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Bouncers – or ‘door supervisors’ – are a pillar of the ‘British night out’. They can sneak you into an exclusive club or send your teeth skating across the pavement with their Wreck-It Ralph fists. They can take a selfie with you and call you ‘mate’ or they can hit on your sister and emasculate you on your 19th birthday. We’ve all tried to sneak past them, to argue with them, to convince them that your best friend ‘is like that normally’ and ‘definitely not throwing up in his mouth right now’. We’ve all tried to high-five them. We’ve all been scared of them. We’ve all seen them hit a

Can anyone name the actors in the new Alien: Romulus movie? No, me neither. Which seems odd for such a massive franchise, but then I struggle to name a single film star under the age of about 35, and I consider myself a movie buff. As is often the case with the release of a new sequel, I returned to the original for reappraisal. Yes, Ridley Scott’s masterwork is still frightening and expertly paced, but what makes the film exceptional is the diversity of the acting talent. And by diverse, I don’t mean the sort of DEI casting-by-numbers that turns every movie into a shiny Benetton commercial. No, I mean

There is, reportedly, an official plan in place for the demise of Larry the Downing Street Cat, aka the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. Old Larry, originally acquired by the Camerons in the early part of the coalition, has now reached the impressive age of 17, having been born in the dog days of the Blair government. Sir Keir is the sixth Prime Minister to have passed through the black door of No. 10 since Larry began his tenure. What exactly will happen when Larry shuffles off to pounce on balls of angelic wool for all eternity has not been revealed. Some wag has apparently dubbed the alleged plan

Benjamin Franklin famously observed that there are only two certainties in life, death and taxes. But there are in fact three certainties: death, taxes and bins. Of the three, bins occupy more of my thought life than my eventual demise, financial or otherwise. For a long time, bins used to be bins: receptacles for rubbish. You scraped the remains of your supper into them, tore a letter up and tossed it in (usually a bill) or emptied the vast tangle of dog hair and unidentified dirt of the hoover bag into it and remembered to heave it out on the right day for collection. End of story.   Not anymore. Since my local Oxfordshire council went Liberal Democrat in the recent election, it has been decreed that there are eleven

There are quite a few ‘theories’ (what the middle classes call gossip nowadays) about why Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck have sundered their union for a second time. Personally, I’m of the entirely uninformed opinion that one of the contributing factors may have been that Jennifer Lopez – like many a celeb – has her own alcohol line, launched last year with a suitably up-itself press release. ‘Delola world-class spirit-based ready-to-enjoy cocktails designed for a thoughtful lifestyle coming to the finest establishments.’  When the touter is teetotal, regular celebrity greed starts to look like something more malign Perhaps Lopez might have been a bit more ‘thoughtful’ about the fact that

Tamfana is just the sort of short-priced favourite that I love to take on. Yes, of course she might win tomorrow’s Sky Bet Atalanta Stakes (Sandown, 2.25 p.m.). After all, she was fourth in the Qipco 1000 Guineas at Newmarket in May and, with more luck in running, she would probably have won that day. However, her two runs since then have been more moderate and her French handler David Menuisier, who trains in West Sussex, seems unsure what is his three-year-old filly’s best distance. Last time she failed to stay a mile and a half on soft ground at Longchamp and so tomorrow she reverts to the Guineas trip