An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Many were the jibes when Boris Johnson announced that he was ‘thrilled’ to be back on the tennis court in 2021 as lockdown restrictions eased. ‘Bloody posho poncing about on a tennis court’ or ‘how typical’ were probably some of them. Sir Keir, naturally, made sure that he was photographed on a football pitch on
Jeff Bezos has brought much tat into the world, along with the undoubted convenience of Amazon’s services. But in at least one respect, he is a man of good taste. In choosing Venice to plight his troth with his lovely bride Lauren Sanchez at the weekend, Bezos picked the best possible location: La Serenissima is
We are told being non-judgemental is a virtue, that discrimination is a vice, and that the avoidance of prejudice is not merely possible but laudable. Perhaps the quickest way to give the lie to these statements is to reveal to you that I am a 53-year-old man who regularly goes to the gym. What are
I will never forget the horror of walking into the breakfast room, jet-lagged to hell, in a hotel in Chicago, looking for coffee and a sugar hit to wake me up. I was hit with the stench of barbecue, in waves. It was being deliberately wafted through the ventilation system. Apparently this is to help
On Tuesday, as the world teetered on the brink of war in the Middle East, the Financial Times’ front page focused on the possibility that holders of gold from France and Germany were considering moving their investments out of New York due to Donald Trump’s erratic policy shifts and general global turbulence. We are regularly
A great Test match at Headingley on Tuesday, the first of five this summer against India, brought a famous victory for England’s cricketers. Required to make 371 – a target they had surpassed only once in history – they got there at 6.30 p.m. on the fifth afternoon for the loss of five wickets. It
I watched most of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande when it was on TV some months back. I wondered whether to write something about it. But I can’t write about every representation of sex that offends me. Who am I – Mary Whitehouse? Thankfully Dame Emma Thompson, the star of that film, has now
The training talents of Ed Bethell and the spending power of Wathnan Racing could prove to be a lethal combination in the years ahead. Both are hugely ambitious and knowledgeable when it comes to all aspects of horse racing. Tomorrow PABORUS, the horse that Wathnan bought earlier this season from his original syndicate owners for
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
Denis Villeneuve, the Oscar-nominated director of such blockbuster behemoths as Dune and Blade Runner 2049, has been hired to reboot the James Bond franchise. Villeneuve is a hugely capable director, somewhat in the Christopher Nolan school of blending epic set-pieces with an intellectual and emotional core. As the first auteur to be hired to direct
A few years ago, a friend wrote a cookery book for the UK market, full of gorgeous dishes, many of them esoterically British. It was snapped up by an American publisher who, as well as converting my friend’s careful metric measurements into loosey-goosey volume-based cup measures, queried a couple of her more British ingredients, one
‘The nuisance of the tropics is/the sheer necessity of fizz.’ Over the past few days, during which England endured sub-tropical sweltering, it was more a matter of beer. I do not wish to denigrate water, which is all very well in its place. I often drink it. But for urgent, nay life-saving, rehydration, nothing beats
‘Are you going to Glasto?’ Just the name – in that smug, shortened form – is enough to set my left eyelid twitching, the way it does when I read emails from people who still include pronouns in their signature. ‘Glasto’, trailing the self-satisfied whiff of BBC executives high-tailing it from Hampstead on a taxpayer-funded
I’ve been having this recurring nightmare recently that involves James Corden. The year is 2045. Society has collapsed and London is under quarantine. There is no transport in the city, so survivors get around on foot – though, for some inexplicable reason, TfL workers are still on strike. I live in a bin and survive
Last year one of the big oil companies informed its employees that they had to disclose any ‘intimate relationships’ with colleagues. I remain grateful that my employer has not yet asked me to do the same, because I’m not sure I could survive the embarrassment that would ensue. I don’t just enjoy ‘intimate relationships’ with
I have been in charge of a pizzeria in St John’s Wood for less than a year and already I feel misanthropy taking hold. Most notably, a complete disdain for the general public; I used to think I hated them, but now I can confirm that I definitely, really, hate them. Service is the heart
Perhaps it’s a sort of Original Guilt – Original Sin’s bastard offspring – that Catholics are born indoctrinated with a sense of the awesome sanctity of church, presumably predicated on the Real Presence. So for us there’s something viscerally shocking when it’s not observed. And yet… I remember being about seven, going to Mass one
In her 1954 essay ‘The English Aristocracy’, the author Nancy Mitford popularised the descriptions ‘U’, i.e. upper-class or aristocratic, and ‘non-U’, to denote household terms. Although she did not coin the phrase (that credit belongs to the otherwise forgotten linguist Alan S.C. Ross), she brought it to wider public attention. When her friends John Betjeman
There’s not one thing I don’t love about the street in Hove where I live, with the sea at one end and the restaurant quarter at the other; if I had to fetishise a non-sentient thing, like those women who ‘marry’ rollercoasters, I’d be kinky for my street. (‘Avenue’, rather.) One of the lovely things
Having spent more than half my life living in Scotland, I found weather was probably the most common topic of casual conversation with colleagues. This is because Edinburgh, where I worked as a physician, is freezing for 11 months of the year, and Glasgow, where I was a consultant anaesthetist, rains for the same period.
I live in a small cathedral city in southern England. The chances of having my mobile phone snatched from my hand by an opportunistic thief, or my Rolex watch wrenched from my wrist by a brutish thug are still mercifully small. But another menace to life and limb has recently emerged here: the mobility vehicle
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
My main fancies for Royal Ascot this year have all run in the first three days and the final two days look a lot harder to me in terms of finding good wagers. Winning money from the bookmakers is hard, giving it back to them is easy. I am therefore going to approach today and
Our homegrown wine was, until fairly recently, regarded internationally as a bit of a joke. Peter Ustinov could quip that he imagined hell to be ‘Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine’. Likewise, Lord Jay, serving as a diplomat in Paris, recalled the British ambassador rubbing up against resistance from the home side – let
A new documentary is to be screened later this year celebrating 50 years of everybody’s favourite 1970s sitcom The Good Life. I will not be joining in with the festivities. During the two-hour show, 85-year-old Penelope Keith, who played the irascible Margo Leadbetter, will revisit some of the original locations, including Kewferry Road in Northwood,
At first glance, today’s Britannia Stakes handicap (5 p.m.) at Royal Ascot looks an impossible puzzle to solve. No less than 30 three-year-old runners are due to line up and plenty of them are plot horses that will go on to win off much higher official marks than they are running from today. However, my
I once heard an American complain that, being married to an Englishwoman, he was regularly baffled by the contents of his kitchen cupboards – salad cream, Ambrosia custard and Robinsons barley water. It was ‘like industrial processed food but from the Shire’. It is probably this quality of baffling foreigners that allegedly enabled drug runners
‘Same old boring Sunday morning, old men out, washing their cars.’ So begins the punk anthem ‘The Sound of the Suburbs’ by the Members. There are plenty of cars being washed (and waxed) on my road on any Sunday morning and the strimmers are buzzing, despite this being peak breeding season for insects. But here’s
An inquest into the Derby in the Oakley household was to be expected. Mrs Oakley, who bets about as often as you will hear Liz Truss say ‘I’m sorry: I got it wrong’, called me at Epsom this year asking for a fiver each way on Lambourn. Since the ten-time Derby winning trainer Aidan O’Brien
