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 art of the reading nook

To add a library to a house is to give that house soul – at least, so said Cicero. Unfortunately we’re not all as blessed in the book department as Ernest Hemingway, whose Cuban library boasted a ten-foot long desk ‘curved like a boomerang’. Modern living is often short on space. But that does not mean you can’t create a cosy

Joanna Rossiter

The trouble with boycotting Russian food

As the war in Ukraine worsens, the horrific scenes filling our screens have prompted a visceral reaction from the British public: 78 per cent now support Russian sanctions – up from 61 per cent in late February. Economic sanctions have undoubtedly hit the Kremlin’s spending power ­– and that’s to be encouraged. But what should we

Theo Hobson

Louis Theroux and the problem with sex scenes

You know the restaurant scene in Notting Hill? The Hugh Grant character defends the honour of his magical girlfriend when she is the butt of some sexist banter from some vulgar brutes, who don’t realise she is sitting round the corner. In many languages, says one, the word for actress is the same as the

Olivia Potts

The ultimate spaghetti and meatballs

Spaghetti and meatballs is an iconic dish: whether it’s Lady and the Tramp that springs to mind at the name, cosying up over a shared bowl of the stuff, facilitating their canine kissing, or Henry Hill describing the prison meatballs that they make to remind them of home in Goodfellas, while Paulie slices garlic paper-thin

Ten cerebral superhero films to rival The Batman

With an added ‘The’ for extra gravitas, Matt Reeves’ fresh take on The Batman is picking up generally favourable notices both for the movie and Robert Pattinson’s interpretation of the character, which apparently makes Christian Bale’s dour Bruce Wayne a happy-go-lucky scamp in comparison. The Spectator’s Deborah Ross wasn’t convinced by yet another dark twist on the

Ross Clark

Is the house price boom about to end?

Will the housing market crash? We have been asking the question for two decades now are prices climbed to ever higher multiples of earnings. But apart from a few months in 2008 and early 2009, when prices did slide appreciably, it never seems to happen. Stock market corrections come and go but nothing will seem

Can a new dating app stop ‘ghosting’?

Modern dating is a mess: it’s a shallow world of filters, FaceTune and superficial swiping. Across the internet, Gen Z complain that daters flake, catfish, scam, and – most objectionably of all – ghost. A new dating app, Snack, proposes a solution. Snack is described as ‘Tinder meets TikTok’: a place where Gen Zs can film themselves

A house hunter’s guide to France

Offering a choice of three stunning coastlines, historic villages and dozens of wine-making regions France has long been one of our favourite places to buy a holiday home. Queen Victoria loved Nice, Noel Coward adored Cap Ferrat and the ‘old’ French Riviera between Toulon and Hyères features in the new Downtown Abbey film out next month,

What will the Queen make of Swatch’s Jubilee watch?

Despite having to cope with family strife, a partying prime minister, the unctuous musings of BBC Royal Correspondent Nicholas Witchell and, most recently, a bout of Covid, our Queen conducted herself in the only way she knows how during the first two months of her platinum jubilee – with the utmost dignity. But ‘dignified’ might

How to cook with wild garlic

In British cooking we have traditionally had a complicated relationship with garlic. Let the french use it to their hearts’ content: fine in a Toulouse but no thank you in a Cumberland. Suggestive of this wariness is wild garlic’s many names – ‘devil’s garlic’, ‘gypsy’s onions’ and ‘stinking Jenny’ amongst others. But in recent years

London’s most unusual dining spots

With around 15,000 options to choose from, how can a London restaurant stand out? Some have pulled out all the stops – setting up kitchens on water, in the air or offering something completely new. Here is our selection of the venues that best combine uniqueness with top-notch cuisine. Hawksmoor Canary Wharf This new East London joint sits on

The enduring appeal of Peaky Blinders

What’s the next step for a macho gangland drama that’s already built a fanbase in some 183 countries worldwide? That’s right: a collaboration with one of the highest regarded companies in UK contemporary dance. When it opens in September at Birmingham’s Hippodrome theatre, The Redemption of Thomas Shelby – a 20-strong dance production from the South

Olivia Potts

The giant pancake that feeds everyone

With Shrove Tuesday upon us, I am forced to face my annual pancake day gripe. It is, inevitably, the cook’s gripe: standard crèpe-like pancakes should be eaten as soon as they are cooked, each doled out to waiting mouths as soon as it’s ready. Yes, recipes tell you you can keep them warm in a

Ten action films that rival Reacher

The trope of a loner, either new in town or returning from years away, who is forced to confront the corruption and violence of the bad guys now in charge, is a familiar storyline in both film and TV. Westerns such as Shane (1953) and the classic TV series Kung Fu (1972-75) revolved around this scenario,

Tanya Gold

A victim of its own mythology: Langan’s Brasserie reviewed

Langan’s, a brasserie off Piccadilly with curling orange neon signage calling its name, is under new management after it fell into administration in 2020. It is a famous brasserie — London’s version of La Coupole — once owned by Michael Caine, a famous actor, and Peter Langan, a famous drunk, who would crawl across the

Emily Hill

The curious cult of self love

As Sigmund Freud once told me in a YouTube video: ‘Who lacks sex – speaks about sex, hungry talks about food, a person who has no money – about money, and our oligarchs and bankers talk about morality.’ So beware anyone who starts preaching ‘self-love’ at you. Chances are they hate themselves quite as much

There’s more to Essex than TOWIE

That Essex County Council is spending £300,000 on an advertising campaign to rehabilitate its reputation can’t come as a surprise. The only surprise is that it didn’t think to do it before – or that somehow they believe £300,000 is enough to turn the tide. As far as I can tell, £300,000 won’t touch the sides.

Drive My Car and the joy of quiet films

Every now and then you watch something that makes you realise how much the likes of Netflix have skewed our viewing habits. While the kings of streaming may have injected more money into Hollywood than ever before, they’ve also stacked the deck yet further in favour of the celebrity blockbuster, the big and the bombastic.

How to explore Colombia’s majestic Pacific coast

The poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote of South American waterfalls that spill over the sides of mountaintops ‘in soft slow motion’, and I was reminded of her lines on the Colombian Pacific coast where seemingly every bay has a wonderful waterfall tumbling down into it. As there are no roads to speak of, the only way

Inside the Henley town house with connections to Henry VIII

Being Henry VIII’s confessor must have been a nerve-racking job, but it’s one John Longland – who also held the titles Dean of Salisbury and Bishop of Lincoln, and was thus a major ecclesiastical figure of the Tudor era – held with aplomb. Although he was closely associated with influential men (and bigger names) such

The lost art of browsing

The paperback’s cover showed a woman and man walking down Ludgate Hill towards Fleet Street with St Paul’s behind them and a red double decker passing to their right, dressed in the office fashions of the post war years. It looked like a still from an Ealing Comedy. A friend posted the image on his

How to restore the British countryside

Our countryside is one of the wonders of the world – a great patchwork quilt of green fields, hedgerows, and rolling hills. But our sad little secret is that England ranks among the most nature-depleted countries in the world. Countless species have vanished altogether, and others cling on in isolated patches of remnant nature. While

Greece’s beauty masks untold poverty

I’ve long been drawn to sketchiness. In the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, I always preferred the dodgy and slightly dangerous old-town Piazza area to the trendy and sanitised Bole area next to the international airport. But even by my sketchy-embracing standards, it was hard not to find the grim state of Athens deflating. After all,

Olivia Potts

The trick to making blueberry muffins

I don’t quite know how the Americans got away with it: convincing first their own people, and then the rest of the world that a muffin is a suitable breakfast food? A foodstuff which is, let’s be honest, cake. But then, we are quite happy to sprinkle our worthy porridge liberally with demerara sugar, to

Ten films that faced censorship

The news that film censors from China’s Tencent streaming service have restored the original ending of David Fincher’s cult classic Fight Club will be warmly welcomed by cineastes around the globe. If you, recall, the picture ends with Edward Norton’s narrator offing his alter ego Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) and initiating a lethal city-wide bombing