Toby Clements

Notes on…interiors

There have already been one or two accuracy-related gripes about the BBC’s summer extravaganza The White Queen, but one anachronism was especially interesting: it was a touching scene of a medieval mother waking her medieval children from their medieval slumber. They were all wrapped together in a lovely bed in lovely sheets and the room

Who’s afraid of Santa Claus?

Toby Clements says that there’s a good reason many children find Father Christmas an alarming figure — he’s an unresolved hotch-potch of different myths Last year in the run-up to Christmas I took my two-year-old son to get his hair cut in one of those strange hybrid toy-cum-barber shops that proliferate in north London. It