Lara Prendergast is executive editor of The Spectator. She hosts two Spectator podcasts, The Edition and Table Talk, and edits The Spectator’s food and drink coverage.
40 min listen
In this episode of Table Talk, Lara and Livvy talk to Ella Risbridger, chef and writer, whose new recipe book is Midnight Chicken: & Other Recipes Worth Living For. It’s part memoir, part cookery; exploring mental health, friendship, love, and the redemptive power of food and cooking. On the podcast, Ella talks about the man
32 min listen
Lara and Livvy talk to broadcaster and writer Iain Dale about his life through food and drink. Or rather, the food and drink he doesn’t like. It turns out that Iain is the fussiest eater to come on the podcast, but he tells us about the food and drinks that he does like (chicken fajitas,
37 min listen
Lara Prendergast and Olivia Potts talk to Bryony Gordon, columnist at the Telegraph and author of Eat, Drink, Run. They have a frank conversation about Bryony’s relationship with food and mental health, and Bryony comes clean about her toddler’s metropolitan diet and why dinner parties are totally not for her.
28 min listen
Sophia Money-Coutts is former features editor at Tatler magazine, and now columnist for the Sunday Telegraph. Her new book, The Plus One, came out earlier this year. In this episode of Table Talk, Lara and Livvy talk to Sophia about how cheese fondue helped her get through her parents’ divorce as a child, how an
26 min listen
Lara and Livvy talk to Fraser Nelson about his hatred of desserts, how working in London made him a stranger in Glasgow, and wining and dining Westminster’s political big dogs. Presented by Lara Prendergast and Olivia Potts.
25 min listen
For our inaugural episode, Livvy and Lara are joined by Prue Leith: chef, restaurateur, broadcaster, journalist, novelist and, of course, Great British Bake Off presenter. They chat about her time in South Africa and Paris, and how that helped shape her attitude to food. She comes clean about some of her cooking mishaps, making sandwiches
I arrived at Waterloo, half an hour before my train departed. Needing to buy a birthday card, I popped into Oliver Bonas, a shop which sells ‘lifestyle gifts’. I came across marble cheeseboards and gin-and-tonic scented candles. If you are looking for a lemon juicer shaped like a cactus, you will find one in Oliver
I arrived at Waterloo, half an hour before my train departed. Needing to buy a birthday card, I popped into Oliver Bonas, a shop which sells ‘lifestyle gifts’. I came across marble cheeseboards and gin-and-tonic scented candles. If you are looking for a lemon juicer shaped like a cactus, you will find one in Oliver
Isn’t Meghan fabulous? Hasn’t she totally brought the monarchy into the 21st century? Doesn’t she make Kate look like such a square? We were so bored of Sloaney English roses, weren’t we? Meghan Markle is widely considered to be the best thing to have happened to the royal family — and Britain — in a
On the latest episode of the Spectator’s Table Talk podcast, Olivia Potts and I are delighted to be joined by The Spectator’s editor, Fraser Nelson. Fraser joins us – from his own office at 22 Old Queen Street, where he keeps an impressive collection of Scotch whisky – to discuss his life through food and drink.
Olivia Potts and I are delighted to be launching Table Talk, a new Spectator Life podcast with Spectator Radio. Each episode, Olivia – who writes the Vintage Chef column – and I will be joined by a guest familiar to Spectator readers. We will discuss their life story, through the food and drink that has
Every weekday, I travel by Tube to The Spectator’s office, staring at the posters plastered all over the walls. I like looking at the plays and exhibitions that have recently opened or wondering whether that shampoo really will add more ‘oomph’ to my hair. Often there is a pretty girl on the poster. A picture
Nell Minow, an American film critic, recently described how in 2010 she had interviewed the Friends actor David Schwimmer. When the noise in the restaurant grew too loud, he asked her whether she might like to move to a room upstairs with him, and if so, would she like a chaperone present. She praised him
Halloween used to be easy. It was a fancy-dress party: you could wear whatever you liked. The idea was to have fun. As teens, my friends and I would dress up as ghouls, spiders or witches, with cones of black paper on our heads. When we became more mature, Halloween turned into a tarty affair.
My friend recently met a man on a dating app and went out for dinner with him. When he arrived, the man announced that he didn’t drink. Nothing unusual about that: plenty of young men are abstemious these days. His next declaration was more surprising: he didn’t eat. Instead, he lived off something called ‘Huel’.
I have a phobia of wedding lists. They always seem very presumptuous. Friends ask for monstrous amounts of things that I’m sure they don’t really want. I look at their lists and my heart sinks. I know I should buy something, but what to choose from all the overpriced paraphernalia? I wonder if the guests
My friend’s ten-year-old daughter has a new hobby. Like many of her school pals, she hopes to become a video blogger — a ‘vlogger’. She has started to record clips of herself for others to watch, share and ‘like’. She showed me a few, then gave me a list of famous vloggers to watch: JoJo
In September last year, official figures showed a startling rise in the number of young British men turning up at A&E with painfully persistent erections. The number of admissions for priapism, to use the medical term, has increased by 51 per cent on the previous decade. Medical experts suggested that the cause was young men
A friend of mine at university had a rule: he didn’t want anything to appear online that might ruin a future political career. On nights out, when photos were being taken, he’d quietly move out of the picture. While we were all wittering away to each other on social media, he kept schtum. Strange, I
The Taiwanese seem besotted with food. The National Palace Museum in Taipei has almost 700,000 objects in its collection, but the most popular two items are a piece of jade that looks like a pak choi cabbage and a stone which resembles a slice of pork belly. You can judge a nation by what it
