Delivering his Autumn Statement on Thursday, Jeremy Hunt specified two ‘great national’ qualities: genius and ‘British compassion’. The Chancellor’s announcements made it clear what he was doing: raiding the incomes of the decently well off to fund benefits rises and protect pensions. Talk of our shared compassion then seems a bit off. Politicians should exploit
‘I know,’ I said to my friend recently. ‘Let’s see a film!’ We booked the Everyman Kings Cross, the only cinema that happened to be showing what we wanted to watch at a convenient time and location. You might already be familiar with the Everyman concept. According to the chain, it’s ‘redefining cinema’ with an
Hope can be remarkably persistent. And so, despite several years of experience pointing in starkly the other direction, a recent weekend saw me at Who Killed My Father at the Young Vic, the latest from ubiquitous Belgian director Ivo van Hove. A young friend had gone with his father the previous week and both described
The man at the posh London bar stood with our drinks but wouldn’t give them to us. He had a lecture to deliver first, for cocktail culture – or ‘mixology’ as the craft is now known – is nothing if not didactic. As I looked enviously out at the people with pints of beer across
Beyoncé Knowles has always been sexy: naturally and consciously so. But her sexiness – those astonishing bottom-swooshing dance moves; the gleaming, undulating chest; the ever-changing, lustrous locks – sat alongside a moral substance that grew as her career progressed. She weighed in on politics, raising $4 million for Barack Obama and singing at his first
Last week, pictures of the actress Sienna Miller frolicking with glee in a tiny orange bikini in St Tropez with her boyfriend were widely shared. Miller is 40, and her boyfriend, the Burberry model Oli Green, is 25. Miller was described as looking ‘incredible’, a mixture of fantastic abs and, it was implied, exuberance at
The San Lorenzo neighbourhood of Rome, a short walk from the murderous environs of Termini, the central train station, is not particularly old or beautiful. A working-class neighbourhood once connected to the Wuehrer brewery and freight yard, it was bombed heavily during the war, the only massive bombing in Rome. But like Wedding or Neukolln
Love Island’s annual ‘heart race challenge’ – where contestants perform jokily seductive dances on the opposite sex – took place last week, an eternity in villa time. The girls and boys who raise heart rates the most win. It is always divisive, since the women in particular – dressed in nearly nothing and manoeuvring with everything they
Love Island, which started again last night, flirts with virtue just a little more obviously each year. The show is racially diverse, and overwhelmingly working class, despite featuring the odd medic. Hugo Hammond, who was born with a club foot, became the show’s first disabled contestant last year. The latest series features a deaf contestant, Tasha Ghouri, a ‘dancer’ with
Put simply, a meal can be too much: too much pressure both on digestion and on the person you’re with. Europeans understand this, which is why they have such an exquisite pre-dinner offering – aperitivi that can extend late into the night, where non-committal drink follows non-committal drink and a lovely slew of small bites
There was a moment, about 20 years ago, when Londoners began to realise, and then boast about, the transformation in our food scene. No longer deserving of mockery compared to other global centres, our restaurants were suddenly producing delicious food every bit (well, almost) as good as that associated with the likes of New York.
Elliot, 28: ‘My greatest achievements in life are: drinking a bottle of Listerine in 10 seconds, beating my laptop at chess on easy difficult and surviving till the age of 28’. Frank, 40: ‘Professional career, into extreme sports and stay fit, yet also enjoy the finer things in life like diner [sic] and a glass
We’re closing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles in 2021. Here’s number four: Zoe Strimpel writing in February about how popular portrayals of the past are being changed to fit the present. The first thing you notice about Bridgerton, Netflix’s big winter blockbuster set in Regency England, is how bad it is:
We have finally arrived in the roaring 20s and the urge to drink – after the year and a half we’ve been through – is strong. Lockdown provided ample opportunity to neck wine in the monotonous comfort of one’s own home, so the mood now is firmly for tipples in luxurious, and crucially, public indoor
Armed with a US passport, I fly to New York for just two days to interview John McWhorter, an African American professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is America’s fast-rising star of the anti-woke movement and I am there to talk to him about his brave and funny new book, Woke Racism. I zip
Hackney’s rise in the 2000s from dangerous and affordable to cool, cooler and coolest eventually made it a kind of Chelsea of east London, with the expensive housing – house prices have grown 281 per cent between 2001 – and glamorous dining establishments to match. It may have become a magnet for Fullham exiles but
Italy’s relaxation of its travel restrictions for double-vaccinated Brits has many of us eyeing up the options for an autumn getaway. And why not? Come September, cities like Venice are no longer tourist traps (Dolce & Gabbana fashion shows aside) and yet the balmy weather remains. Many visitors head to Italy for Venice alone but they
One of the great sorrows of the pandemic has been India. Its own harrowing experience of the virus has been dreadful to see. And less importantly but still poignantly, India’s disappearance from the list of possible destinations for travel for the foreseeable future has created a sense of morose yearning among those itching to get back.
The distinction between on and offline life blurred long ago. The greatest spats, sexual self-fashionings and mad soliloquies now unfurl on social media. The splenetic rhythms and fundamental shallowness of this medium make it a questionable source for art, but Janicza Bravo’s @zola — the first film ever released based entirely on a series of
I am always irritated by film versions of classic novels, especially when I’ve recently read them. I needn’t have worried about Death on the Nile. Kenneth Branagh’s Agatha Christie adaptation, already subject to no fewer than six delays, has been pushed back yet again to the first quarter of 2022. By the time it comes
