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If you were starting with a blank screen to design an education system today, it seems unlikely that you would think of creating single-sex schools, any more than you would single-sex professions or single-sex restaurants. Education for life is something we do together, like working or eating. Their existence is explained by the fact that when the first were established, most girls didn’t go to school. William of Wykeham founded Winchester in 1382 for ‘poore scholars’ who would be boys — that was obvious. Dean John Colet founded St Paul’s School in 1509, taking advice from Erasmus of Rotterdam and putting the management of the 153 scholars ‘from all nacions

Whilst not exactly (to paraphrase Richard Burton as Marc Anthony in Cleopatra) the ‘biggest thing to hit Rome since Romulus & Remus’, Oprah Winfrey’s recent interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex was certainly A Big Deal. With over 17 million viewers watching in the States and 11.3m here, the renegade former royals cannot be ignored.  High-stakes interviews have long been a favourite subject of movies. The onscreen celebrity interview is obviously not a recent creation, with the phenomenon depicted in films as far back as Sunset Boulevard, Champagne for Caesar (both 1950), A Face in the Crowd (1957) and of course Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). But as these films

What better way to get shoppers back into London’s West End than by, er, building a large hill in the middle of it? That’s the latest plan from Westminster City Council, who hope that the Marble Arch Hill will lure people back to the area with the promise of stunning views around the city from its 25 metre high summit. The mound, designed by an architectural firm MVRDV, will boast a winding path with trees and plants, along with a hollow centre for exhibitions. It will tower over Marble Arch, and visitors could be charged a small fee for scaling its heights by Westminster City Council. The BID’s chief executive Kay

On April 23, 1946, Enrico Piaggio filed a patent with the Ministry of Industry and Commerce for ‘a motorcycle of a rational complexity of organs and elements combined with a frame with mudguards and a casing covering the whole mechanical part’. In less formal terms, the machine in question was called a Vespa – and this year the marque celebrates an impressive 75 years of unbroken production with close to 20 million having been sold around the world across a range of at least 50 variations on the theme. All can be traced back to the day Piaggio came up with the idea of saving his father Rinaldo’s bombed-out aero

The campervan is the ideal vehicle for a British spring (at present there is no foreign spring available). There are two extremes to consider. There is the original VW which looks like a fairy princess with big dewy headlamps for eyes. I was driven to Glastonbury in the old VW by a woman who looked like her campervan. They had the same temperament: metal flowerchild. Both broke down, though only one wrote her testimony in prose. There is also the American Winnebago Class A, which is essentially a full-sized kitchen inside a lorry. It has a face like Judge Dredd, something called ‘medical device storage’, and it is owned by the

As the nation waits with bated breath for Sunday’s broadcast of Oprah Winfrey’s already notorious interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, here’s a smorgasbord of royalty in the movies, both real and fictional. With the success of Netflix’s, The Crown at the Golden Globes (granted a semi-seal of approval from Prince Harry) and the threat of yet another biopic of his mother (this time starring Kristen Stewart), the appetite for on screen depiction of ‘The Firm’ shows no sign of lessening. Recently there’s been a slew of saccharine TV movies from the likes of Hallmark and Netflix, all with the same basic plot, namely the travails of ‘inappropriate’ royal

It is the third day of Women’s History Month, and instead of talking about a range of female accomplishments and achievements; everyone is instead, once again, talking about Taylor Swift. Swift tweeted yesterday, criticising the Netflix series Ginny and Georgia for its ‘lazy, deeply sexist joke’ which apparently is ‘degrading hard working women.’ The joke comes from the series’ finale, when 15 year old Ginny argues with her 30 year old mother and cries, ‘What do you care, you go through men faster than Taylor Swift!’ A lazy joke? Yes. A deeply sexist one? I’m not so sure. After a decade of mass tabloid coverage of her relationships, it’s understandable

While we weren’t looking, the countries we used to patronise for their charming but niche ‘World Cinema’, started making movies often classier, more interesting and definitely less woke than we do in the English-speaking world. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in South Korea. South Korean directors have mastered the horror genre, with classics such as Train to Busan (featuring the modern ‘fast zombies’ on steroids) and nail-biting The Wailing. And thanks to Bong Joon-Ho, they’ve cracked the commercial mainstream, too. Cinephiles have known he was great for sometime. But in the West, until Parasite won a triple crown of Best Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay in 2019, Bong

MeToo may have fundamentally shifted the way men and women interact, but that hasn’t stopped a musty, old turn of the century relationship manual from making a surprise comeback. In Sherry Argov’s 2001 bestseller Why Men Love Bitches, the journalist offers tips on how to bag a man. Her principal premise is a surprising one: that women should hold off having sex. And a new generation seem to be heeding her advice: the book has been a favourite subject of Gen Z TikTok videos as well as making a reappearance on the Sunday Times bestseller list. Argov’s book emerged out of the barely recognisable age before online dating, slut shaming and revenge porn. Back