Zoe Strimpel

Zoe Strimpel

The banality of Emma Watson

For a long time it was handy dinner party fact that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One (2010) briefly filmed at my late grandparents’ house, and appeared as Hermione Granger’s house in the film. Even this required extensive exposure of my grandparents to Warner Brothers’ lawyers, the film crew and, of course, to

Le Creuset is for amateur cooks

There have long been Le Creuset fanatics. During lockdown, John Lewis reported that sales of Le Crueset increased by 90 per cent. And last year, a sale at a Hampshire outlet store brought a crush of hundreds of people; police even had to attend. Then there was the affair of Pauline Al Said over the

What’s better than boozing on planes?

It is still the case on transatlantic flights that a drinks trolley comes to even the farthest reaches of Economy. If you’re lucky, the gay man or imposing Essex girl wheeling it will, with a wink and a smile, palmed you over an extra mini bottle of gin or a wine for the meal. They

Don’t condemn plus-sized models

I remember it quite clearly, that moment I first clocked that fat models were now advertising clothing – fitness clothing no less. I was in America and, left with time to kill in a shopping centre, I went into an outlet of the trendy athleisure store Athleta (owned by Gap), which I had pillaged on

How can Gwyneth Paltrow bear so much ridicule?

There is nobody who finds Gwyneth Paltrow, 52, more interesting than the woman who was a teenager in the 1990s. This was the last era of the true pin-up, the heart-throb, the movie star as icon, rather than the whiffy melange of brand-pusher, pound-shop activist and reality star that constitutes celebrity today. I was as

The strange cult of the Trader Joe’s tote bag

Over the years, I’ve made a lot of trips up and down the highway connecting the small Massachusetts town in which I grew up to a strip mall about ten miles away. In this strip mall is a branch of Trader Joe’s, the mid-range American supermarket chain known for its serviceable range of food, decent

Meghan Markle’s rosé-tinted reality

Rosé, like a lot of wine, is not much good. And yet people love it, for the simple fact that it is pink. This reminds them of all nice things – and especially of warm summer evenings somewhere non-grotty. Like the south of France. Or… the Napa Valley. That is where the new branded rosé

M&S, please stop playing with your food

Maybe it was when M&S began selling chicken katsu sando-flavoured crisps, or launched its Plant Kitchen range with its inedible alternative to chicken, or began slathering ‘green goddess sauce’ on already clammy ready salads. Or maybe it was the thousandth time I traipsed, freezing, through the tightly packed rat run of a station M&S Food

Why is the Michelin Guide launching in Saudi Arabia?

Having only a short time ago been synonymous with the terrors of its Wahabiist regime, the temptations and pleasures of Saudi Arabia now seem to know no bounds. Whether it’s Emily Maitlis crooning over the feel of her all-covering abaya as she slips into the Jeddah market, Boris and Carrie Johnson posting pics of their brood in

The cult of the farmer’s market

Farmer’s markets are a very cheeky wheeze and we all know it. Their promise – getting back to peasants’ basics of veg yanked from the ground – carries a hefty premium compared to supermarket food, which actual peasants have to buy. Indeed, supermarket food, from veg and fruit to eggs and cheese and bread, is

Saudi Arabia’s soft power art attack

From roughly the 1970s to the mid-2010s, Saudi Arabia was the stuff of nightmares, referred to now, with understatement, as ‘the dark period’. Governed by the austere, brutal credo of the cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th century Quran literalist who divided the world into true Muslims (Salafis/Wahhabis) and their mortal enemies, Saudi life was ruled by

Who will stand up for swingers?

Is there any intrinsic problem with sex parties? Of course not. At least, not for those of us who believe in the liberal tenet of living and letting live. This tenet has been put to the test by recent events at Belair House, a Georgian pile in subdued Dulwich. Hired last month by the company

Britain is now a slackers’ paradise

My friend recently told me about a young Chinese woman who was staying with them and kept tittering to herself. Asked what she was finding so funny, the answers were telling. In one case, it was because she had seen so many people lounging in parks that she had assumed the working day had been

How is Germany so weird yet so dull?

When I lived in Berlin a decade ago, I was struck by the contrast between the dullness of young Germans and the incredible weirdness of everything else. Only in German could the word for ‘gums’ (Zahnfleisch) mean ‘toothflesh’. And only in fleisch-mad Germany (the word for ‘meat’ is the same as ‘flesh’, which is somehow

Could Maga’s baby boom policies backfire?

If there is one thing that Trump appointees, and most Trump voters, can get behind, it’s that marriage and babies are good, and falling fertility rates (now 1.57 children per American woman vs replacement level of 2.1), single parenthood and abortion are bad. The administration has been preparing to announce baby boom policies – possibly

Bring on the banter ban

Any sane proponent of Britain’s liberal democratic values should be angry. We are facing an apparent crackdown on our once-robust freedoms in the form of a ban on banter. A tweaked clause in Angela Rayner’s Employment Rights Bill, currently making its way through parliament, says that employers must take ‘all reasonable steps’ to prevent harassment

The trouble with Harvard

Harvard is in trouble, but I’m finding it hard to have any sympathy. In the aftermath of October 7th, Jewish students at what is supposedly the United States’s most prestigious university were intimidated, vilified and silenced. It was an intolerable double punch after the trauma of Hamas’s brutal massacre in Israel. The ugly scenes at

The truth about Macron’s smell

Like many teenage girls, I was a committed boy-sniffer. By which I mean a Lynx-sniffer, since this delightfully cheap but heady deodorant was synonymous with all the raging hormones – and the promise that went with them. Even the geekiest, ugliest, runtiest of the litter could be transformed into an object of mystique and allure