is – then it would explain a lot about the second-most disappointing series currently on TV,

The return of the speakeasy

A global pandemic, a booming stock market giving way to painful economic shock, a technological revolution… there are many parallels to be drawn between the 1920s and the 2020s. But if you look very closely, you might find there is another thread linking the two eras: the rise of the speakeasy. These clandestine drinking holes rose to

The hateful sterility of new-build houses

Where do you stand on new houses? You know, the little red boxes you see massed along the sides of motorways or clustered on what used to be flood plains? They’re hateful, aren’t they? Now, I know many people (my mother included) who own perfectly lovely new houses – and these houses are indeed all

The best hotels for bookworms

It’s hard to beat escaping into a book – but for bookworms looking for an escape that jumps off the page, there are plenty of hotels that cater to a love of all things literary. From a Cornish coastal retreat that’s been immortalised in fiction to a book-strewn adults-only resort on a South Pacific island,

Tanya Gold

If Blairism were a carvery: the Impeccable Pig reviewed

Labour is 30 points ahead, and in honour of this I review the Impeccable Pig in Sedgefield (Cedd’s field), a medieval market town and pit village south of Durham. It is Tony Blair’s former constituency and Camelot, but nothing lasts for ever. Blairism had pleasingly flimsy beginnings. Sedgefield had yet to choose a Labour parliamentary

Why I admire Saudi Arabia’s monstrous new city

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia wants me to know that it is building a new city. Its adverts follow me around the internet. ‘Imagine a traditional city and consolidating its footprint, designing to protect and enhance nature.’ I’m imagining. Their city ‘will be home to nine million residents, and will be built with a footprint

Fellowship of the Lamb: how we’re saving Tolkien’s pub

I’ve just bought Tolkien’s pub in Oxford. Well, to be more precise, I and more than 300 fellow drinkers have bought the Lamb and Flag, the 400-year-old Oxford pub where the Inklings group of writers – including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis – drank. Like so many pubs across the country, the Lamb and Flag

Susan Hill

The truth about ‘the most haunted house in England’

Place and story are little remembered now. The rectory in Essex was severely damaged by fire in 1939. But any old house with an unpleasant atmosphere, especially isolated, damp, dark and unmodernised, was once described as ‘like Borley Rectory’. Judging by this long ‘story of a ghost story’, the place showed its true nature from

Dress like Macron to cut your energy bills

The French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire has urged civil servants to trade shirts and ties for woollen polo necks under their suits. It’s part of a drive to heat ministries to no warmer than 19°C – a policy that is compulsory in all government buildings except hospitals and care homes. French petit fonctionnaires can

Good riddance to long books

As soon as I picked up the parcel, my heart sank. The sheer weight of it gave the game away. Already I could unhappily picture myself struggling to hold it in one hand without straining a wrist while standing on the Piccadilly Line. I’d ordered it after coming across a couple of positive references to

Joanna Rossiter

Why Warwickshire rivals the Cotswolds for rural living

Have we reached peak Cotswolds? Not if the queues outside Diddly Squat Farm Shop near the village of Charlbury are anything to go by. Locals bemoan the traffic jams around Jeremy Clarkson’s estate as fans flock from far and wide to take home a bottle of the ‘cow juice’ from the Clarkson’s Farm TV series.

Where would we be without our dogs?

Is a dog man’s best friend? Or is man a dog’s best friend? There is no relationship quite like that between dog and human. My husband loves me, but if I locked him in a cupboard for ten minutes, he would be furious. If I locked my dog up for an hour, she would be

Ross Clark

Scrapping inheritance tax is a terrible idea

There is no hole deep enough that a Conservative minister cannot muster the spadework to excavate it to even greater depths. No sooner had Kwasi Kwarteng announced that he was dropping his proposed reduction in the upper rate of income tax, than Andrew Griffith, one of his ministers at the Treasury, declared that he would

What to eat in game season

Game is a perfect refutation to the sort of militant vegan campaigners who go around placing floral tributes on packaged meat. So long as shoots are responsibly conducted, game is as environmentally sustainable and ethical as meat-eating gets. But this year looks set to be a tough one for parts of the industry. Chiefly because of a severe

The secrets of London by postcode: W (West)

It’s the area that unites James Bond, Rick Wakeman and both Queen Elizabeths. In the first of our series looking at the quirky history and fascinating trivia of London’s postcode areas, we explore the delights to be found in W (West) – everything from fake houses to shaky newsreaders to dukes who are women… Answer:

In praise of farm shops

As a city-dweller for 34 years, I am used to the hustle and bustle of other people. Cars, sirens, strangers chatting in the street: it’s the background noise of everyday life, a comforting reminder that you’re never alone. So when I moved to the Suffolk countryside in April last year, I found it a bit

What the weak pound means for London property

Having written recently about how Prime Central London is enjoying a time in the sun after almost a decade in the doldrums, buying a property there just got even more tempting – if, that is, you’re spending dollars. And 66 countries worldwide are linked to the currency and affected by fluctuations in its value. A

Don’t Worry Darling’s flawed feminism

Don’t Worry Darling, the highly anticipated psychological thriller directed by Olivia Wilde, has arrived in cinemas after months of online gossip and speculation about its production. The controversies include: an alleged affair between the director and main actor, Harry Styles, who also happens to be one of the most famous pop stars on Earth; the

How the Barbour cracked America

I own a motorcycle riding jacket that is unabashedly a fashion piece. It contains armour made of a space-age material that hardens on impact but that is hidden away. The outside is constructed of ‘pull up leather’ which was tanned in such a way that the jet-black colour artificially fades in places that see a

Neon signs have a curious power

In a corner of St Pancras station, Tracey Emin is always turned on. ‘I want my time with you’, a neon sculpture by the artist, has been on show here since 2018. It was part of the ‘annual’ Terrace Wires public arts programme, in which a new work is commissioned every year to hang from

I think I’ll sue over my appearance in Sky’s Boris drama

There on my television screen, in a somewhat surreal sequence, was Boris Johnson contemplating the women in his life. And suddenly before me appeared the famous Wyatt features: first eyes, then a nose and then a mouth, right into camera. Medium-range shot and then a close-up. Ah, we had faces then. And then I looked harder,