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The days are short, the nights are dark and the temperature is freezing. Oh, and in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in an indefinite lockdown that shows no discernible signs of coming to an end. With most other pursuits thus denied to us, now is the perfect time to immerse yourself in a good book. But sometimes, the improving but ‘difficult’ literary novel or the tense crime thriller isn’t entirely what you want. Instead, here are seven recommendations for a purely entertaining read. Most, if not quite all, are laugh-out-loud funny, but there are quieter and sadder moments along the way, too, just like in life. By the end of

‘I don’t wear a headband. If you want to, you can!’ says karate World Champion Jordan Thomas. ‘Don’t disillusion me, Jordan!’ I bark, perhaps a little aggressively. I’ve watched three seasons of Cobra Kai in a week and I am all about a karate headband / floppy fringe combo. Kick-ass comedy drama Cobra Kai is a spin-off of ’80s classic The Karate Kid. Resurrecting the original actors, it follows underdog Daniel LaRusso (now ‘chopping prices’ and ‘kicking the competition’ as the owner of a successful car dealership) and his high school nemesis, sneering country club bully Johnny Lawrence (now knocking back beer for breakfast). Season three dropped just a few

Every weekend Spectator Life brings you doses of topical trivia – facts, figures and anecdotes inspired by the current week’s dates in history … 6 February In 1918 British women over the age of 30 received the vote. The comedian Frank Skinner had a mother who always voted Labour and a father who always voted Conservative. So they agreed not to bother voting, as they’d only cancel each other out. But one election night, as it was announced on TV that the polls had just closed, Skinner’s mother said: ‘I voted.’ Skinner recalls that ‘my dad went absolutely crazy’. 7 February In 1991 the IRA fired three mortars at 10 Downing Street. Two

This week I decided to bring all the fun of the fair into my kitchen and make churros. Churros are a dough enriched with butter and eggs, that are piped into lengths and fried in very hot oil until crisps and light. There’s nothing quite like the smell of sweet, hot dough, frying. In the days when I used to churn out hundred of doughnuts overnight in our small kitchen for events, I’d crawl to bed in the small hours of the morning, wearing the distinctive perfume of that pastry. There are different types of fried dough all over the world – bombolini, beignets, gulab juman, yum yums, funnel cakes

The news that cricket is returning to Channel 4 for the forthcoming series between India and England has been greeted with relief by cricket fans and absolute mystification by everyone else. In 2005, after the greatest Ashes series any of us will ever see, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) signed a long-term deal with Sky Sports, which made the ECB a fortune and blew a huge hole in cricket’s potential television audience. To this day I have cricket-mad friends who refuse to sign up to Sky Sports, either because it is owned by Rupert Murdoch or because it’s so bloody expensive, or possibly both.  It costs me about £1000

Now, in an anxious time, I have an SUV, and this is apt. There is something very comforting about an SUV if it’s yours (though less so if it isn’t). They are designed to dominate any landscape they can fit inside and, if that is a hollow fantasy of control it doesn’t feel like one from the driving seat. The advertising shows them climbing mountains and navigating deserts and investigating forests and this is truthful: they really can do this. It is also true that they rarely do this – their owners are the urban rich, segueing to late middle-age, and are as likely to be found in St John’s

If last year was the one where people started to notice the beauty of the wildlife right on the doorstep during lockdown, this should be the one where we start to get to know some of the best wild places in our own country, rather than presuming that all that is rare and interesting can only be found abroad. Of course, you could head to the famous, crowded and well-trodden nature spots like the New Forest or the Lake District. But then you’d miss out on the joy of really exploring the sort of wild places that naturalists like to keep secret. So here’s a guide to some lesser-spotted wild

The office, as we once knew it, is dead. Zoom has killed it; the digital genie is out of the lamp. What most of us didn’t realise before Covid – back in April 2020 – was that the closure of offices was final and that the daily commute may well be confined to the history books. Even when things return to ‘normal’ we won’t be able to uninvent remote working, and companies know it. In fact, many of them knew it before the pandemic struck. As one leading business figure told me back the early summer, Covid – by forcing remote working – allowed companies to activate a decade’s worth of mooted corporate culture change in just

It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to remake a film that is already considered a peerless masterpiece. Netflix was roundly trashed for attempting it with Rebecca. ‘Superficial and slapdash’ was the New Yorker’s verdict (one of the kinder ones): ‘somewhere between a lukewarm retread of Hitchcock’s original and a glossy Instagram feed’. As for the BBC’s Christmas three-part adaptation of Black Narcissus, not even Diana Rigg in her final role could save it from coruscating comparisons with the 1947 Powell and Pressburger film.  This year will see remakes, prequels and sequels of Top Gun, Cinderella and 101 Dalmations to name but three. But for a remake to be successful, it needs

The furore in the US over the rocketing shares of previously written off companies such as GameStop, Blackberry, AMC Entertainment and Macy’s (the ‘Reddit Revolt’) has introduced stock market trading terms to the general public, with some folks newly opining (with a patina of assumed knowledge) about ‘hedge funds’, ‘penny shares’, ‘junk bonds’ ‘short-selling’ and ‘pump and dump’. But this is hardly the first-time similar events have occurred. Way back in 1720 the ‘South Sea Bubble’ saw investors suckered when the South Sea Company collapsed as any hopes of generating income from its monopoly on selling slaves to South America (mostly controlled by Spain and Portugal) had come to nought, despite

Analog motion, the brand behind the incredibly popular AM1+, are back with their latest model, the AMX Stealth. The company — so I’m told enthusiastically by their CEO — claims to have had a rethink, and wants to now ‘focus on making products that people love’. This surprised me, since their AM1+, reviewed last year, was exactly that: a lightweight, fun, cool and incredible loveable bike (with a loveable price tag). Even more surprising, then, was the news that it wants to depart from this model and focus on higher-value, higher spec — and of course higher cost — models, the first of which is the AMX Stealth. Everything about